If you’re in this position and looking to kickstart OKRs in your team, I suggest taking a more pragmatic approach to begin with. Rather than diving straight into metrics, try focusing more on general alignment around goals and the overall outcome. Once you’re up and running, then you can start to introduce those all-important metrics. Let me explain why.

At my current company, I belong to a group of so-called ‘ambassadors’ or ‘OKRs Masters’ with a mission to inspire and help product teams to drive organizational change by establishing and furthering OKRs in their teams. Based on what I’ve learned from working with these folks, I’m going to share tips for getting started with OKRs, sharing what works and what doesn’t, and why it’s best to hold on using metrics until your framework is up and running.

The fundamental factors for success when introducing OKRs

To start using the OKR framework with a team that has never worked with it before, there are three core factors needed:

• The right motivation: People need to be convinced of the benefits of adopting OKRs, or at least have an open attitude towards it so that they’re willing to give it a try.
• A basic training: Folks should have a grasp of how the objectives and key results should be formulated and what the process looks like, and they should be given some examples so they have a more concrete idea of how to proceed.
• A moderator or facilitator for the planning and review sessions: This is important to provide some guidance, facilitate the discussion, and provide input or impulses to point the conversation in the right direction.

The common challenges

However, even when all three factors are available, it can be tough for teams to have a good start. When things do go wrong, it’s normally because teams are facing one of these challenges:

1. Death by discussions: Planning sessions can easily turn into long discussions as folks try to agree on the objectives to follow, especially if you haven’t attempted this kind of alignment before. People may start feeling that it’s too much work and question if it’s worth it.
2. Complexity of finding the right formulations: If agreeing on the objectives is hard, finding the right key results is even harder. Formulating the measurable part is usually more complex because it’s where things get more concrete. Your team might run out of planning time before you set key results, leaving the project in a ‘draft’ stage with no buy-in from those involved.
3. Difficult or poor progress tracking during the quarter: This can happen either because the OKR sets were not so good (perhaps they were too ambitious/too easy, or they depended on external factors rather than the team itself) or because they were not followed up on (perhaps due to a lack of commitment or a change in priorities).

How to overcome the challenges and achieve a sustainable adoption

Because of these challenges, some teams might just drop the idea of using OKRs. That’s why it’s important to introduce the framework in the right way so that you can achieve a sustainable adoption (when I say that, I mean one where the teams are able to pass the inflection point and start to fully enjoy the advantages of the framework). So, how can you get there?

Take a pragmatic approach

It’s more important to make sure that everyone is generally aligned than it is to get 100% agreement on the phrasing of your objectives. Rather than wasting your planning time searching for the perfect wording, take a ‘good enough’ approach. It’s also important to be realistic when defining the objectives; it’s easy to fall into the trap of overcommitting by overestimating the time available. This is always a balancing act that gets easier with experience (which is why it’s crucial to reflect on how everything went at the end of the quarter and have a review/retro meeting before the next planning session).

To begin with, focus less on metrics and more on outcomes

The only way to improve is to measure and review performance. Metrics are the core of the long-term OKR magic of being able to assess if the team is on track to meet the objectives and why. However, knowing how to measure can be very difficult, especially when the team is confronted with this task for the first time. That's why focusing less on metrics and more on outcomes can be beneficial for the teams when first getting started with OKRs. Here’s why:

• It helps to avoid demotivation: Too many follow-up meetings to refine the formulation of key results can lead to demotivation. Not aiming for perfectly formulated key results is a better approach. It’s more important to find ‘good enough’ key results that keep the focus on the outcome rather than on the output.
• It helps to get a better picture of what the team should aim for: Even if you do have ideas around how to measure progress, the numbers you put forward might be almost random values. To get around this, start by finding a baseline. for what needs to be measured; in this case, the key results will be more generalized. Despite this approach being against the traditional theory of the OKR framework, it can be useful in helping you to know where you are and get an idea of what you need to aim for.

After a few cycles, refine your key results with the right metrics

Focusing less on metrics can be helpful when first getting started with OKRs, but of course, at some stage you need to start measuring. At my company, most teams started to feel more comfortable defining their key results after the second or third cycle. This is a normal pattern, since we humans get better at anything with practice. I won’t explain why metrics are important for OKRs (there are enough articles already out there on this topic), but I will share some insights on how to set effective measurable key results, based on my experience. Here are my key takeaways: