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OKR Product Management: Aligning Product OKRs to Outcome-Focused Roadmaps

Product management goes beyond addressing customer needs. It is about balancing customer requests, product initiatives, and your company’s strategic vision. If your organization uses OKRs as a goal-setting framework, aligning product OKRs and initiatives is key to determining which features to prioritize. In this blog, we will show you how to use product OKRs to create outcome-focused roadmaps and build customer-loved products that drive business success.

What is an OKR?

OKR stands for “Objectives and Key Results” – a framework for companies to set and track measurable goals. Objectives outline what you want to achieve, while Key Results help you measure progress.

Here are some key terms in the OKR product management framework:

  • Goals: The high-level mission or vision of an organization.
    • Example: Become the top digital banking service in the country.
  • Objectives: Specific, measurable steps to achieve your goals.
    • Example: Increase the number of users on our mobile banking app by 15% within the next year by adding new features and expanding marketing efforts.
  • Initiatives: Specific projects that help you achieve your objectives.
    • Example: Create and launch an in-app international money transfer feature.
  • Key Results: Measurable outcomes showing progress towards objectives. These should be specific, quantifiable, and time-bound.
    • Example: Reach a 15% increase in monthly active users of the app within six months of launching the new international transfer feature.

Companies use OKRs at the organizational, team, and individual levels. So, product OKRs are simply your product team’s OKRs (objectives and key results). Setting OKRs for product managers helps to align efforts toward achieving product-related objectives, such as increasing product adoption, that support the company’s strategic goals. 

Product management OKRs are essential in driving product innovation and enabling data-driven prioritization decisions because they highlight the impact of each initiative on business outcomes. Then, once you establish product OKRs, you can maintain them throughout product roadmap planning, resource allocation, and progress tracking. 

How Do Companies Use OKRs?

Companies apply OKRs to establish clear goals with measurable results and align teams around shared objectives. OKRs are used throughout an organization to promote transparency, accountability, and a focus on achieving impactful outcomes.

An Example of Multi-Level OKRs

To illustrate, let’s look at an example of how companies can use the OKR process to translate high-level business goals into specific team OKRs.

  • Management Objective: Grow our business. Key Result: Increase annual revenue by 20%
  • Marketing Objective: Optimize customer acquisition. Key Result: Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) by 20% in Q3

This marketing OKR aims to optimize customer acquisition by reducing Customer Acquisition Costs. By lowering CAC, the marketing team can effectively acquire more customers with the same budget, ultimately contributing to the management OKR of growing the business. As a result, the company can allocate saved resources to other growth opportunities, further supporting the overall business expansion.

  • Product Objective: Improve the quality of our products. Key Result: Resolve customer-reported bugs within two weeks

This product OKR example aims to increase product quality. By quickly addressing and fixing these issues, the company can enhance customer satisfaction and the user experience. As a result, this can lead to increased customer retention, positive word-of-mouth, and potential new customers, all of which contribute to the management OKR of growing the business.

  • Customer Success Objective: Enhance enterprise customer satisfaction. Key Result: Increase satisfaction rate from 4.2 to 4.8 

This customer success OKR aims to enhance enterprise customer satisfaction. By improving customer satisfaction, the company can foster stronger relationships with its enterprise clients, leading to increased loyalty, higher retention rates, and potential upselling opportunities. These factors directly contribute to the management OKR of growing the business. 

Each team OKR is specific, measurable, and aligned with the overall strategic objective to increase annual revenue. So, the beauty of the OKR approach is that it allows you to measure progress at every level to ensure results.

  1. Define your product OKRs
  2. Prioritize product initiatives within OKRs
  3. Estimate the investment, then allocate resources
  4. Track progress in a product OKR dashboard
  5. Report results to stakeholders

So, let’s bring it back to product. An OKR Product Management approach improves outcomes by reducing the number of irrelevant roadmap features, streamlining release processes, and enabling better product-market fit. 

Product teams use various tools for product management ranging from humble spreadsheets to complex software solutions. But when adopting an OKR product management approach, we recommend using a purpose-built tool like Dragonboat to connect product OKRs to outcome-focused product roadmaps seamlessly. Below we will show you how step-by-step:

1. Define Product OKRs

To create focus and alignment with your product OKRs, consider these three tips:

  1. Set quantifiable key results to measure progress while being mindful of prior OKRs for continuity.
  2. Confirm that your product OKRs align with strategic company goals
  3. Allocate appropriate resources to ensure achievable outcomes.

