Google introduced me to Niket Desai by fate. I googled the term “OKRs template” and Niket’s OKRs template popped up #1. I’m pleased to share this Q&A with Niket on his amazing journey with OKRs as a successful entrepreneur, Googler, and an investor. Niket believes everyone should have some flavor of OKRs.

Ben Lamorte: How did you get introduced to OKRs?

Niket Desai: After studying a variety of math and engineering at Berkeley, I joined a small start-up and then created Punch with a few friends which was acquired by Google. I didn’t formally study OKRs until I worked at Google, but I used an equivalent approach to defining goals quarterly and measuring progress even before joining Google.

Lamorte: How are you using OKRs now?

Desai: After joining Google, I wanted to learn about angel investing the only way I knew how: investing in companies. Young start-ups want to be innovative. They pride themselves on lack of process. But here’s the challenge: how do you know when something is not working and how do you know when to stop doing it? I’m finding it invaluable to use OKRs to communicate with start-ups so you have a framework for making choices around when to shift courses.

Lamorte: Do you have any favorite key results that you can share?

Desai: I use OKRs instead of resolutions. Resolutions like “I want to get fit” don’t make sense; they are not measurable. If you say, “I’m going to lose 60 pounds this year,” you can breakdown the goal to 5 pounds a month and start focusing on making progress. It’s measurable, it’s meaningful. I’ll share some key results from my New Year’s Resolution that I think are fun. Most of them tend to be quantitative so I know if I’m hitting the mark.

• [P1][0.0]: Learn greetings & basic conversation in 15 languages.
• [P1][0.0]: Take the stairs in all cases save where it’s unreasonable.
• [P2][0.0]: Get 7 hours of sleep a night.

When it’s a serious business key result I think the best ones push the company forward in meaningful ways. To do that you need to truly understand what’s driving your business and generating revenue (or leading to accelerating growth). That way your key results will be moving the needle on a metric that has significant impact at the company level.

Lamorte: Do you find it easy to define and set measurable results?

Desai: Defining measurable results is easy if you understand what you should be measuring and matters for your business.

Lamorte: Can you share an example where taking time to define OKRs helped a worker understand their business?

Desai: This one company had a standard web-publishing model with 3 participants: the readers, the bloggers, and the advertisers. They found that every campaign led to more readers which would grow the audience which would cause the advertiser to spend more money creating a cycle effect for rapid revenue growth. We learned that we needed more campaigns, but we also noticed most advertisers only ran one campaign. So our growth objective included two key results:

• 50% of signups run a campaign within two weeks
• Increase the average campaigns per advertiser from 1 up to 5

These are great key results because they are quantitative, specific, and open ended solution-wise. We came up with the idea to offer discounts on campaigns run within the first week which led to many businesses running repeat campaigns. This greatly increased revenues since companies were purchasing 3-4 full priced campaigns after a single discounted one. OKRs helped define the goal and focus on measurement. By putting in the multiplier of 5, it was not an arbitrary statement like “grow the number of campaigns.” The measurement aspect leads to a special type of focus that is more effective than making broad statements about improvement. It’s hard for qualitative results to ever be substantial and they are highly subjective.

Lamorte: Would an example of qualitative result be a goal like "Launch the new training" as opposed to "Certify 25 sales reps on the new training methods"?

Desai: Exactly, qualitative goals tend to under-represent our capabilities as well because they fall into the lowest common denominator.

Lamorte: Can you share a story where defining OKRs actually changed a business model?

Desai: Yes!

This article was originally published on Ben's blog - okrs.blogspot.com May 5, 2014.