OKRs? CFRs? (The Key to Success Building Product!)

[nelsonic]

The slightly longer "subtitle" of this issue/story is:

"How to build a sustainable values-driven open source software product company in 3 months
using a proven system to set company-wide, team & individual goals/tasks ("Objectives"),
track metrics ("Key Results") and help each other to ship great UX that delights users."
"How are we going to encourage Conversations, Feedback and Recognition (CFRs) and
ensure that we celebrate each milestone/win, and share knowledge and "unblock" issues swiftly.

Story 📝

As a "dwyler" I want to know exactly what the goals of the company are
and how my personal objectives relate to achieving those goals
so that I can be focussed on my most important work and help my fellows do the same.

Context (Why?) 💭

First a brief history of @dwyl for anyone who isn't aware (or people reading this in the future!)

History? 🔙

We started @dwyl in Feb 2015 to build an App to help people discover+do what they love.
We made our mission reasonably clear in https://github.com/dwyl/start-here which has been read by a few thousand people even though we haven't released our App yet! ⭐️
(note: we don't see this as an "achievement", it's just an encouraging sign that people are interested)

Founders & Coders Mentoring/Directorship 🤓

Early on we went on a "detour" to help make Founders & Coders a sustainable free+accessible technical training program in London https://www.foundersandcoders.com
(now expanding to other countries) and helped empower hundreds of people with the skills they need to find work or create their own ideas!
(note: we in no way take "credit" for the success of F&C. It's a massive team effort and there are many other people who deserve more "credit" than us. you know who you are! ❤️)

"Mobile Web App Development Agency" 📱

We spent 3 years building products/apps/services for other people as an "agency". That was a good way to help the people on our team(s) gain some real-world dev/UX/PO experience and accumulate some bootstrap capital. Our clients are happy and all the products/projects we built are well-written, documented and maintainable (except where Hapi.js has created a "moving target" with v.17 ... 🙄)

Agency != Product 🆗 |> 🦄

The way we went about our work as an "agency" building web apps is good, as one of our team members recently remarked: "our process is admired by the wider dev community". However, building apps for other people is nothing like what it takes to build a successful software product.

We know this because we've worked for both failed 📉⌛️💀
and mega successful 📈 startups (and read extensively on the subject of technology success/failure) and know exactly what the main symptoms/predictors of both outcomes are.
In the cases that lead to failure there is a lack of clarity/focus/purpose and people lose enthusiasm as the company crumbles from the chaos. Whereas a laser focused company has the leadership, clearly communicated vision/mission/goals that everyone in the team can recite and there is a "team spirit" and sense of urgency to the work, it gets done fast and success is possible; not guaranteed but possible.

Communication Fail...? 📣|> 🔇

Historically we have not been very effective at communicating the overall goal of our organisation/company/community ... this has lead to wasted effort, frustrated/confused people
and a lack of sense of direction, meaning or urgency. 😞

I (Nelson) can hold my hand up and take ownership/responsibility for this failing. ✋
However, I would encourage others to reflect on whether they have made the effort to proactively ask questions when they are confused/stuck or whether they silently procrastinate on their FUD ... ❓

Everything can easily be clarified if people are willing to ask questions. We have a culture that welcomes questions of all kinds and we celebrate the people who ask them because we know that often others are thinking the same thing but have been conditioned by society that "not knowing the [right] answers" is "bad" and to "not look foolish" so they stay quiet ... 😞

We Need to Get Better at Communicating! 💬

We need to get much better at communicating our vision/mission (without sounding "grandiose").
Everyone needs to re-formulate/remix @dwyl's vision/mission into their own words to ensure they understand what we are trying to achieve.

If anyone is not "on board" with the vision/mission or product, that's "OK", not everyone will be.
We just need everyone to be 100% honest with each other on how they feel, and if anyone is not "feeling it" we are happy to help them find work with a different company/org that better matches their values and life goals. We have done this before, no hard feelings, everyone's still friends! Everyone who has moved on from working with @dwyl is doing something they love. To us that is a resounding success. Unlike other most companies who only care about "employees" for as long as they are extracting value from them, we continue caring and everyone is always welcome!
Bottom line: speak up!

