Fix Your OKRs – Back to First Principles

Help me think through how this episode applies to my situation. Start by asking what I am trying to change. Separate the episode's claims from your suggestions, and say when the notes do not support a claim. Use the transcript to find passages, then check the audio before quoting. Transcript: https://yuvalyeret.com/podcast/episodes/fix-your-okrs-back-to-first-principles/transcript.md ## Published episode notes Fixing OKRs with First Principles: Aligning Objectives for Success In this episode of Scaling With Agility, Yuval explores how to effectively utilize OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) by applying first principles. He discusses the common pitfalls of OKRs becoming mere 'theater' in organizations and provides strategies to avoid these traps. Yuval emphasizes the importance of focusing on a small set of strategic objectives, distinguishing between working in the business and on the business, and leveraging agile methodologies like Scrum to manage complex and uncertain work. Tune in to learn how to align your organization towards meaningful goals and enhance cross-functional collaboration. 00:00 Introduction to OKRs 00:36 The Purpose and Potential of OKRs 01:32 Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them 03:31 Principles for Effective OKRs 03:44 Working in vs. Working on the Business 07:41 Outcome-Based OKRs and Evidence-Based Management 12:08 Cascades vs Networks - Alignment with Initiative 18:22 Cross-Functional Collaboration and OKRs 23:18 Integrating OKRs with Agile Practices 25:33 Conclusion and Key Takeaways To hear more, visit yuvalyeret.substack.com Fix Your OKRs - Back to First Principles – https://yuvalyeret.com/blog/fix-your-okrs-back-to-first-principles ## Transcript Automatic transcript of the published podcast audio. Recognition errors are possible. Speakers are unlabeled; do not attribute a passage to Yuval or a guest without checking the audio. Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/fix-your-okrs-back-to-first-principles/ Source RSS GUID: substack:post:161735085 Source: published Riverside RSS audio enclosure Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English ## Transcript [00:00:00] Welcome to Scaling with Agility, I'm Uvali Earth, let's talk about OKRs and how to fix OKRs using first principles. [00:00:12] So, a bit of context, OKRs, objectives and care results, they've become the latest management framework to suffer the fate of becoming popular too quickly, [00:00:23] to the point where, in many organizations, OKRs are a theatre, a charade, with little useful substance or benefits. [00:00:34] That's what I'm saying in many organizations that bring me in to help them with their OKRs. [00:00:39] And that's really a shame because OKRs have a huge potential if you use them. [00:00:46] I have a lot of conversations with colleague trainers, or you shouldn't use OKRs, that's a shame because OKRs have huge potential if you use them effectively. [00:00:59] So, let's go about fixing your OKRs. The aim of OKRs is to help you execute effectively on what matters the most, your strategy. [00:01:09] While overcoming the silos, the politics, the ongoing grind, and other management challenges. [00:01:16] So, essentially what OKRs try to do is to provide the organization with alignment and focus. [00:01:26] In the book What Matters, John Doar defines OKRs as an alignment framework, a collaborative goal setting methodology used by teams and individuals, [00:01:36] with challenging ambitious goals, with measurable results. OKRs are how you track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around measurable goals. [00:01:46] So, let's talk about how OKRs, if you use them, set you up for success and what might go wrong along the way. [00:01:55] OKRs should help you focus on your strategic priorities. [00:01:59] If you do have a small set of strategic objectives that reduces context switching and provides a rallying cry that helps cut through the silos, politics, and the whirlwind of the day-to-day work. [00:02:14] Choosing where to focus is hard, though. It's much easier to just define an OKR for everything. [00:02:21] And then when everything is important, nothing is really important. And that's exactly what we often see out there. [00:02:27] We go into an organization and we ask them, what are their goals? [00:02:32] And it looks like one, all pros show where you get a goal, and you get a goal, and you get a goal, and everybody gets a goal, everybody gets multiple goals. [00:02:44] So, when you have so many goals, the goals don't really help you make decisions. A good goal, a good OKR, should serve as a decision filter. [00:02:59] When you're trying to decide which direction to take, do we want to invest in taking this approach, building this feature, building this product, working on this policy, [00:03:12] working on this change to how the company is operating, they don't help us to prioritize. [00:03:19] So, with that in mind, one of the things you want to avoid is to map everything that you're currently planning through OKRs. [00:03:29] But initially, if you're just getting going, it's probably OK to do this mapping of everything that you're currently working on [00:03:41] to goals, just to show yourself, provide a mirror, that this is the reality that you're facing. [00:03:50] It's better to define all of the priorities that you have as OKRs as objectives, just to show yourself that you have too many of them. [00:04:04] Then the next step is to rally around a smaller set to start to focus. [00:04:12] You might find it similar to how we're introducing the concept of flow using con. [00:04:19] The first step is to visualize. [00:04:22] The first step is not to limit or control the amount of work and process, the first step is to visualize the work, [00:04:30] even though that might show us that we have way too much work. [00:04:36] The second step is then to use that visualization to realize, oh, wait, wait, wait, much. [00:04:44] Now let's apply focus. Let's limit them on a work. [00:04:49] So, the first principle we want to apply is to achieve focus, focusing on the few strategic objectives. [00:04:58] Visualizing how many objectives do we have, which enables us to start to focus. [00:05:05] The second principle in OKRs, if you want to talk about is working in the business versus working on the business. [00:05:12] Another way I see organizations drown themselves in OKRs is by having OKRs for everyone. [00:05:19] Running the business doesn't require OKRs. [00:05:23] You can use key performance indicators, APIs, to manage and monitor operational work. [00:05:30] You can cover the capacity to invest in running the business, keeping the lights on, doing work that is not aspirational, that is not developing you. [00:05:42] OKRs should really be used just for development or growth work, work we do to change how we do things. [00:05:51] Or in other terms, working on the business, rather than working in the business. [00:05:58] As you like to imagine, using this distinction would help you reduce the number of OKRs significantly, [00:06:05] leaving a set of fewer, more focused objectives. [00:06:09] One of the exercises that I like to use when I come into an organization, especially if they have a lot of goals, is to map out [00:06:18] which of the goals are developmental, which of the OKRs are related to keeping the business running. [00:06:29] And it's typically possible to see that when you start to talk about what are the outcomes, what's this objective really about? [00:06:40] It's possible to see what it relates to. [00:06:43] Developmental growth, transformational work, the work that OKRs are for, typically involve more uncertainty and complexity than running the business as you recall. [00:06:55] In this environment, a lot is unknown. What is the best way to achieve the goal? Does the goal still make sense? [00:07:02] How long will it take us to achieve the goal? What's the realistic result within a certain time span? [00:07:11] One other interesting exercise that you might find useful is taking your goals and using some sort of two by two metrics where you're looking at the level of uncertainty around why are we doing this? [00:07:26] Do we know why we're doing this? You know why we're investing in this subject and what would success look like? [00:07:33] Sometimes it's very clear why what success would look like. Sometimes there's a lot of uncertainty and there's an assertion and hypothesis, a bet around the why and the why. [00:07:46] And separately, how much do we know about the how? Is it simple execution? Are there a lot of uncertainties around how we won't achieve this goal? [00:08:00] The combination of these two uncertainties can create an environment where we have a multi-variant bet. [00:08:08] But one thing you might be noticing already is that the more uncertainty we have, the more we need to use techniques that leverage empiricism and iteration in order to successfully achieve the goal. [00:08:24] This is where OKRs meet the world of agility or evidence based. Regardless of how you call it, what you need is a management approach that is designed to improve outcomes when facing like an uncertainty. [00:08:42] And the way of working that typically works in that space is to make a bet, to make an assertion, to try something and to close a feedback loop, to sense what is going on to respond to what is going on. [00:08:57] And in order to sense and respond, we both need to slice our work through smaller pieces as well as collaborate across functions. [00:09:07] And a lot of the time, in order to achieve a meaningful objective in the organization, we'll need cross functional collaboration. [00:09:14] OKRs are designed to support or need an evidence based management approach. This combination of we typically use OKRs to do development and growth work, the work that is more uncertain, that is more of a bet. [00:09:32] Is the right fit for techniques such as might call it agile, agility, lean startup, but it's not just in product development. [00:09:41] You might have OKRs that are around policy of the organization, how we hire people, how we're structured to adopt AI solutions that also need this agility. [00:09:55] You might call this thing business agility. [00:09:58] There are a couple of key principles and practices that we need to have in place for this evidence based management or agility to be used in order to achieve our goals. [00:10:14] So let's talk about those. [00:10:16] The first one is you want to rally around outcomes rather than managing outputs in it. [00:10:22] One key aspect in ensuring OKRs enable evidence based management is the type of goal. [00:10:29] Managing outputs and activities can work reasonably well for working in the business. [00:10:34] Since network is typically operational and defined using output and activity based goal to work on the business fixes our plans, our specifications, our designs way too early. [00:10:48] It reinforces a factory mindset where people focus on their deliverables rather than the wider problem or opportunity. [00:10:56] And it lands itself to heavy-handed conlonging control. [00:10:59] We manage a book of work. [00:11:01] We manage scope. [00:11:03] We manage to plans. [00:11:05] We're not open to opportunities. [00:11:08] We're not open to learning and adjusting course. [00:11:12] But for complex uncertain work, you should set goals using outcomes. [00:11:18] Outcome based OKRs unleash self-management and empiricism. [00:11:22] They unleash people's explore and discover because they create an allowance where people are empowered to work together to solve problems. [00:11:35] Think about it this way. [00:11:37] If we set a goal that is output based, most of the time people working towards that goal would be anchored. [00:11:45] They wouldn't necessarily even see that working towards this output is the wrong move. [00:11:51] That there might be a better move. [00:11:54] If we're setting goals towards outcomes, first of all, people might see that there are different ways to achieve those outcomes. [00:12:04] And they also have the flexibility to deliver. [00:12:08] They can choose different activities, even outputs, different deliverables, as long as they're still aligned to achieve outcomes. [00:12:19] One of the challenges we've managed through Outcome goals is that you need to wait longer to see the outcomes. [00:12:25] So it's tempting to manage through outputs. [00:12:28] It's easier to see how many hours did you work towards this project? [00:12:33] Or did you deliver stories? How many stories did you deliver? How many features did you deliver? Did we deliver that feature? [00:12:41] That's an easier leading indicator of progress. [00:12:48] But it's a very good one. [00:12:51] It doesn't really tell us, are we heading in the right direction? [00:12:55] It's something not necessarily. [00:12:58] It's essentially a valid inventory. [00:13:01] The fact that we are seeing progress or delivering features, it's not really helping us take action towards improving the outcomes that were. [00:13:14] It's reinforcing a behavior of convincing ourselves that we're heading in the right direction, even though we might not. [00:13:24] And we know that organizations struggle to tell themselves the truth around, are we heading in the right direction? [00:13:34] It's hard to tell ourselves we're heading in the right direction. We might need to change course. [00:13:41] People would find comfort or people find comfort in tracking vanity metrics, in tracking progress and in activity that can look good, [00:13:52] even though we don't have a clue on whether we're really delivering value. [00:13:58] So remember, the role of OKRs isn't to manage the day to day. [00:14:03] It isn't to show us that there's activity. [00:14:06] A goal of OKRs