Using Dragonboat makes setting and managing objectives easy. You can add new OKRs, including product team OKRs, from any portfolio page and manage them from the goal-setting page or outcome module. The screenshot below shows you how this looks. 

When defining OKRs, you can also allocate resources by percentage or absolute number, enabling you to track and monitor progress to keep teams and product roadmaps aligned. Once you define your product OKRs, they become the baseline for your entire product strategy.

Shreenshot of setting product OKRs using Dragonboat.

When using a tool, you should be able to easily manage your objectives. In Dragonboat, you can Add, Edit, Merge, Archive, or Delete Objectives on the Feature Board page. From there, you can add subgoals to your OKRs to clearly map out your goal setting.

You can also add allocation, either by percentage or by an absolute number, for each OKR. So your target can later be matched with your plan to keep your teams and roadmap aligned. 

You now have your OKRs clearly defined in your tool. Take your time with this step, as it will serve as the baseline for the rest of your product strategy.

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2. Prioritize Product Initiatives Within OKRs

An outcome-driven organization prioritizes initiatives for the relevant OKRs based on how much they contribute to each objective vs. the effort required to deliver the benefit. The metric to measure this is called MoAR, or Metric Over Available Resources.  

When using a product management tool such as Dragonboat, you can add features or initiatives and map them to OKRs, as shown below. 

Screenshot of mapping OKRs to initiatives in Dragonboat.

If you also use MoAR to evaluate and prioritize your features quantitatively, you can add your benefit score to the Feature List page, as illustrated.

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3. Estimate the Investment, Then Allocate Resources

Although estimating the investment required to reach each objective and prioritizing initiatives is important, you must also allocate resources across all OKRs. So, Dragonboat provides a high-level view of resource needs and current allocations (shown below). Reviewing your allocations from this perspective allows you to re-balance to maximize the impact of your product efforts and achieve target outcomes. 

Screenshot of a report in Dragonboat showing resource allocations across objectives.

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4. Track Progress in a Product OKR Dashboard

To stay on track, monitoring the progress of your OKRs (outcomes) and product roadmaps (initiatives) is crucial. Dragonboat simplifies progress tracking by allowing you to easily view and update the status and health of your objectives and initiatives without any additional configurations.

Screenshot of a product OKR dashboard in Dragonboat.

The snapshot page above provides a convenient way for product teams and executives to view outcome and roadmap progress side-by-side, with all metrics displayed in a single pane. 

For additional insight, integrations with tools like Jira, Github, or Asana provide real-time trend data, making progress tracking and roll-up reporting seamless.

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5. Report Results to Stakeholders

You have spent a lot of time defining how your product OKRs can benefit your company, managing initiatives, and guiding your team’s work. Your progress is integral to your company’s success, important toward driving organizational alignment, and helps you focus on achieving outcomes rather than just delivering outputs. 

A good tool will make sharing results with key stakeholders, executives, and team members easy. Below is a simple example of a report using Dragonboat.

Screenshot of a stakeholder report in Dragonboat.

Key Takeaways

Outcome-focused organizations often use the OKR framework to guide decisions and expect their product teams to do the same. When this is the case, aligning product OKRS to your product roadmaps can help you prioritize initiatives that will most impact business outcomes. That will enable you to make data-driven decisions and create transparency and accountability at all levels.

A purpose-built tool like Dragonboat can help you do this by guiding you through defining OKRs, prioritizing initiatives, allocating resources, and tracking and reporting results. Schedule a demo today or sign up for a free trial to see it yourself.

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Management Collaboration Tools To Drive Your Team Forward

Collaborative teams are essential in today’s dynamic work environment, but the need for effective management collaboration continues to be overlooked. Remote workforce, decentralized decision-making, and agile madness have only exasperated this issue.

Now more than ever, fast-growing global companies need a better way to connect all the moving pieces of building products in one collaborative tool for their distributed teams.

Managers that win are able to effectively connect silos by collaborating up, down, and sideways. Managers must collaborate upwards with the executive teams to align objectives and strategies, horizontally with each other to identify and address dependencies, and downwards with their teams to ensure strategic clarity and alignment.

2/3 of Inc 5000 companies fail to scale due to leadership failure.

To the disservice of managers and the company overall, the focus has been skewed heavily to executive and individual contributor level, but less so at the manager level. However, managers are the bridge between company goals and tactical execution. While leaders may drive company strategy and objectives, that goes nowhere without a strong management team to bring the vision to life.

