How to make OKRs work in a big company: the Leader’s OKR Guide (free PDF)

A 16-page guide for leaders who run OKRs inside a larger organisation. It covers how to set OKRs from your strategy, use them every week, and bring your sponsors (the senior people who back and fund your work) and other teams with you.

Most OKR training stops once the OKRs are written. Then the quarter starts. Your sponsors want different things. Other teams don’t know what you’re aiming for. The weekly meeting turns into status updates, and the OKRs come out again in week twelve. That’s where OKRs work or fail, and it’s what this guide is about.

I first wrote it for product managers at a large firm. It works for any leader who needs other people’s support to deliver: sponsors, managers, dependent teams, commercial teams and customers.

What’s inside

Six parts, each of which works on its own:

1. What OKRs are. Objectives, Key Results, and the plans that sit under them.

2. Working with OKRs. The weekly meeting, with the questions to ask about your OKRs, your numbers and your customer feedback. Then the mid-quarter review, the retrospective and the quarterly all-hands.

3. Developing OKRs from strategy. How to tell whether your strategy is clear enough to write OKRs from.

4. Working with sponsors. Setting OKRs with them, keeping them informed, and what to do when two sponsors disagree.

5. Working with other stakeholders. Dependent teams, customers, commercial teams and your own manager.

6. A sponsor’s guide to OKRs. Two pages to hand to your sponsor, so you’re working from the same page.

You’ll also find good and bad example OKRs, and a case study from Google Maps public transport. When progress stalled and the sponsors asked for results ten times faster, the team changed its strategy and used OKRs to bring the sponsors with them.

Six ideas from the guide

Fewer Objectives work better. One is perfect. Three works for most teams. Each one you add takes attention from the others.

OKRs work in the weekly meeting. Putting them in software changes nothing. Bring them up every week, and use them to change your plans when you learn something new. The One Page Plan keeps those plans in one place.

Write the strategy first. If writing OKRs feels impossible, you may be trying to write a strategy at the same time without realising it. The One Page Strategy helps.

Agree what kind of target each Key Result is. Is it a commitment, a target or a stretch? Agree it with your sponsors at the start, and the end of the quarter gets a lot easier.

You don’t need to teach every stakeholder OKRs. Share yours and say “here’s what we’re trying to get done this quarter”. Then talk about it.

Keep OKRs out of performance reviews. Judge people on what they achieved with the time and resources they had. Use OKRs to help them achieve more.

Download the guide

The Leader’s OKR Guide

16 pages in six parts you can use on their own, plus example OKRs and a case study. Free PDF, no email needed.

Download the guide

If you’re setting OKRs for the first time, start with the OKR Cheat Sheet, then set them with your team in a week.

Want help with this?

I help leadership teams in larger organisations run OKRs through the quarter, and coach the leaders who carry them.

The transformation I’m leading. You need OKRs your sponsors back and your teams use every week.