post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Microsoft lays off 3% of workforce while renogiating partnership with OpenAI

Podcast

How to build the right product culture during transformation – Joca Torres (Product Consultant)

B2B product management

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Context, intent, change, purpose, constraints – a model for communicating requirements

5 difficult conversations and how to have them

DoorDash eats Deliveroo while OpenAI makes its biggest buy: This week’s news roundup

Why great product managers think like therapists

Tools and techniques to scale product teams – Charlotte King (Lead Product Manager, eBay)

Greg Bayer is Managing Director of Silver Ridge Advisors where he leads the product management and digital transformation practice. Prior to Silver Ridge, Greg led the Product Operations organization for Thomson Reuters across its 125 news, accounting and legal products and was Product SVP for Nielsen’s Marketing Cloud (NMC), its data management and identity platform. Greg has also held product leadership roles at companies such as Sony, Rakuten and Annalect (an Omnicom company). Greg graduated from Princeton University and is a part-time lead instructor for General Assembly’s Product Management course.

Greg Bayer

<p>Product leaders are charged with leading cross-functional teams through high value, iterative product releases. The product leader needs to understand market dynamics, their customers’ problems and needs, and storytell internally to generate excitement and support.  To do this effectively, the product leader must partner with cross-functional leaders (design, engineering, product marketing, sales) to determine what success actually looks like.</p>
<p>The Objectives and Key Result (OKR) framework is a popular way to bring small teams together and define priority outcomes over a fixed period.  As with any framework, there is room to customize what works best within an organization’s culture. I’ve worked with OKRs in several different organizations; there are universal truths that apply to any team, including:</p>
<ul>
<li>OKRs translate a mission and strategy into actions for a specific period of time;</li>
<li>OKRs center on a few critical objectives, while allowing for roadmaps to remain flexible;</li>
<li>OKRs create discipline and accountability across the cross-functional product team, challenging teams to ground objectives in measurable outcomes;</li>
<li>The product lead drives the OKR process, but requires input from cross-functional partners;</li>
<li>Objectives should be ambitious&#8211;accomplishing ~70% of the target is success;</li>
<li>The product leader needs to make sure that dependent products share or are aligned to KRs;</li>
<li>Use baselines and metrics that are available, avoiding aspirational metrics which aren’t trackable yet;</li>
<li>KRs should have flexibility to change mid-year based on new insights, but objectives should be durable.</li>
</ul>
<p>You may have noticed that OKR alignment or cascading is not on this list…that’s on purpose.  The idea of creating OKRs at the CEO level is very powerful and critical to centering a company’s executional strategy. On paper, it’s logical to cascade this downwards across the full product organization: CPO aligns to CEO OKRs; a product group aligns to CPO OKRs; a product team aligns to product group OKRs &#8211; nice and tidy. John Doerr and Google pioneered the concept of cascading OKRs during Google&#8217;s early phase of growth and it was a huge success (Doerr’s book <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.whatmatters.com/the-book">Measure What Matters</a></span> is a must-read!).  Although cascading OKRs can be successful, in my experience, the effort created more problems than benefits.  My advice: focus on getting your product’s OKRs pointed accurately to your company goals and be done. The time it takes to do just that while ensuring OKRs are updated and communicated is a big enough lift in itself.  Here’s what I found to be the most challenging things about cascading OKRs:</p>
<h2>1. The process takes too long.</h2>
<p>Ideally you want to brainstorm around next year’s strategy, north star and OKRs between Thanksgiving and mid-December before vacations, so that coming into the office on January 2nd, the team is fully aligned and off to work. If OKRs cascade, you need to wait for each layer above to be set before your team can set its own.  Good luck getting going before Valentine’s Day.</p>
<h2>2. Update meetings are cumbersome.</h2>
<p>With cascading OKRs, you’ve now introduced another set of alignment meetings where you need to make sure that things around you stay connected. As a product leader, you need to report progress to another entity which will be an unnecessary distraction.</p>
<h2>3.  Needs heavy overhead and software.</h2>
<p>Cascading OKRs requires a central team software solution. A shared Excel doc will be overwritten and broken in minutes. A part-time owner will leave a lot of fields blank due to other priorities. Puting in the right oversight for this effort can cost the company several hundred thousand dollars.</p>
<h2>4. Not all teams will define OKRs the same way.</h2>
<p>Within a product organization, your product operations team can lay out best practices and standards for writing good OKRs.  What happens when other teams, with different styles, take a different approach?  One team’s OKRs may only focus on outputs (send out 30 emails) vs outcomes (improve conversion rate by 0.5%).  This compounds challenges number 2 and 3 above.</p>
<h2>5.  No one wants the job of running this process.</h2>
<p>Yes, I said it.  This is painful for someone to run. They need to constantly badger people for updates, push back on bad KRs, and then deliver a rolled-up version of overall progress to the executive team which is always incomplete.</p>
<p>A good product leader will always look for ways to minimize their team’s overhead and create as much space as possible for testing, exploring and delivery. OKRs are an excellent framework to allow a team to go fast and keep centered.  As with any process or framework, there can be a tendency to over-engineer &#8211; leave OKRs with the team, make sure they have the right buy-in, and it will be the measuring stick for how well the product and team can perform.</p>
<h2>Discover more content on OKRs</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/jenny-herald-using-okrs-to-define-success/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jenny Herald: Using OKRs to define success</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wham-a-framework-for-workshopping-product-okrs/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WHAM! A framework for workshopping product OKRs</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/lets-talk-about-okrs-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Let’s talk about OKRs – The Product Experience</a></li>
</ul>


core/freeform

Frameworks

Unlocking the secrets of UX by Javier Andrés Bargas-Avila

Susana Lopes: Embracing a dual-track career ladder in product

Going from 0 to 1 in Product discovery by Merci Grace

From opinion-based to evidence-guided product development by Itamar Gilad

Make better decisions faster by Martin Eriksson

Key Experience Indicators for Product Managers by Tomer Sharon

The GIST Framework by Itamar Gilad

Critical Thinking for Product Teams by Teresa Torres

Cascading OKRs – more trouble than it’s worth

ProductTank Pune

ProductTank Hyderabad

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Helsinki

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Lomé

ProductTank Wellington

ProductTank San Diego

ProductTank Canberra

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Hong Kong

ProductTank Bangkok

ProductTank Doha

ProductTank Tel Aviv-Yafo

ProductTank Baku

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Richmond

ProductTank Cluj-Napoca

ProductTank Zagreb

ProductTank Amsterdam

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Hamburg

ProductTank München

ProductTank Buffalo

ProductTank Manchester

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Oxford

ProductTank Madrid

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank Dallas

ProductTank Portland

ProductTank Curitiba

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Austin

ProductTank Philadelphia

ProductTank Montevideo

ProductTank São Paulo

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Gdansk

ProductTank Stuttgart

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Bangalore

ProductTank Chennai

ProductTank Mumbai

ProductTank Fribourg

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Zürich

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank Jacksonville

ProductTank Florianópolis

ProductTank Tallinn

ProductTank Denver

ProductTank San Francisco

ProductTank Sheffield

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Valletta

ProductTank Bologna

ProductTank Vancouver

ProductTank Milano

ProductTank Columbus

ProductTank Belfast

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Seattle

ProductTank Lausanne

Product Management Foundations BST

Product Management Foundations ET

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Bielefeld

Communication & Alignment BST

Communication & Alignment ET

ProductTank Frankfurt

ProductTank Bonn

Cascading OKRs – more trouble than it’s worth

Greg Bayer

Read more