is, first of all, to align us around where we can do through outcomes much better than we can do through output and activity. [00:14:19] The second goal is to help us steer with evidence. [00:14:26] We can use other processes to manage the work that we did towards the OKRs, the experiment with identifying intermediate outcomes. [00:14:35] This is challenging but satisfying. [00:14:38] Slicing outcomes is similar to identifying a minimal viable product or a minimally marketable feature or slicing stories. [00:14:48] Slicing them not through technical slices but in valuable slices. [00:14:54] Slices that either already deliver some value or at least deliver some learning, close feedback loops. [00:15:01] So let's take advantage of the tractal. [00:15:05] You probably already have product leaders and angel practitioners in your organization that have practiced slicing products, slicing features [00:15:16] in order to enable feedback loops. [00:15:18] So if coming up with outcome-based objectives that are sliced into smaller pieces that fit into corners or at the minimum, having leading indicators that you will be able to track on an ongoing CSEs hard, top to these people. [00:15:37] Leverage their expertise to come up with some ideas. [00:15:42] One of the things you want to make sure of is that at least the qualitative objective level is outcome-focused. [00:15:49] Even if your KRs as a starting point are output-oriented. [00:15:54] And over time you evolve from output towards outcomes for your KRs as well. [00:16:01] Let's switch gears and talk about the line initiative over command and control. [00:16:06] When leaders want to align their wider organization around their goals, they often cascade OKRs for other organizations. [00:16:14] Cascading is the act of connecting each objective at each level to the level above and to the level below. [00:16:25] This string cascading means that by the time you get to the people that will work towards the goal, they're bound to tasks and activities. [00:16:32] They don't really have the maneuvering room they need to seek the best way to achieve people. [00:16:37] Or even reconsider what's the best goal. [00:16:40] And this looks quite similar to OKRs predecessor, management biogetives, which was very control-oriented. [00:16:48] One of the advantages and reasons for OKRs is compared biogetives. [00:16:54] Is to move towards aligned autonomy rather than control the line. [00:17:00] Alignment and control are two different aspects that can work in concert, right? [00:17:06] Donald Reinersson calls this aligned initiative, Eric Neiberg talks about aligned autonomy in the Spotify engineering culture video. [00:17:17] And why does this initiative or autonomy language or preference matter so much there are two main reasons. [00:17:24] The most important one is remember that OKRs are for creative developmental work, work on the business, [00:17:33] remember that in that environment we're dealing with an uncertainty and complexity and nothing that happens. [00:17:39] It's typically knowledge work where the best solutions are learned from pulling the trenches. [00:17:44] It emerges from people in the trenches when we provide them with a clear goal, clarity on what's the goal, [00:17:52] and empowering them to take the initiative. [00:17:55] And by doing that we dramatically improve our chances of achieving our desired outcomes. [00:18:02] A secondary benefit is that people are intrinsically motivated by being empowered by feeling like players, not like pawns. [00:18:12] And for that we need to find the right level of autonomy. [00:18:15] We don't mean everybody is doing what they want. [00:18:18] What we mean is we provide alignment towards what goals are important to us, [00:18:24] an autonomy within those boundaries. [00:18:28] The key then is to achieve alignment without street cascading. [00:18:33] Leaders should use OKRs to provide context and direction. [00:18:37] We should have company-level OKRs, portfolio or product OKRs, business unit OKRs. [00:18:46] Leaders should use those OKRs to provide context and direction to inform about the why rather than prescribe the what and how. [00:18:55] And then teams and groups come up with their own OKRs. [00:19:01] The connection can be reinforced as part of the why and how for each other. [00:19:06] So beyond talking about what's the outcome that we're seeking, [00:19:10] we also recommend each objective include a why and how state. [00:19:15] Why are we focusing on this now? [00:19:17] This might be some local context that is driving the need for this objective, [00:19:20] or it might be we're