Goal Setting for Startups - Intro to OKRs

Hello, hello everyone. I hope you are having an awesome, awesome day. My name is Daniel. I'm a part of the F5 marketing team and we're back again with a very, very exciting event with another startup leader. And this time what we're talking about is goal setting for startups. Before I intro our speaker today, I just want to know where you're all coming in from, right? Let us know in the chat. And right now I can see We have people from Kenya, we have people from Poland, we have people from Tijuana. Awesome, awesome. Toronto, a lot of people from Toronto. Interestingly, our speaker is also from there, so that should be a lot of fun. New York, we have people from Croatia, Montreal. Awesome, London.

Awesome.

So what's really awesome about the events that we do and just generally the FI network and the startup network in general is you have a very global audience. So it's kind of a testament to the power of startups and entrepreneurship. So yeah, let me introduce our speaker today. Ahmed is the director of Communitac. He's a seasoned entrepreneurship leader with experience helping startups in Canada, Egypt, and the US. So we're very, very excited to have him with us. Amit, if you could maybe unmute yourself, say hello to the audience.

Thanks, Daniel. Great to see everyone, although virtually, and again, I'm glad to see lots of folks coming from Toronto and Canada, but I see wonderful presence from all over the globe. Thanks again for having me. Look forward to the webinar and, you know, giving you some folks some knowledge around goal setting and everything. Again, wonderful opportunity by the Founder Institutes, the global presence is amazing, and it's just the learning from that community and the networking with that community that kind of keeps the startup ecosystem going, so thanks again. Looking forward.

Awesome, yeah, exactly. Some housekeeping rules before we begin, folks, if you could see to your right, you have this Q&A button right under the chat button, So if you have a question for Ahmed, drop your question there and then once Ahmed is done with his presentation, we'll bring your question on screen and then Ahmed can answer whatever that you have in mind. And please do keep in mind that once we are done with the presentation and the Q&A, we have a networking portion. So if you want to connect with startup founders from across the world, just generally anybody who's enthusiastic about startups, maybe the FI team, And hopefully if Ahmad has time, he might be sticking around as well. So do stick around for, yeah, the networking part. And just the last thing, if you look right at the bottom of your screen, you have this reactions button. So if you love what Ahmad is saying, you know, if you're enjoying the content today, do show him some love. And with that, folks, I will be moving to the back of the stage and let Ahmad take over.

