OKRs are dead! Dashboard-driven organizations are the future

I'm not pitching the future of dashboards. I'm pitching the future of organizations.

At my last job, company leadership used Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to run the business.

Here’s what it looked like in practice:

Every quarter, leadership would ask everyone across the company to create personal OKRs, then team OKRs, and division OKRs.

From there, the business would create company-wide OKRs.

And the whole process would devolve into process for process’s sake.

Because there is no accountability.

When updating OKRs every quarter, I would wonder ‘What the f*** is the point of this?’

After a couple quarters, I made it my mission to figure out why our company actually used OKRs in the first place.

I needed to figure out: What problem was the company actually solving with OKRs?

Unfortunately, my typical approach - just asking people - didn’t work.

I couldn’t find anyone inside the company who had a clear justification for why this process existed for our business.

So instead of giving up, I decided to do some more fundamental research into why companies use OKRs (online research and books).

Two patterns emerged:

1. Most companies use OKRs to run their business

2. Most companies suck at using OKRs to run their business

Very few companies are able to: 1) use OKRs, 2) effectively use OKRs, and 3) communicate effectively to the company about using OKRs.

Most companies suck at OKRs - It doesn’t mean that OKRs are bad

Big companies are very effective at one thing: turning great ideas into useless, mundane processes.

At most companies, this is what happens with OKRs.

OKRs become a process added to the quarterly to-do list for hundreds or thousands of employees. No one can explain why they exist, but it’s very clear that they have to be done.

Every.

Single.

Quarter.

Because otherwise, the company would fall apart. And the person tasked with running the OKR process would be out of a job.

(If you can’t tell, I think most companies suck at OKRs)

That being said, if you do a bit of research, you’ll quickly realize…

OKRs are a very powerful concept

They help with:

1. Clearly defining the company strategy

2. Setting goals for employees to stay aligned with the strategy

3. Getting feedback from the organization on the strategy and the goals

4. Moving quickly

John Doerr successfully rolled out the concept of OKRs to massive organizations like Intel and Google. He’s the champion of the OKRs concept.

If you haven’t read his book - Measure What Matters - I highly recommend it.

Here’s a 4 sentence summary of the book from ChatGPT:

"Measure What Matters" by John Doerr is a management book that emphasizes the importance of setting and tracking goals to drive organizational success. Doerr introduces the concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as a framework for effective goal-setting. He shares insights from his experiences working with companies like Intel, Google, and Amazon, highlighting how OKRs have helped them achieve remarkable results. The book provides practical guidance on implementing OKRs, including examples and case studies, and offers valuable advice for leaders and teams on aligning their efforts, fostering accountability, and promoting innovation through goal-driven culture. Ultimately, "Measure What Matters" offers a compelling argument for the power of goal-setting in driving high-performance organizations.

In summary - OKRs allow companies to align on goals, set goals, move fast towards those goals, and create a plan for measuring progress.

OKRs are where strategy meets execution

If you have a company strategy, you need a way of turning the strategy into an actual plan for the organization to execute against over a timeframe (let’s assume quarterly).

OKRs and goal-setting in general are a great way of defining that plan.

That’s great, but it’s 2023…

Goal-setting isn’t enough.

You need accountability.

OKRs are great for setting goals, but awful for measuring progress

The fatal flaw of using OKRs is one thing….

Measurement is an absolute nightmare, so accountability doesn’t exist.

Imagine a company of 100 employees and 10 teams.

If each quarter, the company sets 3 OKRs, each team sets 3 OKRs, and each employee sets 3 OKRs, we’re looking at 333 potentially different ‘key results’ that need to be tracked constantly over the course of the quarter.

Let’s recap:

• The company creates a strategy

• The strategy is codified into company, team, and individual goals

• Everyone aligns on those goals

• The company has NO CLUE how to actually measure progress and hold people accountable towards 333 key results

If you can’t tell by now…

OKRs are great for goal-setting, but awful for creating accountability.

Let’s take a step back and think about the problem here.

Actually tracking metrics on a recurring basis is the tough part…

If that’s the case, what if you could make sure that the goals you set will be tracked in an automated manner?

This is where automated dashboards come into play

Instead of turning a strategy into objective goals, objective goals into key results, and key results into hopes and dreams of accountability, let’s consider a different approach.

Why not start with accountability?