doing this now because this is our way to contribute. [00:19:25] This is what we need to do to support the wider objective. [00:19:31] And that is an important connection to maintain. [00:19:35] All we're saying is not every objective needs to be tied one to one to a part. [00:19:41] It's more of a network than a higher. [00:19:45] Teams and groups share their intent with each other and with the leaders so that we can see this. [00:19:52] We can see if the network is configured if all of these OKRs are aligned. [00:20:00] If I'm planning to achieve a certain goal, I might be relying on another group to achieve theirs, [00:20:09] or there might be a conflict or a duplication. [00:20:11] We do want to see this network and to discuss this interaction between these OKRs across the organization. [00:20:19] But we don't necessarily want to do it as a hard. [00:20:23] This might seem like a complex process to pull off, [00:20:27] but the good news is that we've done these things before. [00:20:30] We've created plans that work across a set of teams coming into a room with [00:20:39] this is the strategy that we're pursuing without telling people all of the details, [00:20:45] letting teams come up with what are they doing to achieve this and using the process to align. [00:20:53] You might recognize this as what we call big room planning or PI planning, [00:20:57] a network of OKRs for the entire organization, not just product development. [00:21:03] For example, a fast-growing biotech startup. [00:21:06] What we've done is we've used this approach to come up with the OKRs, [00:21:12] an aligned network of OKRs for the entire company. [00:21:16] Things that cut across their IT organization and their technology group [00:21:23] that comes up with machine learning, simulated therapeutics. [00:21:30] The wit lab that is simulated therapeutics, manufactures them in the lab and tests them [00:21:38] are all of these different groups, use OKRs, talk about and plan, [00:21:46] and how are we going to develop our companies as an organization. [00:21:50] They didn't use it for the day-to-day work of creating therapeutics, [00:21:55] they used this more for developing what's the next of this company, [00:22:00] what's the way to double our throughput of their expertise. [00:22:05] A key aspect of this evidence-based management that OKRs require [00:22:11] in order to maximize success in the environment of uncertainty is the feedback. [00:22:16] Many organizations set the OKRs for the quarter and then forget about them until the end of the quarter, [00:22:22] and that's like setting your sales quota and only checking back at the end of the quarter. [00:22:28] That's a recipe for disaster. [00:22:30] The other extreme is that they micromanage OKRs every day. [00:22:34] It's all about finding the Goldilocks cadence, the cadence that provides enough transparency and opportunity to invest. [00:22:41] Up to the right level without living. [00:22:45] There can be a different cadence for everybody involved in achieving an OKR. [00:22:50] The people that are involved in achieving an OKR should probably need a faster feedback loop, [00:22:56] a faster opportunity to inspect and adapt and adjust the steps that they take in order to achieve the key results that we're aiming at. [00:23:07] The stakeholders might still want to see what is going on and provide feedback, [00:23:14] and we might be interested in their feedback, but we can do that on a less frequent basis. [00:23:20] The right cadence also provides an opportunity to reinforce or communicate one of our strategies and what is our focus. [00:23:28] Do we want to change it in our focus? [00:23:31] We can take inspiration from frameworks like strum for how such a cadence could be. [00:23:37] So you might use a cadence that involves planning, reviewing, retrostatic, [00:23:43] with a clear distinction between the team working on OKR that would plan their work retrospect on how they're doing, [00:23:50] but will rev to you. [00:23:52] Their outcomes, their leading indicators, their lagging in theirs, they would rev them both with themselves and their stakeholders, [00:24:01] and then bring whatever they learn into planning their cycle. [00:24:06] I mentioned earlier that a lot of times we need OKRs to be cross-functional. [00:24:11] What do we mean by that? [00:24:13] So, leaders struggle to manage the cross-functional collaboration and dependency many OKRs require. [00:24:20] It's hard to get cross-functional work flowing in an organization, especially as you scale up, [00:24:28] and their innovation becomes a set of functions, if-dums, and you