We need a 100% foolproof way of formulating+recording our company/individual objectives & key results and helping each other when someone is "stuck" ...
Otherwise our company will crash-and-burn and we will all be dusting off our CV's.

Each person in the @dwyl "core" team is capable of working in a much more focussed way.
We are all able to be more targeted, learn faster, communicate more effectively and deliver better work in less time. If your memory is "foggy" on when you were last mega-effective, that's a sign that something needs to change. Our collective future depends on it.

One Chance 🚀

Not to sound overly dramatic but we only get one shot at this.
We need to ship a product that people love using enough to pay for.

We have a massive head start on other technology entrepreneurs in that we know what problem we want to solve, we have the skills we need to solve it and we have a team of people who can execute.

But we also have a major handicap: we are stuck in "good enough" mode from having PO's who were not demanding enough. We need to shake off the "good enough" mindset and go for gold! 🥇
Everything we do needs to be the best of our ability. (don't worry nobody will be "judged"...! Each person is responsible for determining what their own "personal best" is. Our only "judge" is the "end-user", if people use our product, pay for and share it with others, we know we're doing our best!)

I hear you asking: "How do I know what my personal best is...?"
With that in mind, we need a "system"!
But first a few words on workplace "systems" ...

We Have Been Where You Are Now! 🤔

Both Inês and I have been where you are now. We have worked for small & large companies that either had no "system" or had a token "performance management" and "annual review" system that everybody thought was a pointless "chore" and treated as a "box-ticking exercise".
We know what a bad system looks like and we have spent years searching for a good one.
We feel that the success of the companies using OKRs + CFRs as described in John Doerr's superb book (see below) is worthy of our attention. We feel that Larry Page's endorsement:

"I wish I had this book nineteen years ago when we founded Google"

... is enough of a reason to try the system.

Proposal (What?)💡

We propose the adoption of the OKR+CFR system used by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify, etc ...
To maximise our chance of success while building our software product.

OKRs? 🎯+ 📊

This management-speak sounding initialisation stands for "Objectives & Key Results".
In a nutshell: OKRs are a way of defining company-wide (and individual/personal) goals (Objectives) that directly and clearly relate to the company's mission and the corresponding metrics (Key Results) that keep everyone accountable and "on track" (or help each other to get "unstuck"!)

Don't worry, I too was "sceptical" that a system this simple (sounding) could work ...
But after reading the book I'm convinced that not only is it a good <option>, it's our best one!

CFRs 💬 + 👍/ 👎 + ❤️/🎉

CFRs (Conversations, Feedback and Recognition) is a short-hand for how to approach humanising the system, encourage teamwork, communication (even "hard truths) and celebrate the efforts/success of each person in the team!

Todo (How?) ✅

• Everyone in the company should read "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr https://www.amazon.com/Measure-What-Matters-Google-Foundation/dp/0525536221
  For a taste, watch: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/video/john-doerr-on-okrs-and-measuring-what-matters/

@dwyl will pay for your personal copy of the book where you can make notes.
Just tell us where you would like us to ship it! (or if you prefer to read on eBook, let us know)

• Once you have read the book, please leave a comment below so we can proceed to setting up the "system" with everyone giving their input (even/especially anyone who is sceptical).

We cannot move forward with this until/unless everyone is on board with this.
We must be fanatically disciplined/focussed on what we are doing in the next few months/years.
We cannot afford to miss sprint milestones/deadlines or be "confused" as to what we each of us needs to do. If you are unsure of anything open a question/issue immediately.

• If you have questions/reservations about having a "formal" goal setting, progress tracking and feedback giving mechanism, please voice them either as comments below (or if you prefer to do it "privately", speak to @iteles or @nelsonic)

Related to #145 How Can We Make @dwyl the Best Company to work for?