Why not focus on identifying and automatically tracking the objective metrics that represent the company’s goals and business strategy?

What does codifying goals + metrics into dashboards actually look like?

Find the metrics that represent the priorities for the business.

The things that can be automatically tracked.

Organize them into dashboards.

And use the DASHBOARDS to represent your quarterly goals and progress towards those goals.

Ignore everything else.

At Portable, we’re a dashboard-driven organization

Every quarter, we sit in a room and turn our strategy into dashboards.

Those dashboards display objective goals that we can actually measure in an automated fashion.

All.

The.

Time.

We can look at a dashboard everyday and stay on track. (Because it’s a concrete thing).

How do you look at a goal everyday? (That sounds like a distraction to me if it can't be turned into a dashboard).

The only goals we track as a business MUST BE DEFINED in dashboards.

Otherwise, we ignore them.

What does a dashboard-driven organization look like in a practice?

First, you need a forum where the company can convert strategy into dashboards.

For us, we use quarterly team off-sites as the means of recalibrating our business and our dashboards around our company strategy.

We get everyone in a room and we talk about the company priorities for the quarter. Some of this is top-down, some of this is bottoms-up, but the main objective of the off-site is to make sure everyone is aligned on the most important dashboards for the quarter. Those dashboards represent our goals as well as the metrics we will use to measure success.

Next, you need a centralized location where everyone can access your company dashboards. If you’re a data person, at this point, you probably think I’m crazy. There’s no way you can get hundreds or thousands of dashboards into a centralized location that’s easy to access, discover, and understand.

Well… that’s where we differ. I don’t believe companies need hundreds or thousands of dashboards to run their business. They need one single dashboard, exposed to everyone at the company, with tabs for each business unit. The left-most tab outlines the top level goals (and progress against those goals). Every other tab exposes the key goals and progress metrics for a single business unit. Every quarter, you delete the dashboard, remove all the tabs, and start from scratch.

Finally, you need a way of populating the dashboard (and the tabs) with automated data. Again, you probably think I’m crazy. ‘You can’t possibly automate objective metrics for every single goal across the company’.

Honestly, you can.

If your data team isn’t working on this, ‘what the f*** are they doing?’ Working on low-value stuff for one person in the marketing ops department?

Automation doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does need to be there. Otherwise, you’re going to spend all your time trying to track down KPIs instead of executing against them.

Here’s a very simple and cheap playbook:

• Find a visualization tool (they’re not that expensive if you do your research)

• Connect the visualization tool to a warehouse (again, most KPIs don’t need heavy storage or compute and shouldn’t cost you much to process)

• Connect your production databases to the warehouse (or directly to the visualization tool if that’s enough to automate your product metrics)

• Replicate data from your business applications into the data warehouse using an ETL tool like Portable (which supports over 500+ business applications as prebuilt sources)

• For all the metrics you CAN’T sync from a business application directly into your warehouse, create a Google Sheet to track the data, and automatically sync the data from your Google Sheet to your warehouse with your favorite data ingestion tool

At this point, you can automate EVERYTHING. Even the metrics that you would historically track in spreadsheet.

(Because you’re still tracking them in a spreadsheet, but now you are able to automatically expose them in a dashboard to everyone across the company).

A single view into the business creates accountability

By exposing a small number of dashboards that represent company priorities, everyone across the company can see ALL THE IMPORTANT THINGS going on in one place.

• It provides a clear sense of accountability

• It provides visibility into what’s working, what’s not, and where the company is falling behind

• Teams are accountable for exposing their own metrics, keeping the data up-to-date, and explaining to other teams why the metrics look great, or why they’re failing

As the CEO (or leadership team), this approach offers a single view into the business and it allows executives to spend time on the parts of the business that need the most help:

• Sometimes that help is around automating metrics.

• Sometimes that help relates to hiring.

• Sometimes that help involves process improvement.

• Sometimes that help includes spending dollars.

But without a single view into the business, neatly packaged for actual stakeholders to consume, how would executives ever see what’s working and what’s not?

OKRs are dead, start aligning your business around dashboards

OKRs were a great step in the right direction.

They taught us the importance of combining top-down strategy with bottoms-up feedback.

But accountability has to be a first-class citizen.

Without it, the whole concept is just that.

A concept.

Let’s turn concept into reality.

Throw your OKRs out the window.

It's time to become a dashboard-driven organization.