Thanks, Daniel, appreciate it. So again, let me start sharing my screen here. I can get some verbal or even in the comments chat if everyone can see the screen okay. Yes, wonderful. So again, we'll be talking about OKRs and goal setting in general with the lens on early stage and how can it actually support startups in setting their goal, delivering on their mission, and hopefully kind of, you know, progressing in the direction of of their goals and objectives. As, you know, customary in these things, we always start with the joke, but I'm hoping to be more than a joke. It's, you know, we have a lot of unsaid and undocumented goals and aspirations and dreams in our mind, especially in the early stage when we're running startup or we're even thinking about it. Unless these things are actually documented somehow, shared and communicated with the rest of the team and who we're working with, again, it will always be in someone's mind and there will be always a difference in expectation whether we're actually nailing them or meeting them or anything like that. So here you go. This is something I wanted to start with and Daniel with helping me with it. I'm hoping if you can just— scan the QR code with your mobile phone and give us some insights into where you are on the OKR spectrum. Again, we want to know how familiar you are with it, and I'm going to switch to this for a second, and I'm hoping you can— here you go. So these are the answers that I'm receiving from you. And again, it's live, it goes up and down, so you know how it goes. I just wanted to know where the people are coming from today in terms of familiarity with OKRs. I know I've talked to groups that have no idea what is OKRs, although obviously they've been familiar with goals and goal setting in general. And then some people heard about it, but they haven't actually used it a ton. And some that are familiar and some others that are practitioners that actually have some experience with it. Use it, whether on a team or within an organization or their startup or their community. And there are folks like me and a couple of people on our team that are OKR champions, that are people who advocate for it, speak about its importance, try to share the benefits of it with the people and get the insights from it with everyone in the organization. I see we have a lot of, you know, a huge spread. But it gives you insight. Again, it's a bell curve like anything. So we'll try to be as generic as possible so that we can cater to the folks that are not as familiar to it. But at the same time, I'm glad that we have some folks with experience and people that are championing the process that will obviously add to the conversation. I hope for it to be a conversation with you, not just like a one-way teaching or anything like that. So I'm glad we have this kind of spread. And I'll go back here for a second so that we can continue on. What are we going to cover today? I'll tell you a little bit about myself personally and professionally, and then we'll go through a bit of history, hopefully not so boring, but I think it's good to have some history and background of where we where OKR came from. We'll review the framework. Obviously, we get an overview, we'll have some examples, and we'll share the benefits. This is actually how you get people excited about it and invested in it. And we'll talk about different approach cascading and alignments and all of that. And hopefully I'll take you through a couple of steps on how to write good OKRs, because really setting, writing, communicating OKRs is the is the most critical, I would say, part of it. Because if you don't get it right, you're not measuring the right thing, you're not communicating the right thing, you're not aligning on the rest of the team on what's important to you. And then we'll go through the process, or at least a recommended process for you if you plan to kind of adopt an OKR framework. And we'll share a bit of resources and obviously have some questions that the at the end. So again, I'm Ahmed Biddawi. I'm the Director of the Data Strategy and Program Management Office at Communitech. I lead the teams that work on our data products and initiatives, and at the same time, I do a bit of operational excellence on the program management side, and this is where the OKR lives. I'm coming to you from Toronto today, wonderful fall weather. Again, this is the picture that you usually see when you, you know, you get familiar with the city, but I'm sure the folks that are from Toronto will tell you we have other, you know, pictures of it. Sometimes they're full of construction sites and cranes and stuff at the moment, but it's a great city, and it's a good segue to tell you a little bit about myself. I lived and studied and worked in so many countries. I'm born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. I studied in the US in Boston when, you know, I went there to get my grad studies in business and I wanted to focus on entrepreneurship. I moved to Canada in Toronto 10 years ago. I always love a good piece of art, whether it's photography, a painting, or drawing, and also any craftsmanship, whether it's It's wood, leather. It gets me excited. At some point I was, I played squash. I was obsessed with lighthouses when I used to live in New England and Boston. I have a healthy like to it now, but not as such. My wife is in HR, people and culture, if you're more into that space now. She also appreciates art and we both have a 7-year-old boy. I always like to ask what people are reading these days and always like a good recommendation. The one that I just finished that's more of a business is The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. It's a really good book around organizational health, team health, team, you know, structures and benefits and all of that. And then stuff that we do on the side and, you know, readings that we do on the side. I like Man's Search for Meaning. It's a really good book around kind of, you know, getting folks, how you understand the challenges of life in general. It's heavy reading, but it's a really good reading. Professionally, the things that you would see on a business card or LinkedIn, my background is computer engineering. I've done some development and coding in the past. That was more than 20 years ago. You can tell I'm a bit old. I started my first social venture right after university. We wanted to help folks with our skill set to kind of present and articulate their skills and, you know, their abilities differently. So we started the first Korean entrepreneurship organization out of a public university in Egypt. That was 20 years ago to cater to the STEM grads. Help them with essential skills, what we used to call soft skills in the past, and all of that. I've been working with founders around startups and scale-ups for the past 15 years. I've run founder support programs at multiple organizations, Endeavor, OCAD University here in Toronto, and most recently, Communitech for the past 3+ years. I led teams consisting of less than a handful of team members, we were in the same place, and I've led teams that are more than 250, 270 people that were distributed all across Ontario, as you would obviously imagine during the pandemic. I consider myself an advocate for, especially the founders from diverse backgrounds and mission-driven startups and scale-ups. If you're familiar with the framework, the working geniuses, I like to share that so you can get insights into kind of my work modes. I excel at wonder and enablement, the ideation, the support piece of it. And some of my frustrations comes from trying to galvanize and procure and rally the folks around that idea. And sometimes it's the tenacity, the last bit that kind of sometimes get me. And my work, as I mentioned earlier, now kind of centers around using data and leveraging data to kind of, you know, showcase operational excellence opportunities and that in turn kind of, you know, drive performance and growth across organizations. I think that was more than enough about me. We'll get into a bit of history now. And apologies, I see lots of questions. I promise we'll get to them at the end and maybe my colleagues at the Founder Institute could help me if there are, you know, question or two or there's something burning that I need to stop and answer, but I'll go on with this and we'll come back to the questions. Without going into lots of details, OKRs is an OKR framework, Objective and Key Results. Apologies if I haven't spelled out the acronym at the beginning. Sometimes you live in the thing, you don't realize most people have no idea what you're talking about. We have tons of acronyms in our space. It's not new. The roots of it goes back at least 7 years. Peter Drucker kind of mentioned management by objective in some of his early books. He's considered, you know, one of the authorities on management and business management. Andrew Grove, who was kind of, you know, one of the people who invested early at Intel, and sorry, he was one of the folks that worked at Intel, adopted that and kind of, you know, based the OKR