Time to rethink your OKRs: Lessons from Google, Pinterest, and Miro

How to choose the right structure for your company OKRs.

The Coda team

Time to rethink your OKRs: Lessons from Google, Pinterest, and Miro

By The Coda team

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As the year draws to a close and New Year’s resolutions are starting to form, many of us are also in the midst of another annual tradition: planning. We’ve found that an effective planning process is essential for hitting ambitious goals and helps generate excitement for the year ahead among employees. But if the thought fills you with dread rather than enthusiasm, it might be time to revisit your process. Here at Coda, we follow the OKR process for planning. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) originated from Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s. They were later adopted by Google thanks to former Intel salesman John Doerr, who was working at Kleiner Perkins at the time. In brief, Objectives define what you want to achieve, and Key Results outline the specific, measurable actions you’ll take to achieve them. Everyone’s OKRs—from the CEO to an entry-level employee—are transparent across the entire company. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to OKRs. Over time, different companies have adapted and evolved the OKR structure to suit their needs. Whether you’re a small team with just a few Objectives or a bigger company with more complex teams and goals, there’s likely a version of OKRs that can work for you. Let’s take a look at three common OKR structures:
  1. The simple: No hierarchy
  2. The classic: Google-style levels
  3. The flexible: Modeled hierarchy à la Pinterest and Miro

1. The simple: No hierarchy OKRs.

 Typically suited to smaller startups with a few focused goals, the “no hierarchy” approach means a single list of Objectives and Key Results (KRs) across the whole company. Depending on your team size, there are typically one to three KRs per person, each directly linked to one Objective. For example, an Objective might be “Redesign user interface” and two Key Results might be “Create prototypes by x date” and “Test the redesigned user interface with x users.” This works really well when you only have a few Objectives and KRs you want to track, as teams struggle to remember more than a handful at a time. The benefit of this approach is its simplicity; the goals are easy to remember and understand, and every Key Result is linked directly to the company’s top priorities. As your company grows, you may find that your list of Objectives and KRs starts getting out of control. In an effort to keep it manageable, it’s tempting to try and restrict the number of KRs allowed. But this often leads to teams spinning up their own expanded lists in the background, which gets messy fast. If you’re facing this challenge, it may be time to consider a different approach. Best suited to: Startups and small teams with only a few high-priority Objectives. Look out for: Too many Objectives and Key Results to remember and track effectively.

2. The classic: Google-style OKRs.

 Rather than a single list of OKRs, the classic Google-style approach involves a set of Objectives and Key Results for each level of the business: company, team, and individual. The OKRs cascade down so the company-level Key Results become team-level Objectives, and team-level Key Results become individuals’ Objectives. Doerr’s theory behind this approach is that by having OKRs cascade down, you can be sure that everyone is working toward the same result. This helps focus effort, foster coordination, and make the whole thing—he believed—fun. That was certainly true for Google. According to co-founder Larry Page, it helped them propel 10x growth on multiple occasions. Another benefit of this approach is that it scales to any size of company. However, the cascading nature of this approach carries some risks. As OKRs get rewritten for each level, they become increasingly disconnected and abstracted from the original goal. Plus, waiting for each level to write and update their OKRs before the next level can do so is slow and laborious. You can also easily end up with far more OKRs than anyone can remember or regularly look at, so teams lose sight of the company Objectives. Side note: Google’s approach also states that Objectives should be ambitious (they aimed to hit 70% completion), Key Results should be measurable, and OKRs should be visible to everyone else in the company. Whether you use this classic approach or not, these are smart guidelines to implement in any OKR process. If you need some inspiration on measuring KRs, this post outlines how we approach this at Coda. Best suited to: Companies of any size that want every team and individual to have their own OKRs laddered up to company Objectives. Look out for: Team and individual OKRs becoming too abstracted from company-level goals.

3. The flexible: Modeled hierarchy OKRs.

 The modeled hierarchy approach usually involves adding an intermediate layer that defines key focus areas for the business. These are often called initiatives, pillars, or epics and are limited to just a few. Initiatives and Objectives are shared company-wide, but Key Results are only viewed and managed by the individual teams. This allows teams the freedom to create as many KRs as they need and organize them however suits best.
We use this approach at Coda because, as our Head of Engineering Oliver Heckmann explains, “it allows every team to connect and trace their KRs directly to strategic initiatives and company Objectives without requiring every employee to read and understand all KRs across the company.” And we’re not alone. Pinterest has adopted what they call “Pyramid OKRs” to scale planning for their org of 2000+ people. Planning starts with company mission and strategy and is then organized by Pillars → Teams → Individuals. Each pillar has a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI), its own Objectives, and its own Key Results.
The intent, says Pinterest’s SVP of Products, Naveen Gavini, is “to strengthen the connection between our mission and longer-term strategy to individuals who are on the ground working on critical projects.” He explains that OKRs are tracked in line with the company’s operating cadence: “strategic direction when needed (more than a year), quarterly progress on long-term Objectives, monthly status updates on execution and roadmap, and weekly monitoring on critical business metrics.” OKRs are managed in Coda to make it easy to see how day-to-day work ladders up to the company’s long-term mission. You can try out Pinterest’s template here. Another company taking this approach is Miro. They use cross-functional OKRs that define where they want to be, and cross-functional initiatives that define what they’re going to do. Objectives are refreshed each year, while KRs are defined every 6-12 months and initiatives every 3-12 months. They use Miro boards in their initial planning phase to draft and collaborate on goals and initiatives. Once they’re aligned, they move finalized OKRs into Coda.
“In Coda, we have all the needed information about each OKR and initiative, from involved people to details on RACI, what success looks like, target audience, risks, and dependencies,” shares Ilia Tregubov, Head of Product Operations at Miro. “Automations help us to bring together actual data on OKRs and send notifications to DRIs to prepare their updates.” Best suited to: Companies that have clear company-wide focus areas but want the flexibility for teams to define and manage their own KRs. Look out for: Team KRs being misaligned to company Objectives or going off track.

How Coda makes managing OKRs easy.

 If you search for content about OKRs, you’ll find many strong opinions about the “right” way to do things. But the reality is that the right approach is whichever one works for your company. The most important thing is to know that you’ll likely need to iterate over time, and that’s ok. Once you’ve chosen an approach, you’ll need some way to document and manage your OKRs. Having a tool that makes them easy to manage and view progress is essential for getting buy-in and adherence to the process. An unwieldy, stale spreadsheet and having to constantly nudge teams to update their OKR status isn’t effective or fun for anyone (we’ve all been there!). That’s why Pinterest, Miro, and hundreds of others use Coda to manage their OKRs. With tables that talk to each other, easy tools for managing and displaying progress, and the ability to visualize the same data in multiple ways, Coda can act as your single source of truth for OKRs. Plus, whether you start with one of our OKR templates or build your own from scratch, Coda lets you fully customize and iterate on your OKR setup however suits your business—not how someone else thinks it should be. For more guidance on setting up company OKRs and how to structure them in Coda, check out the Ultimate Handbook for Planning & OKRs, which includes many more goal-setting insights from Coda’s Head of Engineering, Oliver Heckmann.
Read the handbook

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