Objectives are qualitative descriptions of what you aim to accomplish that are easily remembered. Short, inspiring, and engaging objectives are ideal. A goal should both encourage and challenge you.
Key Results are a set of measurements that track how far you’ve come toward your goal. You should have two to five Key Results for each Objective.
Example:
First and foremost, we require a goal. We want to “Be Recognized for Having an Awesome Customer Experience,” as an example of a tactical goal.
This sounds fantastic, but how do you know if the experience will be fantastic? Remember, you don’t have a goal if you don’t have measurements.
That is why Key Results are required. How can we tell if we’re giving our customers an amazing experience? Two good alternatives would be Net Promoter Score and Repurchase Rate. Do our customers think we’re so great that they’d recommend us and buy from us again?
However, relying just on NPS and repeat purchases can send the wrong message. It could motivate us to go to any length to make the consumer pleased. As a result, a countermeasure statistic like Customer Acquisition Cost should be included. We wish to please our consumers while reducing expenditures to a minimum.
As an example, consider the following:
The Objective is to “Be Recognized for Having an Awesome Customer Experience.”
The following are the key Results, as measured by:
- Increase your Net Promoter Score (NPS) from X to Y.
- The repurchase rate should be increased from X to Y.
- Maintain an average Customer Acquisition Cost of less than Y.
Having a set of Key Results, as well as countermeasures to push the proper behavior, aids in the creation of a clear and long-term OKR.
So we have an Objective and a Key Result to gauge our progress, but how will we connect them to the actual job we’re doing? This effort (which should be viewed as experiments or bets; see “Hypothesis-Driven Development”) that we do to try to achieve our goal(s) should be made public. You’d need something like an Initiative or Activity description to keep track of them if you didn’t have Restya, but we can use our standard Epics, Features, User Stories, and Bugs instead. As a result, we have Objectives, Key Results, and Work Items.