on the management by objective. And the idea is basically to have goals and you try to achieve them and you try to measure how close you're getting to that. It really started gaining some ground and popularity when John Doerr, who was Andrew's colleague at Intel, he invested in Google in the early days and he brought OKR to Google. And then fast forward 10 years, Google was actually kind of, you know, sharing that with everyone. They had videos about it. They would talk about how it revolutionized the business. It kind of made them who they are right now. And now tons of companies around the world, different scales of different capabilities, adopt OKRs. There are multiple, lots of tools, and we'll share some of them at the end that helps you start, excel, improve. And even kind of get very specific results and outcomes from it now. So again, the summary is not new, built on lots of basics from early on. And again, we got to OKR from management by objective. We're using SMART objectives when we're talking about objectives. I mean, the goals has to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, all of that for it to be helpful. Then we use some elements of KPIs, key performance indicators. Well, one, some of your goals could be to improve on a certain KPI that you have, whether it's a revenue target or whether it's, you know, engagement metric or something like that. So things started to kind of, you know, come together under OKR. And obviously you could use OKR for balanced scorecards. Again, that was that was a framework that's been used mostly by top management boards with leadership to kind of see what we're doing and maybe 4 key quadrants and things like that. So this is really how it all evolved. But I hope that was enough history to tell you that again, OKR is not a fad. It's not a new thing. It is built on other frameworks. It's kind of the evolution of the goal setting framework, but What is really OKR? Let's talk about that for a second. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, as I mentioned. And again, it makes you think about it only has two elements, but actually the key— this is when namings are not as good in our work. Actually, its main elements are three. You have the objectives, the results, but also the initiatives. This is where all the planning and the actual work is being done to deliver, to get to the results and to deliver on the objectives. The objectives tells you where you want to go, whether it's building something new or innovating, you know, in an industry or in a space, and sometimes it could be improving on or fixing something that you already have. And the results help you kind of, you know, measure where the progress towards that objective, measure where you are now on your journey to kind of achieve that objective. And the initiatives, again, as I mentioned, is everything that you do, whether it's planning, work pieces, teamwork, everything to achieve that results and get closer to your objectives. How does it fit within the traditional mission, vision, strategy, you know, all these things that you hear about? So obviously up top we have the vision. Why does this company exist? What do we want to do really? And this becomes the mission, the approach that we take, whether it's, you know, we exist in this space because we felt consumer in a certain industry need the better solution to something, something, right? And then the mission is the approach. How are we actually doing that? And the strategy is that How can we execute on that promise? How can we get things to be actionable and fulfill that mission for a startup or for a new chapter of scale-up? Then to operationalize and execute on that strategy, you need to broke it down, you need to break it down to objectives. Okay, to get to this strategy, I have multiple objectives, one for the sales team, one for the product team, or sometimes even if we're still a small founding team, Maybe one for the individual contributor, for individual team members on that team to kind of get us closer to that strategy and— sorry, get us closer to achieving that, deliver on the strategy and get us closer to delivering on our mission and vision. And as I mentioned, the results are just major points and, you know, along the way that specify the objective that you want to, or the goal that you want to hit to get there. So again, objectives are most of the time qualitative statements. I want to be, we want to be the best company in a certain space or delivering a certain product. It's usually not a quantitative space. It is aspirational. It is sometimes what we want to improve or what we want to create. The results, when the kind of, you know, rubber meets the road, it has to be specific, it has to be quantitative, it has to be measurable. And again, this is how you measure how you're close or how you're progressing towards that goal. The template that we have is that the success of an objective is actually measured by the progress made on the key results. And this is how sometimes how you would test if you put down a good OKR treats this way. And I want to give you some examples after some, you know, that kind of theoretical part about it. So let's take a product or a customer discovery example. Early stage, we're all focused on the product, right? We want to research early stage customer expectation and, you know, so we can improve on the areas that matter. We really want to understand what our customers want at that stage. So what do we need to do? We commit to X number of interviews. We commit to X number of summarizing learnings from the interviews. I've used that exact OKR very recently on a product that we're working on. And then we commit to analyzing these learnings to come up with the top 3 areas that we start working on in terms of benefits and features and things like that. So that's an example of a product or early stage of customer discovery. Let's look at the revenue objective. For example, you want to expand the portfolio or expand the pipeline and drive revenue growth. Again, aspirational, not quantifiable, but it tells you a direction where you want to go. Then we can distill it down to, okay, how many new clients do I need? How many, you know, how much revenue do I need to increase from existing or from new clients, right? What about satisfaction or engagement? How can we measure that? What percentages are we targeting? And again, if we measure on all these 3 dimensions, which are the key results, and you can say 19 out of the 20 or 4 out of percent of the 15, then it gets you that, okay, given all of these inputs, you're 73% or 3/4 away on your on your kind of track to hit that objective. I just wanted to give you a similar example on an area that's not too far from what we just talked. So someone is looking again at maximizing revenue from current customers. So very similar objectives to what we just had before, but the way— apologies— but the way they articulate their key results tell you that things can be measured differently. And this is where key results are important, is that we could have similar objectives but we're looking at it differently, or more— we're measuring progress differently depending on the objective. So again, in the previous examples we focused on revenue from existing or number of new clients. Now we're focusing on subscription, raising prices for example on a certain product, or retention rate instead of engagement. Or, you know, again, another engagement, talking to existing customers, 40% of them, to know more and what we could offer better. So again, same objectives, different key results, and they're all aligned. It's actually how you try to measure it. Some of our folks that are into the marketing and social and then sides of things, you could look at social media engagement, for example, across channels to try to Maybe shore up some resources or try to decide on where to invest your time and energy, for example, on the challenges. So the click-through rates, the LinkedIn posts, webinars, for example, things like that. So you could measure things, the concrete steps to get you to a goal that is a bit, you know, that is aspirational or that's unquantifiable, like we want to increase our presence on social media. We can come up with, you know, clear steps or clear measures of progress. I'll tell you more about the benefits of a framework now that we've kind of went through what are some of the basics, what is an objective, what's a KR, what are some of the characteristics of it. But if you're trying to work with the team or work within your organization on getting folks to appreciate the, you know, the benefits of having a goal-setting framework like OGR, why is it the go-to framework? Why is it important? When with new framework, you're creating more results-oriented and data-driven management style. You want people to be informed. You want their decision-making to be based on facts and evidence, not gut feelings, and not very output-focused and on activities that we're trying to do. So you stay focused on what's important. You agree on what objectives you want to achieve this quarter