need more and more politics and sway. [00:24:35] What if achieving an objective, if achieving the goal requires collaboration across functions? [00:24:41] These collaboration across functions can be hard. [00:24:45] The larger the organization, the more likely it is that it's structured according to functions, [00:24:52] functions that become victims, and every time you need to collaborate across these functions, [00:24:59] there's more coordination over the more friction and more politics, [00:25:04] which makes it tempting to divide and conquer and cascade these OKRs into functional OKRs. [00:25:12] The problem is that those functional OKRs, more often than not, can only describe outputs and activities, [00:25:23] because you cannot really achieve the outcomes with the collaboration across functions. [00:25:28] It's tempting to use these functional OKRs. [00:25:32] It allows you an objective that is within your scope of control, if you're managing a function, [00:25:39] but it hides their reality. [00:25:42] It might show you that you're making progress towards an objective, but the objective is not meaningful. [00:25:49] And you cannot really see whether you're making progress towards an outcome. [00:25:53] Like we discussed earlier, you will have less optionality for changing the direction in order to maximize the value that you're creating, [00:26:02] to make sure that you are achieving the outcomes. [00:26:05] So what's the alternative? The alternative? There are two alternatives. [00:26:09] One is to fight this surge. [00:26:13] Yeah, we know it's going to be hard to achieve these OKRs. [00:26:17] We know that there's going to be some coordination overhead, but we're willing to pay that price, [00:26:24] because what we're interested in is achieving the outcomes, not enabling groups to manage themselves. [00:26:31] OKRs, again, are not about managing the work. [00:26:34] It's about deploying a strategy, making sure we're focused on strategic goals. [00:26:40] So we'll deal with some of that coordination overhead. [00:26:44] If we're seeing too many of these OKRs, if we're seeing too much work that is cross-functional, [00:26:53] that might provide a mirror that helps convince us to organize our own OKRs. [00:27:01] So what this might look like is you start implementing OKRs, you identify what are your real OKRs, [00:27:10] who's needed to work towards each of them. You get rid of the OKRs that describe the business as usual. [00:27:16] You don't try to capture all of your work using OKRs, just the work on developing your capabilities, [00:27:23] developing your product, your strategic priorities. [00:27:27] Those real OKRs, some of them might require cross-functional collaboration. [00:27:33] Mip that out, show which OKRs require this cross-functional collaboration. [00:27:39] And for starters, manage them that way. [00:27:42] Over time, you can experiment with a couple of things. [00:27:46] You can take one of these OKRs, let's say the most strategic one that is also the most cross-functional, [00:27:52] and create an empowered cross-functional team around that OKR to make collaboration. [00:27:58] Just for the time that these people work on that OKR, a Tiger team, a SWAT team, [00:28:03] whatever name you want to use, you probably created those team organizations. [00:28:08] Do that for these sort of OKRs. [00:28:11] If you're starting to see more and more of these patterns, [00:28:16] then you might want to have a conversation around reorganizing around value-creating teams or groups [00:28:24] that spend functional lines, but are able to take on an objective and achieve. [00:28:31] One example might be bringing people from marketing together with Sales and Ableland, [00:28:36] bringing people, the classic is people from development together with testing. [00:28:40] We don't even talk about it these days, but that was the move. [00:28:43] We created a team, an onboarding team that worked on the onboarding experience, [00:28:48] that had people from IT and people ops and finance, [00:28:54] and people from the wet labs. [00:28:57] Those people collaborated on this objective of making it easier to onboard new people into the organization. [00:29:06] Another benefit of organizing around OKRs is that once you do that, [00:29:11] the team that you did create has a very clear business school. [00:29:15] They're much more empowered and they're more motivated and engaged. [00:29:20] They're more focused, they spend less of their time in context. [00:29:25] An anti-pattern is to create cross-functional teams for all of your OKRs. [00:29:34] If you didn't narrow down the