Team OKRs

Team OKRs are often easier to construct than strategic OKRs since there already is strategic OKRs to draw inspiration from. At the same time, the challenge can be really hard when the team can’t see any strong links between the teams work and the common goals. In these instances, it is common to produce a team mission to improve on understanding on how the team contributes to the bigger picture.

Team OKRs are created based on:

• Strategic OKRs – it is when teams build their OKRs based on the strategic OKRs that the organisation achieves strategic alignment. This does however not imply that the team should just pick OKRs from the strategic ones or copy objectives or key results just like they are presented – the strategic OKRs are just one influence among several, even though a very important one
• Team challenges – teams do both external work towards customers and other teams, but they also need to tend to internal work in such things as productivity, recruitment, documentation and much more. These topics should act as influences for the team OKRs as well.
• Team mission – while a sales team often have a very clear line of understanding of the impact of their daily work on the company’s overall targets, it is not always as easy for a software developer or the customer support staff. Crafting a team mission can help explain this link and can act as a substitute to strategic OKRs to craft OKRs upon.
• Vision / mission / strategy – it is often helpful to let the vision / mission and strategy be a direct part of the team OKR setting as well to ensure full alignment even on aspects that are not captured in the strategic OKRs.
• Dependent teams and dependencies – teams need to coordinate their OKRs with other teams to ensure alignment on dependencies.

All taken together, while strategic OKRs often have similarities between organisations, team OKRs are often more specific to the challenges at the time of the specific team. They also differ a lot between teams dependent on the function where commercial teams many times have a slightly easier road to creating their OKRs while product, support functions and technology teams don’t always have the same preparedness in goal setting and progress measuremnts.

This is a typical marketing OKR based on a strategic OKR with financial growth focus. It connects a couple of different important aspects of the lead process to improve support to sales.