or this year and how you would measure it. You actually connect and align across the company or across the team on what is important to you. So again, we talked about similar— sorry, different objectives but measured— similar objectives but different— measured differently. Apologies. So when you agree on a way to measure success towards that, this is alignment. This is connection across the different teams. You want to track for accountability and transparency. Some of the most successful implementations that I've seen in OKR were Actually, the tracking is available to everyone on the team, available to everyone in the organization so that you can easily see what we're doing on sales, what we're doing in operation, on product, even our shared services. So I encourage you to, you know, if you think about that, to have it as transparent as possible and you actually look for it to be also a measure of accountability. And at the end, doing all of that, will have to drive growth and performance because you're getting more actionable, you're getting more, you know, results-oriented, you're getting more data-driven with your approaches. One of the— again, framework is not a prescription, it's not a very restrictive set of rules, so people can take different approaches. And one of the One of the areas that I get asked about a lot, and I see in the work that we do, is should I go with cascading or aligning OKRs? And we'll speak about that in a second. So cascading OKRs basically is that as a company or as, you know, founding team will set on an objective and we'll try to break it down to key results. And then let's say a product team will take one of the key results and that becomes their objective. And then they will break it down further to another key results. And it goes on and on depending on how steep is, you know, the hierarchy or the team and how wide is the organization. So again, basically the higher levels results becomes your objective and you keep breaking it down and cascading it down. That really works better for more established organizations with more resources that are very set on this strategy. It's been tested, it works, and I'll tell you more about that in a bit. I'll tell you first about the problem with it. Again, very top-down style, and in terms of execution, it's also very Waterfall, again, to mimic the development practice that we have. It assumes the strategy is perfect or near perfect, or the company or the organization is very established that it has been tried and tested this in the past, and that basically we should all align or, sorry, should all be cascading or working on our piece that's related to that objective. It's difficult to maintain and it gets expensive because, you know, In order to answer a first question, you have to go all the way down to see, you know, what the PR team is working on EU influencers, for example, to answer that question, what we're doing on launching European markets or different markets, for example. So again, speaks about the resources that is needed and the effort that's put in it. I do not recommend cascading for early stage. It works better as you mature as an organization and work in a more established framework. More people are familiar, more people are using the framework to set goals and kind of measure progress. And again, apologies, I missed the last one. It leaves some teams on the sidelines. So, okay, we keep cascading and breaking it down, but it's not— It doesn't assure that every team will be involved or bought into achieving that objective. And I'll give you an example why. A company objective might not be only delivered by its sales and marketing, for example, or product and, you know, business development teams. What about the shared services teams? What about, you know, the tech team, the finance, like as big as your organization can get, it could leave some folks on the sidelines. Aligning OKRs, again, very similar, but I'll tell you the big difference is that we have the same objective as a company. We want to launch our offer in, or launch our product in European market. It assumes you've been based in North America or somewhere else. And again, the examples, the example talks about, you know, okay, we'll talk about sales from Europe, but also coverage or marketing or PR efforts or social presence in Europe. But really the objective is not very, it's not the same. So I'll give you an example. Sales in this example has decided to take on the key results that 30% of new sales should come from Europe, and that became their objective. And then they defined new results. They wanted to see more salespeople in the space, more sales qualified leads from that market, right? But in the PR or the market, I don't know why they call it PR, and the marketing team, for example, decided to go a different route. It didn't take the 50% as a goal, it wanted to have incredible brand recognition. Again, aspirational, talks about the vision or, you know, an objective that's not measurable. And we, they said, okay, to do that, we want to secure press releases or articles, and then we want to increase our influencers or the social presence there. What about some of the support teams? For example, the folks that are working on documentation or working on manual, they're aligning to the company objective but in a different way. They wanted to make sure that our help docs or manuals are actually catered to the European market, talk about different languages, different culture and locale and things like that. And again, finance, if that's, you know, a product that you'll be selling, what about payments and what about, you know, purchase order and things like that and set it up in a way to work for different markets or for a different industry to where you're working on. So again, aligning works better when it's really— when the teams are connecting to the main objective. They're aligning the team level objective to the company level, but they also work on their own. They believe that there are other goals or other things that they need to achieve to align with the main objective other than just the immediate results. And that's here, it says, you know, we're talking about in the case of cascading, everything connects up, you know, one level up to the other, up to the other, up to the, you know, the highest one. But aligning basically means that we're respecting the main objective, we're aligning with the main objective, but the teams are free and actually flexible to have their own goals. They are the knowledgeable folks, so the product could look into, you know, product ops team could look into having manuals or, you know, offerings in another languages or locales things. So they might start to come up with their objective to support that, to align with that, but it's not exactly the same. And I'm sure we'll get to some questions around that. It's a subtle difference, but it actually helps. It gives you a sense of scale to the, you know, this example to where you could use that. It also, you know, includes all the team when you go about aligning objectives, or it includes all the members, especially at an early stage in a founding team when you talk about aligning objectives. And maybe we'll switch now to how to write a good OKR, an objective and the results. And there are tools and software that helps you with that, but I'll just briefly give an overview of the basics. So we talked about the objective. What is it that we want to improve or what is it that we want to build? There are new objectives for new builds and there are objectives for fixes and improvements, as you would imagine. And why is it important to us now, to us as a team or to us as a company or a startup? Or a founding team. And then the results are— basically answers the question, how do we know if we're improving and what are we actually measuring on an ongoing basis? And the idea is that I've shared that kind of template in the past is that you could swap the objective and the key results here and be able to say, we will launch this product in the European market as measured by XYZ. You have X sales from Europe or you have X, you know, presence or X new features that are catering to that market or that new industry. So you could test it, you could articulate it this way. And one of the things that is helpful is that, again, looking at maybe bigger or more mature organizations is that the objectives are usually set as a high level, as a company level, as a corporate level. And then you get the teams to decide or their own team level, and then their key results. So usually the company or the corporates, they don't have results of their own. They work with the team-level objectives and their results as an indication of measure. So I'll give you an example that we use at Comunitac. We work on dimensions or priorities that are capital, talent, you know, a community of tech or community of entrepreneurs. These are our new, our main pillars. These are objectives. We have an objective to do in every one of these areas, but the measuring, the results that we measure, it's actually distilled down in