Cross-Functional #158, Objective and Key Results

Author

Rory Madden
September 26, 2023

The Weekly Summary

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have gained significant traction as a tool to set ambitious goals for teams, with key results typically measured by shifts in customer behaviour. While this approach is highly effective for teams that possess the autonomy to devise and implement solutions, it can be incredibly damaging for those without such control. The mismatch of high expectations without the corresponding authority can lead to burnout or indifference, both of which are terrible for the people involved and for team morale.

So before implementing OKRs across the board, it's crucial to ensure that each team has the authority to effect the necessary changes to achieve their objectives.

If you want to dive deeper, especially concerning OKRs in non-product teams, we have two articles on the subject in this week's newsletter.

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The Bulletin Board

The design to developer workflow, particularly with AI integration, has become one of the most debated topics this year. This forum addresses the challenges and best practices to improve the collaboration between designers and developers.

Russ Drury, Senior Director of Customer Success at Zeplin, will lead the forum on "Streamlining the Design to Development Workflow" at EMEA 23 in less than 3 weeks. Attendees will gain valuable insights from this session, emphasising the benefits it brings to the industry. Ensure you have an in-person ticket to access this exclusive content.

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

Charity offers insights on effective communication during low trust situations, emphasizing clarity, positive intent, and understanding.

Emily explores team memory and knowledge sharing in remote settings, focusing on the role of serendipity in distributed workplaces.

Product Direction

OKRs For Service Businesses by Jeff Gothelf

Jeff shares how you can set up OKRs for service companies, highlighting the importance of realistic targets that reflect controllable behavioural changes.

Tim discusses the optimal use of OKRs at all hierarchical levels, with an emphasis on clarity and avoiding bureaucratic overload.

Continuous Discovery

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss a few of the common stages companies tend to go through when they adopt continuous discovery.

Four key questions that will help you turn any observed behaviour into actionable product ideas.

Continuous Design

Mark shares strategies for engaging users with new products, with an emphasis on understanding needs, reducing friction and showing product value.

The Real Value Of Tokens by Erez Reznikov

A fun and interactive article highlighting what mistakes to avoid when creating landing pages and the psychology behind highly effective pages.

Continuous Delivery

Technical debt can and should be quantified by looking at the maintenance time, opportunity cost and human cost of bad code.

Fernando goes beyond the neat theory of creating separate domains to share a case study of how they did it at Klaviyo.  

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