When you start to scale and have multiple products and/or teams, alignment becomes paramount. The general trap is to try and control things to stop misalignment form every happening by adding many layers of bureaucracy — or as I like to call “forced-alignment”. This stifles creativity, does very little to keep your people motivated and usually degrades team velocity.

Objective — the goal we wish to achieve, and;

The key results we expect the objective to give us. General rule of thumb is to have no more than five key results per objective.

“why?” — why are we launching app x? What benefit are we expecting to see? The answers to these questions are likely be the outcome you’re trying to achieve.

Key results need to be measurable like “increase retention by 5%” — think SMART goals.

OKRs can be used at all levels — they can be high level larger long-running, lagging indicators or low level tactical, leading indicators.

The Hypothesis framework which is commonly used is relatively simple. At a core level it consists of two statements, one which is the experiment that you wish to try (or “bet” as I like to call it) and second is the outcome you expect it to make and more importantly how you are going to measure its impact.

We believe that ____________________

For ____________________

Will result in ____________________

We’ll know we have succeeded when we see ____________________

OKR’s are deliberately solution agnostic to allow the freedom for the “how” part — OKR’s don’t care how you achieve the objective, they just want the objective met. This is where Hypotheses come in.

Like with anything I often start with the vision — the end goal, where are we heading and why.

The next question to ask yourself as a Product Manager is “how am I going to measure progress towards the vision? how will I know I am swimming in the right direction or not?” — these are your top level OKRs for your product.

Consider diversity in your metrics on your OKRs — i.e. you don’t want to increase sign-up conversion at the detriment of retention — beware of tunnel vision!

An important thing to note is that this doesn’t supersede discovery, rather the contrary, discovery should be informing your bets.

your roadmap will likely have planned bets in the near-term and “fuzzy” opportunities still in the far-term — all still aligned to an OKR.

Having a shared vision and measurable outcomes (whether they are expressed in OKRs or not) is a powerful way for creating alignment across the multiple teams and products

The devil is often in the details with how you maintain alignment. The key is to provide direction and boundaries, not to cascade solutions or micro-manage (I often say to leaders I coach, “facilitate don’t dictate”)

OKRs and Hypotheses should correlate, not cascade down. They are common goal posts to keep teams loosely aligned — not for telling the teams what to do.

There should be no need to getting “someone’s blessing” this only creates a dependency and bottleneck, rather teams should be empowered and trusted to make their own decisions.

Don’t pick too many metrics either — again, less is more! I generally work off the same rule-of-thumb as for OKRs and go for no more than 3 metrics/key results for both OKRs and Hypotheses

Think about leading vs lagging indicators — it can be useful to think about OKRs as more lagging indicators or ones which will see the needle move over a much longer time period whereas, since your Hypothesis are your experiments to meet the OKR, their metrics are often leading indicators, as they require a much shorter feedback loop