Measure What Matters
A book on how different types of large companies accomplish their goals by using OKR methodologies. And some key examples with it.
Author: John Doerr
Personal Rating: 7.5/10
Personal Review: I was starting to read the book a recommendation of my colleague last year 2023. I was working on creating 2024 OKRs for my engineering org.
At first, I started with Google results, but I felt this those were too generic. Then while reading this book, I got some different ideas. while helping shape the okrs up.
The book will not tell you what your okrs are, but it will give a lot of stories of okrs, like what an okrs meant to Google or intel. Who started to use okrs first and in which context did that, how they use that? There are lots of different company scenarios. So you will get an idea of those I think the writer tried to create some senses around the okrs for different perspectives using different stories and use cases.
Those stories. are nice but sometimes it's boring, to read pages and pages of stories instead of seeing okrs explanations.
So anyone new at the OKRs ideas, I would recommend this book as a history lesson and get some holistic idea how those things got implemented and used.
Quote from the book:
the key result has to be mesaurbale, But at the end you can look, and without any argument: Did I do that or did not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgement in it.
Many companies have a "rule of seven", limiting managers to a maximum of seven direct reports. In some cases, Google has flipped the rule of seven.(When Jonathan Rosenberg headed Google's product team, he had as many as twenty.) The higher the ratio of reports, the flatter the org chart--which means less top-down overshight, greater frontline autonomy, and more fertile soil for the next breakthrough. OKRs help make all of these good things possible.
In other words, the most important things need to get done first or they won't get done at all.
"Okay, I want each of you to name five projects you can implement to bring us closer to our goal.
If you wrote them down in five minutes, they probably aren't good. Think
Make sure the metrics are unambiguous. If you say "1 million users." is that all-time users of seven-day activies?
Link: https://amzn.to/48GBkn8