The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment. As with any tool, there are many ways to use it. Here are the critical points for you to keep in mind when using the tool for product teams in product organizations.
Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable.
Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks.
The rest of the company will use OKRs a bit differently, but for the product management, design, and technology organization, focus on the organization's objectives and the objectives for each product team, which are designed to roll up and achieve the organization's objectives. Don't let personal objectives or functional team objectives dilute or confuse the focus.
Find a good cadence for your organization (typically, annually for an organization's objectives and quarterly for a team's objectives).
Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks.
Keep the number of objectives and key results for the organization and for each team small (one to three objectives, with one to three key results each is typical).
It's critical that every product team track their active progress against their objectives (which is typically weekly).
The objectives do not need to cover every little thing the team does, but they should cover what the team needs to accomplish.
It's important that, one way or another, teams feel accountable to achieving their objectives. If they fail substantially, it's worth having a post‐mortem/retrospective with some of their peers or management.
Agree as an organization on how you will be evaluating or scoring your key results. There are different approaches to this, and it's in large part a reflection of your particular company culture. What's important here is consistency across the organization, so that teams know when they can depend on one another. It's common to define a score of 0 (on a scale from 0 to 1.0) if you essentially make no progress, 0.3 if you just did the bare minimum—what you know you can achieve, 0.7 if you've accomplished more than the minimum and have really done what you'd hoped you would achieve, and 1.0 if you've really surprised yourselves and others with a truly exceptional result, beyond what people were even hoping for.
Establish very clear and consistent ways to indicate when a key result is in reality a high‐integrity commitment (described earlier) rather than a normal objective. In other words, for most key results, you may be shooting for that 0.7 score. But for a high‐integrity commitment, these are special, and it's more binary. You either delivered what you promised or you didn't.
Be very transparent (across the product and technology organization) on what objectives each product team is working on and their current progress.
Senior management (CEO and executive team) is responsible for the organization's objectives and key results. The heads of product and technology are responsible for the product team objectives (and ensuring they deliver on the organization's objectives). The individual product teams are responsible for proposing the key results for each objective they've been assigned. It is normal to have a give‐and‐take process each quarter as the OKRs are finalized for each team and for the organization.