4 reasons companies like Pinterest and Google use OKRs
How goal tracking with Objectives and Key Results can flex to companies of different shapes and sizes.
John Scrugham
Head of Solutions Marketing at Coda
4 reasons companies like Pinterest and Google use OKRs
By John Scrugham
Share this article
You have goals. So does your team, and your company. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can help you achieve those goals. As John Doerr, the long-time advocate of OKRs, said in Measure What Matters, “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.” OKRs align goals––yours, the teams, and the organizations––to measurable outcomes. An Objective is a qualitative goal that is intended to be ambitious. Key Results are the quantifiable steps that indicate progress made toward the objective. OKRs combine these two concepts so that high-level guidance is tied to actionable, metric-driven tasks. Some of today’s most admired companies, such as Google and Pinterest, use OKRs. Each of these companies has a reason for using OKRs that is unique to them, and they all speak of how the OKR planning process helps them convert goals into execution. Here are the top four reasons why these companies use OKRs.
1. OKRs align teams as they scale.
Like many other innovative companies, Pinterest has grown from 15 employees in 2012 to more than 2,000 today. They’ve had to grow their systems to keep pace, and spreadsheets of OKRs wasn’t working––their information was siloed in too many places.We adopted OKRs as a process to help align our company objectives with our team’s results as we scaled. We doubled, then tripled the size our team in just a matter of a few years, and OKRs helped clarify the important objectives, kept teams aligned, and created an accountability structure.
Naveen Gavini
Former SVP of Products at Pinterest
2. OKRs help teams focus.
At Google, a huge draw for OKRs was that a single objective stays in frame until the strategy changes. This hyper-focus on Objectives and Key Results keeps teams aligned in their creative thinking.OKRs help Google teams to identify the single most important problem to tackle, and they also help to define the results they intend to achieve for the cycle in addressing that problem. OKRs help teams to focus on the problem and the impact of their work.
Gannon Hall
Former executive product leader of Google Maps, Local Search, and Location Services
3. OKRs help teams prioritize.
Aavia is a small startup team with a HUGE vision—which means a ton of possible products and directions. Teams can get stuck trying to accomplish 100% of their goals, so it is crucial to prioritize the ones that matter most. At Aavia, OKRs are their ambitions, and they’re meant to surface the most important work that they do.OKRs are our big bets for the next six months and what we’re committed to learning and improving. We cap our Key Results at six.
Aagya Mathur
CEO at Aavia
4. OKRs provide consistency.
Skillshare was founded ten years ago—and their strategic goals evolved as they grew from a startup to an organization of 500+ employees. As they scaled, the Skillshare team realized they needed to plan for future process changes today even if everything was running smoothly.Providing a consistent and predictable operating cadence helps our team stay on track to hit our goals. The easiest way for you to get started with an operating cadence at your organization (no matter the size) is to categorize each of your operating processes into annual, quarterly, monthly, etc. buckets.
Matt Cooper
CEO at Skillshare
Coda is the common thread.
Whether you’re a startup or an established organization, you can use OKRs as a tool for goal setting, alignment, prioritization, consistency, and progress tracking. Each of the examples above illustrate the value of customizing planning processes—plus the tremendous importance of having a powerful and flexible tool to run those processes.Related posts
Explore more stories about planning and OKRs.