every team. So the marketing does their part, the data does their part, the operation, the founder services, finance, all of that. And this is healthy so that you're not bogged down with too many layers and too many redundancies. So again, a company should be high-level objective, an improvement area or in a build area that different teams or different individuals on the same team can contribute to. It's not a task that someone can do, and it's not the daily work or not a project that we kind of can plan and achieve. It should be broad enough that you can brainstorm around it, you can plan your work around it, yet somehow specific enough to provide some direction for the quarter you're setting it in. So again, when we say we want to provide a superior experience for our founders in the Waterloo-Toronto corridor, for example, that's one of our objectives. Then we get into the details. What does experience mean? What does engagement mean? What is the delivery on that promise should, should like? So it is aspirational, but we can get into the specifics as well and we can break it down into things that we get quarterly. And then that's the, that's the company, the corporate one. When we look at team objectives, you want to make sure that they're aligned with that. It's not exactly the same. It's aligned as in sales has their part, product development has their part, marketing has their part finance. And again, I'm using teams in more established organizations as an example. But again, it could very much be a small founding team at an early stage startups and every individual kind of, you know, works as a team on their own or, you know, 2 or 3 small group can be a team on their own. So you could look at it this way. So you want to be aligned. But it's not exactly the same. So again, gives us some flexibility and freedom because we know as a team what we're working on. And again, gets us some insights into testing out the strategy and testing out winning moves that we could try here and there. Objectives are not projects, are not initiatives, are not work. It's actually what we want to achieve. What's the outcome of all the work or all the projects that we want to do in a certain area in a certain quarter. When a team kind of gets together to work on their OKRs, they want to— the team should be responsible for writing together their OKRs. And there are sessions and there are tools and templates and figures to help them with that. But ideally, the big questions that you want to be answering is, you know, how do we drive, you know, success or how do we drive the company's success forward from within our role? What's our involvement in that? How can we create or innovate or fix something or improve something for that, for it to be successful, right? What are some of the challenges or barriers that are stopping us? Maybe One of our objectives is to break one of them or to overcome one of them, for example. So these are usually the kind of overarching questions that you ask. What is my role in the company success or in the startup success at that stage? What can we build that new or can we innovate existing? And then again, sometimes we fall back, okay, if everything we have is good and we just need to move forward and faster and better, then what's actually stopping us? What can we do about some of the challenges? I just wanted to give you, because we talked about corporate and team or company and team level and an example of aligned goals. I think we've seen another example, but again, you could look at the company, improve customer retention by making more product more sticky, for example, especially in an early stage. Sales has a role around engagement, early engagement with customers. Product has a role when it comes to improving onboarding, for example. And marketing has a role, is that you could target and improve marketing qualified leads, for example, for customers that are staying longer and they target them and kind of aim for that better. So again, not the same objective, but they're more more aligned, they work together to achieve a company goal, and every one of them would have their results. Now we'll go briefly to the key results piece. So what is a key result? We talked about an objective. We want to build our reputation as an industry-leading, you know, software provider, a SaaS, you know, a productivity tool, something like that. A good OKRs to look at it would be, okay, you're talking about reputation, you're trying to measure reputation. How many, what percentage attend your events up until the end? Not just how many events you do, which would be an activity, or how many attendees, but then how many attendees will continue or complete that. For example, you want to drive unique viewers to a website or a landing page. Again, not just build a landing page or, you know, market it or something, or measure visitors. You want unique results. So if you can see a pattern, it's always trying to measure an outcome, not just an activity that we do or an immediate output to it. So not just event, not content, or again, you know, As in the last example, not just follow-up with participant, but what do we actually do with that follow-up? Is that you want to increase participation rate, you want to increase the re-invites from one event to the other, for example. When you're writing them, you want something that's measurable. Sometimes it's a delta, it's— you're measuring a change, a value change in a KPI, for it from, from a number to a number, from a percentage of a revenue figure, a percentage indicating how close you're getting to achieving that. Ideally, you want to look at 3 to 5, and it's perfectly fine to have 1 or 2 or 3. Again, we'll talk about how many around each key results and objectives you should have, but the rule of thumb is that you never pass 5 because it gets, it gets, uh, gets difficult to maintain. It's— you're spread, you know, within across the things that you're trying to measure. And I know I'm repeating myself a lot, but really, the results are not activities, they're not projects, not work that you do. It's actually the outcomes of that. Very quickly, if you look at the comparison as we would do when we're buying a new device, you want the objectives to be aligned, corporate to teams, initiatives and key results will not always be aligned. Some won't be self-sustained and maintained within a certain group or a certain team, for example. You want the results to be ambitious. So if you think you can do 5, put 7 as a measure of progress or measure of success. And then the key is we always— there is a rule. If you keep hitting 10% or, you know, you're measuring key results every quarter or every month and it's always 100 or 80 or 110, you're not setting the ambitious enough. Again, if you're measuring right and it's always 30% and 50%, maybe there's an alignment and there's tweaking needs to be done, but you don't want to be always kind of achieving. You want to be pushing yourself a little bit further for it to work. Objectives gives you direction and then key results works on the details of execution in that direction. The objective and results are high impact. Again, as in they're not immediate, They're not business as usual. They're not the day-to-day activities. Objectives are aspirational. We talked about that. Key results is the measurable piece. Initiatives are to be measurable. Whether when we're talking about results, you're measuring outcomes. When you talk about initiatives, we're measuring the outputs from the work that you're doing. We shouldn't measure an objective. Objective actually should be our statement where we want to go. You want to go. And the SMART thing: Specific, Time-bound, Relatable, Understandable. I want to focus on the last two for a second. When you're setting an objective for a team or for a company, objective has to be within a circle of influence. You might not have control around everything that you do to achieve it or everything that you get, you know, And I mean total control, like 100%, but it has to be within your influence, your team, your immediate partners, your cross-functional teams that you work with, but it doesn't have to be within your absolute control because again, we talked about aligning multiple goals and multiple sub-goals to achieve together a certain objective or a certain goal. Key results, obviously within your sphere of or circle of influence and same as initiatives. But what stays within control is the initiatives or the work itself that needs to be done to get us closer to that objective, to kind of, you know, progress on the results that has to be within your control. So if you lead product development, it has to be about the product. If you lead marketing, it has to be marketing. And then when we collaborate along with others on kind of the next level objective. I'm gonna skip some of the examples because we've shared some examples and I have some resources to share more, just to be respectful of your time. I want to get to some of the common mistakes you want to avoid. And some of the absolute basic ones, think of it as your checklist. You