07 Case Studies Teach You to Write High Quality OK Rs

07 Case Studies - Teach You to Write High-Quality OKRs #

After introducing the writing methods for the Objective (O) and Key Results (KR), I believe you are now able to create a relatively complete OKR. In order to deepen your understanding of the OKR writing method and help you write high-quality OKRs, this section presents multiple complete OKR case studies and provides some comments. By showcasing the advantages and disadvantages of the OKR formulation in these case studies, I believe you can fully master the writing method and evaluation criteria for high-quality OKRs.

From the beginning until now, I have presented many OKR case studies. Let’s take a look at how these OKRs are written based on the knowledge points mentioned in the past two sections, related to the O and KR writing methods.

Case Study 1: Baidu’s Li Yanhong OKRs #

  • O1: Build an unprecedentedly prosperous and powerful Baidu mobile ecosystem
    • KR1: Adhere to a product value perspective that emphasizes safety, inspiration, loyal service, and reduced barriers. Continuously optimize user experience and increase the total time share of Baidu products.
    • KR2: Adhere to a business value perspective that emphasizes eliminating inferior products through superior ones. Achieve revenue growth based on maintaining a good brand reputation and optimizing user experience. Achieve a revenue of * billion, an increase of *%.
    • KR3: The products should have innovation. We should not always be a “me too” company and lag behind in the market.
  • O2: Successfully implement the mainstream AI track and achieve sustainable growth
    • KR1: XIAODU AI enters millions of households with daily interactivity exceeding * billion times.
    • KR2: Develop a path for the scale development of intelligent driving and intelligent transportation to achieve * times revenue growth in both 2019 and 2020.
    • KR3: The cloud and AI2B business should become the leader in at least * trillion-level industries.
  • O3: Enhance Baidu’s organizational capabilities to effectively support the rapid growth of the business and avoid lagging behind in strategy
    • KR1: Successfully implement the OKR system throughout the company, effectively reducing communication and coordination costs, and motivating everyone to strive for higher goals, achieving better performance than KPI management.
    • KR2: Stimulate a sense of ownership in employees from ESTAFF to frontline staff, making them more willing and capable of self-driven management in their respective areas than in 2018.
    • KR3: Establish a reasonable mechanism for the turnover of management personnel and create no less than 2 recognized outstanding leaders in the industry.

Comment: In the OKR case study publicly released by Baidu, due to the sensitivity of business data, the related quantitative data results are not transparent. However, I believe attentive individuals can still identify other issues with Baidu CEO’s OKRs. For example:

  • KR3 of O1 is not quantified at all. It is just a vague description, and it is not clear what innovation it refers to and how to achieve it.
  • KR1 of O2 does not specify the implementation path. However, if you have seen the reality show “Running Man Season 4” in 2020, you would know that Baidu’s AI assistant “Xiaodu” sponsored the show and invited the celebrity Sha Yi to endorse it. Therefore, a good presentation of this KR would be “Xiaodu inviting Sha Yi to endorse and cooperating with the program ‘Running Man’ to increase user recognition and usage, achieving daily interactivity exceeding * billion times.”

In this case study, apart from most of the KRs lacking quantified implementation targets, there are also some well-written Os and KRs. For example:

  • O1 “提升前端研发团队的效能和协作能力” 表明了京东某部门前端研发负责人希望通过 OKR 提高团队的工作效率和协作能力。这个目标适用于技术型 OKR，其关注点是提高团队的技术能力和工作效率。
  • KR1 “通过实施代码审查，减少代码错误率至少10%” 以定量方式度量了团队协作和质量控制方面的进展。
  • KR2 “使用敏捷开发方法，缩短发布新功能的时间至少15%” 在时间维度上衡量了团队的开发速度和迭代能力。
  • KR3 “提供至少3次技术培训，提升团队成员的前端技能” 以培训次数来衡量团队成员的技术能力提升。

这个案例中的 OKR 旨在通过改进团队的技术能力和协作能力来提升整体效能。KR 的设置既包括定量指标又包括 qualitied指标，并以具体的行动来实现目标。这样的 OKR 设定有助于团队明确目标并执行计划，同时也有利于评估目标的完成情况。

  • Objective: Enhancing frontend tool capabilities to continuously improve frontend development efficiency and user experience.

    • Key Result 1: By implementing skeleton screen technology, resolve the issue of long white screen loading in front-end and back-end separation, improving merchant satisfaction to 85 points.

    • Key Result 2: By upgrading the Wot Design mobile component library UI to version 2.0, resolve the inconsistency between plugin pages in H5 and Mini Programs and the overall frontend specifications of Jingmai App in mobile development. This will enhance user experience with Jingmai App and consolidate the team’s mobile component library capabilities.

    • Key Result 3: By practicing Progressive Web Application (PWA) technology, introduce excellent frontend new technologies into business projects to enhance the user experience of the projects and consolidate the team’s PWA practice experience.

(Note: The OKR of this frontend development leader was set in Q2, so the entire OKR should be completed in Q2.)