[ghost]

I really liked “the taste” of “Measure What Measures”, this is very serious and very straightforward.. the f.a.c.t.s (focus alignment commitment tracking and stretching) are every day with you and Inês 🚀
I’m keen on adopting this system.

[iteles]

@nelsonic Thank you for making the time to open this issue which I should have opened a long time ago! I'm excited about where we're headed, it's been a long time coming.

If anyone is not "on board" with the vision/mission or product, that's "OK", not everyone will be.
We just need everyone to be 100% honest with each other on how they feel...

This in particular hit home for me, I think this is where it starts. We need to be unafraid of having the tough conversations (which I thought I did well, but actually have been avoiding them my whole life and pretending with 'difficult' rather than the conversations that matter) and being viscerally honest with each other.

I recently read Radical Focus and found it a really understandable beginner-level OKR book as well (it wasn't at all what I was expecting from the book) so I'll dig up my copy and provide some notes to complement everyone's comments on Measure What Matters.

[SimonLab]

Just finished the first read of "Measures what matters".
The main idea of OKR in itself is quiet simple (create objectives, the what, and key results, the how, to complete the objectives). The difficulty will be to apply the process to dwyl. We will have some tries/errors and a quick calibration phase. We need also to define the structure of our OKRs (time length: quarters seem to be mostly used in the book example but this seems to be a long period of time for dwyl, where do we write down our OKRs: in Github issues?, what is the description format of our OKR,... ) but I'm keen to start trying OKR and to write down our main objectives for the team.

Some main points and notes I wrote down:

p66: OKR scale: "OKR started with 14, 2 years later the team is 60"
p67: Create 3 to 4 personal objectives
p68: Introduce OKR process step by step instead of the full process in one go
p72: Doing too much too soon will end in pain (too much OKR process)
p83: Key results become obectives when passed down
p85: Make key results time bounded and measurable
p86: Avoid trickle down ojbectives:

• loss of agility
• lack of flexibility
• marginalised contribution
• no horizontal connections

p88: The higher the goal, the higher the performace; Let user set some of their own goal; Create a mixed of top-down and bottom up goals
alignement: team working together to a common goal instead of not knowing what people are doing
p128: "What can you be the best in the world" Jim Collins
p133 BHAG: Big Hairy Audacious Goal, setting big and aspirational goal improve performance
p138: "The gospel of 10x": aggressive goals
p147: "Get uncomfortable excited" by goals
p152: Allow user to make complex thing/action with a UX phenomenally uncomplicated
p160: The most important things need to be done first or they won't be done at all
p203: OKR force people to "think in the macro", ie people are focus on the steps to achieve the main goal
p208: Create better conversations: talk about personal goals -> boost motivation and energy
p244: If all key results are in green (green, yellow, red for a result status) you failed, ie the OKR are not well defined
p245: Ideas are easy, execution is everything
p256: Poorly done/managed OKR are a waste of time. Well done OKR are a motivational management tool
Objectives are the Whats, Key Results are the Hows

My next step is to read again the Google's OKR playbook and the resources (from p255) see how I can apply OKR to my own goals (on paper to start with), however it might be good to start to think how to apply it to dwyl too (might need some help for that).

[nelsonic]

Anyone interested in succeeding with OKRs should read:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law (via: https://thehustle.co/Goodharts-Law )

[rub1e]

Apologies, I've finally ordered the book. This is all very exciting and inspirational! Will report back once I've made my way through it

As an aside, Goodhart's Law reminded me of this gem from Christopher Hitchens's crank younger brother, Peter:

[nelsonic]

OKRs from a development team’s perspective:
https://zafulabs.com/2019/05/24/okrs-from-a-development-teams-perspective/
via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20004127

[nelsonic]

How to Set KPIs and Goals (Adora Cheung YC): https://youtu.be/lL6GdUHIBsM

[nelsonic]

Thoughts on OKRs: https://joeblu.com/blog/2022_05_okrs/
via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31422718