want to start Always start by defining an objective for the quarter, not for 6 months, not for a year, not for anything that's longer than that. Because again, it gets diluted, it becomes vague, measure of success doesn't become really, you know, as close to reality as possible. So company can set something for a year, can set an annual objective, especially on some of the big targets, the big rocks as we used to say them, launching in a new market or launching another iteration or another product or something like that. But when it comes to specific teams, quarter is the key. It's good enough time span to do, to start to plan, to do retrospective, all of that. 3 to 5 Key Results per Objective. It's perfectly fine to have 1 or 2 or 3. It depends on the work that you want to achieve, to do, or to get closer to that objective. It depends on the resources and the size of the team that you have. But even if you have 100 people, do not measure more than 5 things. You want them ambitious but not impossible. We touched on that in the past. Results are not activities or not projects. They are the outcomes from the activities or from the work that you do. And again, we talked about time balance. Usually it's, it could be even within the quarter. Quarter, you could talk about, you know, 6 weeks, 8 weeks, if it's something that can, you know, mean be more specific. And you have ideas, you plan initiative and work to achieve it. If you look at key results and there are no work associated with it, there are no plans and no initiatives to it, it's not a good OKR. It's not actionable OKR. It's not something that you'll be able to measure. And again, The team's actually action should have a clear impact on the results and on the objective of this quarter. There has to be alignment with what the team, what the company is working on, and the goals that you set. If we keep catering to a lot of random requests that we get bombarded by and we're not aligning to the actual work that we planned for, then sometimes it's not really a failure or the shortcoming of the framework, it's more of around, mode of work or mode of execution itself. I— sorry, I didn't respect, you know, the order here for a second, but I'll go back to the last one, which I want to spend some more about. The KPIs— key performance indicators are not results. A key performance indicator is a figure, percentage, a number, something that you keep track sometimes day to day. Sometimes you have them on dashboard, that you look at them weekly with the team or monthly or something, and you want to see improvement. One of your results, one of your objectives is to make an improvement, to make an impact on one of the KPIs. But objectives or results are not the same as OKRs— sorry, KPIs. Again, we mentioned where OKRs stands in relation to strategy, for example, You do the work, you achieve towards the mission and vision, you define and measure the progress, you know, by OKRs, and it gets you closer to delivering on your ultimate goal or the strategy that kind of, you know, deliver on your mission. KPIs are different. It maintains business as usual. It gives you an insight into how are we doing. And again, it can stack up, it can roll up to, you know, feed or inform the strategy, but it doesn't usually take care of new direction. It doesn't take care of new goals. It's really focused on the business as usual. Any advancement, any big fixes will have to go through a goal setting or, you know, an initiative setting. And that example I like quite a lot. It always tells you the KPI is your car dashboard, tells you about, you know, the fuel, all the pressure, all of that internally, your engine, your team, your health, resources, all of that. But the OKRs are more like, you know, the signposts. It tells you how are you close to that, you know, location. Are you, you know, 1, 2, or 3 closer to that goal that you have towards the end? It's a bit external. It's a bit aspirational. You're driving towards it. You don't have a ton of control, go over it, but this is how you measure. Again, I attribute lots of and recognize lots of resources from Purdue and Wikidata. I'll give you some more resources on it. Again, there are lots of open, accessible, public content out there to help you set a proper, you know, OKR framework, but these are the ones that I wanted to share. Very quickly on the process itself, just mindful of time. Again, usually we talked about a quarter, and if you distill a quarter right before the end, you want to close the previous one, get some learning eventually. I mean, if it's the first quarter, you're talking this as a team, as a management team, as leadership, you get together and you want to define what it is for the quarter. But if it's a recurring one, usually the last one, is more of retrospective, a documentation of the learnings, what we've done, how are we doing, what do we need to extend in the next quarter, what do we need to pivot on, things like that. And then the first one, first week of the quarter, you close all the OKRs achieved, dropped, missed, things like that. And then throughout the quarter, you want to monitor, you want to track, you want to intervene if there are things that you know, needs to happen. But if we look within the quarter with more kind of zoomed-in approach, you want to set and align early on. You could do weekly. Some larger organizations, they do monthly, but the teams do weekly. So again, depending on what stage, what size of an organization you have, sometimes you have a combination of both where the smaller teams have weekly check-ins where they are, and then they report to a leadership team or, you know, other kind of leadership group on a monthly basis. But then everyone across the org needs to know at least once a quarter where we are. This is when we analyze our performance, this is when we share our learnings from the past, and then kind of set and plan for the next. And again, most of the tools will have something like like this. This is from week done. You have an objective, you've broken down to results, you're measuring the results with a number of percentages, you know, anything. And then you're measuring, you're working on initiatives to get you to achieve these results. And you're kind of breaking down the plans by individual, by team, right? And you want to talk about what's important this week, what is important that month, what's within this quarter and then keep measuring then and it then rolls up. So at the end of the quarter, you know, across let's say 3 or 5 objectives, you say, this is how we've done in a very objective, you know, way. Now I want to share some resources with you and I believe we'll share these slides so you'll have all these active links. There are guides step by step. So I've given you some summaries But there are complete guides, there are some examples, there are websites that are dedicated to templates for writing goals and objectives. OKR examples, I believe it's by Weekdone or Perdoo. Dability also have some templates. Most of the major work collaboration tools, Notion, Miro, all of these, they have templates for OKRs, PowerPoints, Google Sheets, all of that. And there are systems if you want to get sophisticated and you want to buy in. And I believe most of them, like we've done in Purdue, I believe they're free for if you're less than maybe 3 or 5 users. We use Asana, for example, and it gets sophisticated as you go with the tiers. So again, multiple resources, multiple systems. But if you want to focus on, and again, video and article, like different modalities so that you share the message across different teams. But some of the essentials, one that you— I want to share with you is a template, a planning template to come up with the actual OKR or the actual objective and results and plan the work, uh, respecting, you know, resources, respecting hours, respecting impact and revenue. Or something else, for example, if you're not, if you're pre-revenue. So that comes OKR. And then again, you have to have a template for this and you have to have a template, could be even a spreadsheet to put your key results in a place aligned to your objective and be able to measure it per quarter. So if you don't want to use any of this or you're not at a stage to go like full implementation mode on it, at least use some template to help you with the planning and use the template to keep track of it. And again, I mentioned in this, there are lots of resources here to help you with this, including some links to the templates. There are even— remember the readable part? I will objective measured by— there are tools, and I believe they're free on them to help you make sure that OKR is good, objective is good, key results good, it's readable. Measurable if it's a key result and it gives you a score like good, needs improvement, something like that. I use it, I use the examples, so don't shy away, use the tools. And again, thank you very much. I think, I hope it was helpful to kind of go through this. Apologies if I went over time and I'm happy to take some questions or answer some questions now.