number of OKRs, you still have a lot of them. [00:29:40] A lot of them are cross-functional. [00:29:42] What you decide is, let's have a cross-functional team for each one of those OKRs. [00:29:47] What might happen is that some people, typically the key people, the bottlenecks, [00:29:54] need to join multiple OKR teams and start to spend more and more of their precious time. [00:30:04] In coordination, work, context-witching, work around the world [00:30:12] that is a result of these cross-functional OKR teams. [00:30:16] This pattern only works if you either limit it to one or two top OKRs [00:30:23] or create teams that are distinct, where people don't join multiple such OKR teams. [00:30:32] If you listen carefully and you have an experience with OKRs, [00:30:38] you might be noticing a lot of similarities between OKRs and OKRs. [00:30:46] Still, a lot of organizations struggle with their relationship between OKRs [00:30:52] and their OKRs. [00:30:54] They're unsure what the best way to relate OKRs to their backlogs [00:30:59] they feel like there's a redundancy between the hedge-all and OKRs. [00:31:04] So, how do we address these overlaps and this lack of clarity? [00:31:10] Some OKRs are left cleanly into existing teams and groups in a product development organization. [00:31:16] In this scenario, OKRs can become the creation of product backlog items [00:31:21] or product goals or features, whatever you want. [00:31:26] How we're doing on our OKRs should be inspected during our hedge-all events, [00:31:31] during our planning or new events and shooting for our decision, [00:31:35] and there would be no need for an additional ongoing OKR. [00:31:40] Quarterly or so, OKR reviewing and planning can replace our release planning [00:31:45] and would focus more on outcomes impact rather than scope features. [00:31:52] If you're using something like a scaled-edge old frameworks, [00:31:56] you might still use PI planning. [00:31:59] PI planning would be focused much more on outcomes and key results [00:32:05] in the network of objective across the teams instead of detailed scope features. [00:32:14] Another approach would be to still use the same PI planning approach that you use now, [00:32:20] but focus on the quarterly objectives. [00:32:25] Let's call in as well. [00:32:27] There's a wider opportunity though. [00:32:32] While Scrum was created as a framework for managing product development, [00:32:36] it is appropriate for working on any complex problem. [00:32:40] As we've established earlier work to achieve OKRs is typically complex even when it's not product development. [00:32:48] So the natural next step is to apply Scrum or any other Agile ways of working. [00:32:54] You prefer as the approach to doing the work towards achieving the OKR, [00:33:00] to experimenting, to building, sensing and responding and learning. [00:33:07] Scrum or Agile can become the operating system for working on the business, [00:33:13] for working towards your OKRs. [00:33:17] OKRs don't really tell you how to work dating and how to work towards them. [00:33:22] They're more at the goals level, so there's a good thing. [00:33:27] So let's bring all of this together. [00:33:30] OKRs and Agile Scrum aren't in conflict. [00:33:35] Looking at OKRs with an Agile Scrum lens reinforces the principles that OKRs are fixed on. [00:33:42] To successfully leverage OKRs, you should focus on working on the business versus in the business. [00:33:48] Stop starting, start finishing, focus on the few key initiatives, maybe even just one, [00:33:53] rather than micro manage outputs and activities. [00:33:56] Provide alignment and enable initiative through empowered teams and groups. [00:34:01] Organize around value and leverage OKRs to see what the value that you might want to focus on and reorganize around. [00:34:10] Leverage OKRs in scrumming the trenches in order to execute on your OKRs. [00:34:15] And when in doubt, you should go back to the first principles of alignment, [00:34:20] Ireland, focus, slow and empiricism. [00:34:25] If you want to learn more about these principles and how to apply them, [00:34:29] there are a couple of places where I suggest you might want to go. [00:34:33] Alright folks, thanks for listening. [00:34:35] If you found this useful, please join me again next time for Scaling with Agile. ## Source boundary These are the published show notes from the podcast feed. They are a starting point for discussion, not a verbatim record of the conversation. The transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors or unlabeled speakers. Check the audio before quoting anyone.