Improving Focus and Alignment by Organizing around OKRs and managing OKR Flow

Today, I wanted to share two quick observations about OKRs.

Too many teams working on each strategic OKR

I encounter many organizations that use OKRs. Too many of them have this crazy matrix where the high-level OKRs — those that aim to achieve the organization’s strategy — map to too many teams/functions in the organization. This creates a need to cascade the OKRs, create sub-OKRs, or other techniques which eventually create a larger and larger distance between the OKRs at the team level and the strategic OKRs. While this at least creates transparency of who’s involved in executing each aspect of the strategy, we can and should do better.

One key thing that unlocks agility and value is to “Organize around Value”. Scrum talks about each team having ONE Product Goal they focus on. SAFe has a specific principle around “Organizing around value”.

If you’re using OKRs One question to ask yourself is what is the relationship between OKRs and teams/teams of teams. If most OKRs require a multitude of teams across the organization/portfolio to achieve them, this will require a lot of coordination.

Try reorganizing into a value stream network/topology/team structure that aligns with your OKRs —…