Emil, thank you so much. I hope you can see the emojis on your screen. The folks obviously loved it.

I started seeing them right now. Thank you.

Yeah, a ton of applause, a ton of hearts. Yeah, thank you so much for that very, very in-depth presentation. And folks, don't worry, we will send you the presentation along with the recording of the video in 48 hours. I do want to be very mindful careful of the time here because we're right about to end, so I'm just going to take a question or two, right? Uh, to start things off, um, this isn't a question we got in the, in our question panel, but generally is something that's been discussed in the chat. Uh, assume that I am a solo founder, my goal now is to look for a co-founder, you know, do customer research. Is it too early for me to really be thinking about OKRs and frameworks, or should I, you know, just be really in the trenches and focusing on, um, you know, the bare minimum basics?

It's an excellent question, and, and again, the answer is easy. It's never too early, even if it's something as finding a co-founder. That could be an objective. The idea is that you don't want— it's a mindset. You don't want to always think about finding an objective. You want to set some steps that are actionable that you can measure so that if you, if you don't find a co-founder in a term or a timeframe that you set for yourself or for the company or the team, at least you see for yourself as a founder how close you are to getting that. So you can set number of, you know, events, community events that you get to, X number of co-founders potential that you talk to. You know, even set yourself a list of items that you want to discuss with future candidates that, you know, you want to do and do that validation for you. So again, I wouldn't recommend going and buying an OKR or like subscribing to an OKR platform at that stage, but as a mindset, as a framework, again, that's the beauty of it. It's not that restrictive. You can even have the basics, just jot down in a note on your phone, like, this is my objective, finding a co-founder in this place or with that experience in a certain timeframe, and maybe a couple of metrics underneath, a couple of results to tell you how close you are from that. And again, you can get as sophisticated as in the journey or as you grow from there. But again, I wanna stress, it's never too early. It's a mindset, it's a framework. You want to be conscious, you want to be mindful about the goals and achieving them.

