Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

This is a great small book introducing to the concept of OKR. It does not go too deep into explaining how to set up and monitor OKRs, however, a book is perfect to understand the main idea behind it. Book consists of entertaining fable ( a story about fictional startup) and more formal part explaining basic concepts.

I've read it when we already were using OKR for some time in our company so there were not so many new things but confidence levels were something new and we successfully adopted that in our team. It helps to remind us about our KRs during sprint meetings.

While the book is great for introduction, it is lacking deeper insights.

I love this quote from the book which sums up it pretty nicely:

“You don’t need people to work

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more, you need people to work on the right things,”

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A good model that emphasizes outcomes over output. OKRs themselves are a prop for the larger goal of creating a culture of productive focus and accountability. A little rough around the edges, the telling in the form of a fable (a la Patrick Leoncini) is a great way to introduce the concept, and more importantly, speak to the process of change management.

Borrowing language from the book, Radical Focus will give you a path into the future that uses Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to align your work to OUTCOMES, not merely plans or initiatives.

Being anchored on ACTUAL RESULTS helps teams become more innovative, pivot when appropriate, and experiment to understand the best market fit for your products. Part One includes an engaging story / business use case in need of OKRs. Part Two provides what is needed to implement OKRs, including how to bookend the week by setting intentions on Monday, celebrating successes on Friday, setting and evaluating progress quarterly, and how to implement OKRs in three special cases, exploratory work for "start-ups" and innovation teams, Hypothesis OKRs for show more understanding whether to pivot or persevere on the road you are on, and Milestone OKRs to link your work on long-term initiatives to OUTCOMES rather than outputs.

Of particular interest is Wodtke's adaptation of the Boston Consulting Group's 2 by 2 matrix for mapping each product in your portfolio to a Market Growth versus Relative Market Share matrix. Different products will require different types of measurement. Your "Question Mark" products should have exploratory OKRs. Your "Star" products should have expansion OKRs: State your objectives, and set KRs that tell you how high the ceiling goes. Your "Cash Cow" products will be those in saturated markets where measuring by growth would be frustrating, but maintaining them adequately will continue positive returns. Lastly, your Dog products occupy fading market positions that are costing you time and resources with inadequate return on your investment.

The author has extensive experience in web product work as well as consulting and teaching. show less

About Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and how to implement them. Mentions applications for individual + team/organizational use, but the focus is mainly in organizations. You'll learn:
• What are OKRs, and how/why they work;
• The pre-requisites, components, and steps to set and implement OKRs; and
• Useful templates and tips to successfully use OKRs to maximize results at individual, team, and organizational levels.
Book summary at: https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-radical-focus-christina-wodtke/