Hello learners! Welcome to the 26th lesson of the series 30 Days of PM by Crework! Today, we will be talking about OKRs, something you must have definitely heard of, but might not know what it exactly is.
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What is an OKR?
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, which is a goal-setting and leadership tool used by organizations to communicate what they want to accomplish and how they will measure their progress. OKRs provide a framework for executing and achieving desired strategies through goal setting.
Okay, let’s break it down further in simpler language.
Objectives are the clear, ambitious, and qualitative descriptions of what an organization or individual wants to achieve. For example - Increase revenue by 20%
Key results are specific, measurable, and time-bound outcomes that indicate the successful achievement of the objectives. They provide a way to track progress and determine if the objectives have been met. Key results are the measurable results that need to be achieved to reach the objective.
OKRs are typically written with an Objective at the top and 3-5 supporting Key Results below it. They can also be written as a statement:
I will (Objective) as measured by (Key Results).
For example, “I will fix the website for the vast majority of people as measured by 7 out of 10 people being able to get through, a 1-second response time, and a 1% error rate.”
Examples:
Let’s say you want to lose 10 kg weight over the next 6 months. This is your objective: Lose 10 Kg weight over the next 6 months.
Now, in order to achieve that, what are the things that you can do?
You can go to the gym regularly for 6 months
Go into a calorie deficit (eat less calories than you burn per day)
So, if I have to turn these “things to do” into some key results, they will be:
Go to gym 4 times a day for next 24 weeks
Eat less than 2000 calories per day for the next 24 weeks.
If these 2 things are done, the objective will be achieved.
Let’s take a business example maybe?
Objective - Increase revenue by 20% in the next quarter
Key Results:
Increase new users acquired by 10% every month
Increase Month 1 retention of users by 30%
Increase the free to paid conversion rate by at least 10% this quarter
If over the next quarter, these Key Results are achieved, the objective will be fulfilled too.
How Duolingo used OKRs
When Conor Walsh joined language learning platform Duolingo as a brand-new product manager, he was immediately given a challenging problem to solve. The number of users for Duolingo Stories — a product that lets users put their newly acquired vocabularies in the context of an audio narrative — had been declining for a few months.
To make matters more challenging, resources were tight. Management was getting concerned and was skeptical of the product due to the failed experiments. Walsh needed to come up with a plan of attack, and rally his team and the company around that immediately.
Duolingo had conducted user research in the past, but didn’t have the bandwidth or resources to do a specific analysis on users who engaged with Stories. But Walsh knew that to improve the fate of Stories, that’s exactly what he needed to do. That means centering his team’s OKRs on gaining a better understanding of what the Stories user’s experience was like.
When it came to setting the team’s OKRs, Walsh opted for a combination of qualitative and quantitative Objectives. Rather than starting with an Objective like “increasing Stories traffic by 50 percent,” Walsh decided to carve out space to understand Duolingo’s users.
For example, one of the team’s Objectives was to:
This ended up being a time-consuming endeavor. Walsh placed an ad on Facebook and screened users based on their experience with the product, as well as their ability in the language they’re trying to learn. The process took almost an entire quarter.
Eventually, hours of interviewing led Walsh and his team to identify a set of pain points that the team categorized into high impact, medium-high impact, and medium impact. One of the highest-impact pain points, Walsh found, was that users found it challenging to use Stories on their phones. Enhancing the mobile experience eventually became another Objective for the team.
But Walsh’s focus on understanding the Stories users’ pain points ended up paying off. After redesigning the entire user experience, growth among Stories user skyrocketed. When Walsh joined the company in June 2018, Stories had less than 20,000 users. By October 2019, more than 80,000 users were engaging with Duolingo Stories.
Day 26 - Completed ✅
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