Comments:

Firstly, let’s take a look at the Objective set by this frontend development team. The keywords used include “capabilities”, “efficiency”, and “user experience”, which correspond to the four types of Objectives I mentioned earlier: revenue, user, efficiency, and capabilities. This makes it a typical value-oriented Objective.

Furthermore, in all the Key Results, it is evident that each Key Result aims to solve user problems in order to improve user experience. This case is highly valuable for setting technical development OKRs. Development professionals often focus too much on feature development and deployment, which can lead to a lack of business awareness and make them feel like mere tools.

All aspects of organizational work need to be focused on creating value for users/customers from a business perspective. This is how organizations can thrive and individuals can perceive that they are creating value. Therefore, when setting OKRs for development professionals, it is not only important to have descriptions of feature deployments but also to examine them from the perspective of users/customers and incorporate the “universal formula” I provided earlier to clearly state how organizational business problems are to be solved.

Another advantage of this OKR is that in the specific implementation method of Key Result 3, it adopts the new PWA frontend technology. Setting challenging Key Results aims to examine the industry and incorporate new technologies and methods into organizational work in order to create breakthrough performance results for the organization.

Of course, a drawback of Key Result 3 is that it does not clearly state the specific user problems being addressed. Similar to Key Result 2, it lacks quantitative metrics to measure the improvement in user experience. The quantification of user experience results for Key Results 2 and 3 can be improved by following the same approach as the improved design of merchant satisfaction in Key Result 1.

Now that we have reviewed the OKRs for development, let’s take a look at an OKR example for an exploratory project.

Example 4: JD Product Management Project OKR #

Objective: Build an industry-leading product operation platform to reduce costs and increase efficiency for merchants.

  • Key Result 1: In mid-August, conduct industry research and competitive analysis, as well as merchant and business unit surveys, to produce research reports and conclusions. Accurately identify pain points in merchant product publishing.

  • Key Result 2: By the end of August, validate the hypothesis regarding pain points in merchant product publishing by using data to analyze the duration of merchant use on the product publishing page.

  • Key Result 3: By September 30th, select pilot merchants for product publishing transformation, launch an MVP of the simplified intelligent product publishing process in pilot categories, and gradually cover at least three-tier categories. Ensure automatic information filling rate for product details is above %.

  • Key Result 4: By October 31st, expand and apply the simplified intelligent product publishing process to at least three-tier categories, ensuring that the automatic information filling rate for product details is above % for each category.

(Note: To ensure privacy, I have blurred key data and methods in this project. When studying this case, pay more attention to how OKRs are applied to exploratory projects.) Comment: As I shared with you earlier, in the formulation of project-based OKRs, key results (KR) need to be quantified through “time + output”.

In this case, we can see that each KR has a clear time frame. For exploratory projects, the phased output will go through stages such as “research - hypothesis validation - pilot implementation - scaling”, and not every stage will have quantifiable business results. Initially, the key output will be in the form of “research reports, validation of hypothesis effectiveness”. It is only during the trial operation and scaled operation stages that quantifiable business results will be produced. Just like in this case, the quantifiable business effect is seen when the time frames of “9.30 and 10.31” are reached, with a “commodity information autofill rate of *%”.

Furthermore, by managing key outputs through the 4 KRs for the 4 important milestones of this project, we do not need to include the daily work of the project in the KRs. It is sufficient to state the key outputs at the key time points.

From the formulation of KR1, we can infer that this project is benchmarking against industry competitors. In the entire process of implementing the KRs, the team is essentially engaging in internal entrepreneurship, conducting exploratory trials and validations. Therefore, completing the entire OKR is full of challenges.

Lastly, I want to emphasize that project-based OKRs do not strictly follow the rules of quarterly OKRs in terms of time limits. The OKRs are not decomposed according to the quarterly cycle. For the sake of consistency and continuity in project management, displaying a complete OKR based on the start and end time of the project is more reasonable. For example, this project spans from August to October, overlapping different quarters.

The 4 case studies I shared with you are particularly relevant as they cover the OKRs of a founder, company strategic OKRs, R&D leader OKRs, and project-based OKRs. In my specific comments, I referred to the knowledge points on writing objectives (O) and key results (KR) from the previous two lessons. I explained the strengths and weaknesses of these 4 OKR cases, and a complete understanding of these cases will enable you to have a more comprehensive and profound understanding of how to write good OKRs, avoiding pitfalls in practical application.

Summary #

Lastly, for your convenience in learning and reviewing in a timely manner, I have compiled the knowledge points you need to master when writing objectives (O) and key results (KR) into a table:

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I welcome you to compare the key points of OKR writing in the above table and your study understanding of various OKR case studies. After that, please share your complete OKR in the comments section. I will help you identify the strong points and areas for improvement, assisting you in continuously iterating and producing “high-quality OKRs”.

Now that we have covered the practical aspects of OKRs, it is not enough to simply write OKRs for them to be implemented in an organization. At this point, you need to combine process management. In the next lesson, I will introduce “OKR formulation and process management”.