Awesome. Yeah. And just to follow up on that, how do I determine if my goal is significant enough to be an objective, right?

Excellent. Yeah. So again, it's a muscle that you have to train. Again, with these things, most of the guides will tell you everything will need sometimes, and they always come in 18. Could be 18 weeks, 18 months, 18, you know, something like that. You do the best, you do your best on trying to abide by the practice. Let's say objective is aspirational, uh, something that I can achieve or measure at least in a quarter, right? So that I'm not wasting 6 months or 9 months without or not being able to know if I will ever achieve that or if this is too small or too, you know, far-fetched or something like that. So you really put a few of these to test. And again, you want something that is inspirational but achievable. It's not prohibitive and time-bound so that you give yourself a test time to see how close. And again, if it happened, great, we will measure it. If not, then at least we learn from it and we set something different complete the next cycle. But I think you could use some of the tips that we shared today. And if I would pick just the basics, is that timebox it and be as aspirational but also respectful of your resources and effort and time.

Awesome, thank you so much for that answer. So what I want to do is I want to bring this question up on stage because I feel like it's pretty interesting, and this might speak to maybe like the benefits of the OKR framework. So Shivani here asks, for my business, very early stage, uh, I am using user stories and tasks. I've created an organization using Azure DevOps. Should I switch to OKRs? Are they complementary to user stories? And just to kind of add to this question, a ton of our, um, uh, audience, they've been wondering, can they maybe combine frameworks? Does that make sense to you?

Absolutely, absolutely. Great question, Giovanni. Again, I would not recommend switching to— again, OKR is a framework for goal settings. It is not a tool to understand your customers, your, you know, users, user journeys, user personas, or user stories. Are very good at that. You have the canvases, you have the models. What OKR can do for you is measure the progress on that intimate understanding or measure the progress on achieving that intimate, you know, understanding of your customer or your user so that you can set, you can break down your goals. Again, I'll do interviews, I'll get X personas developed within a certain timeframe. So definitely complement but not replace. And again, there are things that are still would be timeless, the, the, the, the canvases, you know, the business model canvas, all of that, and different audience will, you know, talking to investor, they would, they might not want to see your OKRs, but they will be very, you know, impressed that you're thinking about goal setting and measuring at an early stage, but you might want to show them a user persona or a story in a deck or something like that. So it's all complementary, and again, you know, you know your resources, you know your time, you know your team, so be mindful of not overburdening or over-indexing. That's why, again, Daniel, first question, like if you're in early stage, don't go full force, 100, you know, like don't subscribe and set up an organizational framework and all of that, but at least start thinking about the framework from that. What is my goal? How am I getting closer to it? Same with the user stories example.

Awesome. There you have it, folks. So start thinking about it even if you're not fully implementing it. Emmet, thank you so much for taking out the time to join us. I just kind of want to remind you we're kind of past the hour mark. So yeah, Emmet, thank you so much.

Thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed this. I hope it was helpful. And again, you know, I've seen you sharing— we'll share the slides, we'll share the resources. Processes, I'm more than happy for folks to reach out on LinkedIn, answer some, you know, short, quick questions if I can do that. Thank you.

Awesome. So folks, we'll have Ahmed's LinkedIn shared with you in our follow-up email as well, or you can, you know, head on over to your LinkedIn, look him up. Thank you so much for joining us, and please be mindful, we do have the networking happening right after this. Join the table, talk to a fellow founder, talk to an aspiring startup founder, or maybe the FI team. Uh, so we'll see you in the next one. Have a great day, guys.