3-operating-horizons

Managers connect the dots between executives and teams, annual and weekly planning cadences, as well as strategy and execution. Creating autonomy, yet empowerment at all levels.

80% of teams struggle with competing priorities

Creating collaboration between all stakeholders is critical to success at modern companies. Successful managers don’t just manage up or down, they responsively adapt and adjust based on changing priorities.

Responsive Reallocation

Today’s World Demands Responsive Organizations

Responsive organizations rely on collaborative leaders to align, empower, and enable agile teams.

“Dragonboat automates mundane work and facilitates the best practice for responsive portfolio management connecting Agile and OKRs.  Not only does it save hours every week for every PM, but it also created unprecedented alignment across all our teams and offices”

Mauro Martins, Director of TPM

Collaborative leaders rely on Responsive Product Portfolio Management (“Responsive PPM”). Responsive PPM dynamically connects objectives, customer needs, products, and resources with execution to accelerate business results.

Dragonboat is a responsive PPM platform that connects OKRs, customer needs, and product with Agile execution to achieve alignment and visibility across the entire company.

Quarterly Alignment is Replacing Quarterly Planning

Is quarterly planning still relevant in today’s dynamic, fast-changing environment? The answer is a definitive yes, but with a twist. Quarterly planning should not occur only once a quarter, and its deliverable shouldn’t just be a list of projects. Instead, it should be an exercise of continuous alignment on a quarterly horizon.

Some may ask – why do you need a quarterly cadence? With Agile, couldn’t we just continue iterating on the product in sprints? This takes us back to the need for the three separate time horizons of strategy and execution within an organization.

Every organization needs a longer-term, mid-term, and near-term time horizon with their own goals and respective strategies. Quarterly planning focuses on connecting the longer-term vision (e.g. annual) with the mid-term focus (e.g. quarterly), which provides strategic guidance for the next level of iteration (e.g. bi-weekly). Quarterly alignment is for agile leaders to provide context for agile teams.

company quarterly alignment across three time horizons

Here are some of the common challenges for product teams lacking responsive quarterly alignment:

  • Disconnect – Let’s say a product or feature launched from the previous period and hit the market. The resulting business impact may or may not have been anticipated. So, the company must adjust goals and strategies subsequently. However, these strategic changes often won’t reach the team in time or with enough context, resulting in the team continuing to execute strategies from 1-2 quarters ago.
  • Poor allocation – Many companies adopt stable teams or a full-stack team model (think pods or tribes) without adjustment. However, as the business needs change, the previous allocation by team may not support current needs. Some teams end up under water with too many mission critical features while others may not have the same level of delivery pressure, leading them to focus on their locally optimized roadmap.
  • Incongruent UX – Without frequent alignment across teams and functions, silo’d decisions and prioritization happens. Dependencies are exposed. To avoid lengthy delays, teams have to create work arounds. This creates a suboptimal user experience and “products with an org structure”.

Quarterly Planning vs Quarterly Alignment

Traditional quarterly planning aims to address these challenges, but it focuses on the output of a committed list of projects. While there are merits to this deliverable, it does not fit into the fast-changing environment where the list of projects will change through the quarter.

This is why quarterly alignment emerges.

Quarterly alignment is the process of connecting the longer-term vision with sprints and activities responsively via collaboration between executives and leaders and across teams on what we want to achieve and the strategies to achieve them. The outcome is a set of initiatives (aka programs) with defined goals that empower further innovation without misalignment.

How Do You Perform Quarterly Alignment?

Here is a time-tested framework:

  1. Define the top 2-5 goals and target metrics for the upcoming quarter. An OKR framework (Objective and Key Result) is a good way to start.
  2. Brainstorm and prioritize product features, marketing and/or other initiatives to achieve these goals.
  3. Identify gaps and dependencies in achievability and/ or resources (check out how to use MoAR to prioritize).
  4. Iterate between 2 and 3 until a good enough game plan (a list of initiatives enabling your OKR’s) is in place. Learn more about the rock, pebble, and sand method.
  5. Track both work progress and OKR progress to responsively adjust your team’s focus.

Quarterly alignment is not a “build it once and rest forever” exercise. Frequently review (on a bi-weekly or monthly basis) the current trajectory against the desired outcome, and adjust the detailed activities responsively.

Clarity and alignment are critical to the success of any company. Quarterly alignment is a valuable cadence to enable it, giving your company the opportunity to align teams and products against the goals at the OVERALL company level (see the MoAR Method). This way, your teams can innovate and move fast in the same direction.

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