Blog for Engineering Managers

Blog for Engineering Managers

How to create the best OKRs to increase your impact

Transform your goals into high-impact OKRs: Examples for every level + your personal OKR GPT Assistant đŸ€–

Stephane Moreau's avatar
Stephane Moreau
Nov 12, 2024
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Why Creating Great OKRs Is Hard (But Worth It)

Creating OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) sounds simple: define a goal, pick a few measurable outcomes, and you’re done. Right?

Wrong.

In practice, writing great OKRs is deceptively difficult. Many engineers and teams struggle with:

  • Vague Objectives: Goals like “improve performance” or “become a better communicator” are hard to measure, making it difficult to know what success actually looks like.

  • Task-Oriented Key Results: Tracking activities like “implement caching” or “set up monitoring” measures effort, not impact.

  • Unclear Metrics: OKRs without clear success metrics leave too much room for interpretation, requiring endless debates over whether a goal was really achieved.

Great OKRs, however, eliminate this uncertainty. They don’t just define what you want to achieve, they also make it unquestionable whether you succeeded. Well-written OKRs are:

  1. Crystal Clear: Anyone reading them knows exactly what success looks like and how it will be measur


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