Who Does What By How Much?

1. OKRs: The Customer-Centric Compass for Your Organization

The most common reason people work on the wrong stuff is that they lose track of what their customers want.

The core problem. Many organizations work hard but on the wrong things, often because they lose sight of their customers' true needs. This misdirection wastes immense time, money, and energy, hindering improvement and desired results. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) offer a powerful solution by re-centering efforts on customer value.

Everyone has a customer. This book uniquely emphasizes that every role, team, and department—whether external-facing or internal—serves a "customer." This could be an end-user, a colleague, a partner, or a constituent. Success hinges on understanding and positively influencing their behavior.

The value equation. At its heart, OKRs are built around a simple value equation: "Who does what by how much?"

• Who? Your specific customer.
• Does what? Their desired behavior.
• By how much? The measurable change in that behavior.
  This framework provides clarity, focus, and a practical way to quantify success, ensuring all efforts contribute to tangible value.

2. Strategy First: The Foundation for Meaningful OKRs

Without a strategy, how will your team know where to focus their OKR energy?

Strategy defines focus. Many organizations mistakenly believe OKRs are their strategy. However, OKRs are a tool to express and execute strategy. Without a clear, opinionated, and coherent strategy, teams lack direction, leading to misaligned or ineffective OKRs. Strategy identifies the most important challenges and defines how to address them.

Strategy for everyone. While often associated with top leadership, strategy is relevant at every level. Whether it's a company'wide challenge or a team's approach to a project, strategic thinking helps make informed choices. A lightweight process for strategy involves:

• Identify your biggest challenge: What critical problem needs solving?
• Determine where you will play: Which customers, markets, or areas will you focus on?
• Propose how you will win: What unique approach will you take?

Coherent approach. A good strategy is a mix of policy and action, ensuring all parts reinforce each other. It's not just a plan, but a guiding approach that allows for flexibility. Leaders must communicate this strategy as a compelling story, making the logic visible and fostering alignment across the organization.

3. Crafting Outcomes: Who Does What By How Much?

An outcome is a measurable change in your customer’s behavior that creates value.

Success is an outcome. Traditional success often focuses on completing tasks or launching products (outputs). However, true success with OKRs means creating a valuable outcome—a measurable change in customer behavior. This distinction is crucial:

• Output: The stuff you make (e.g., a new feature, a policy).
• Outcome: The change in customer behavior resulting from that output (e.g., customers use the new feature, employees take more vacation).
• Impact: High-level, long-term organizational goals (e.g., revenue, market share), which are too broad for direct key results.

Key Results are outcomes. Every Key Result (KR) must be an outcome, strictly adhering to the "Who does what by how much?" formula.

• Who? A specific human (your customer).
• Does what? A valuable behavior you aim to create or change.
• By how much? A specific, measurable target for that behavior change.
  This ensures KRs are customer-centric and directly tied to value creation, not just activity.

No solutions in KRs. Crucially, KRs should never contain solutions, tasks, or outputs. They define what winning looks like, not how to win. This empowers teams to innovate and discover the best ways to achieve the desired behavioral change. Even if a metric is hard to measure, if it's the right outcome, commit to it and figure out the measurement later.

4. Collaborate, Don't Cascade: Aligning Goals Top-Down and Bottom-Up

When people set their own goals, they are infinitely more motivated to hit them.

Beyond command and control. Traditional goal-setting often involves top-down "cascading," where leaders dictate goals. This approach stifles motivation, ignores valuable insights from those closest to the work, and leads to resentment. OKRs thrive on a collaborative, two-way process:

• Top-down: Leadership defines the overarching strategy and high-level organizational OKRs.
• Bottom-up: Teams, understanding the strategic context, draft their own OKRs that align with and support the higher-level goals.

The "family tree" model. Instead of rigid cascading, think of OKR alignment as a family tree: every OKR must have a "parent" OKR it clearly supports. This ensures:

• Strategic lineage: Every goal, from individual team to organizational, traces back to the core strategy.
• Accountability: Clear ownership for each goal.
• Flexibility: Teams retain autonomy to define how they contribute, fostering creativity and engagement.

Shared OKRs for dependent teams. For teams with high interdependencies, sharing a single OKR can prevent "hyperlocal optimization" where one team's success inadvertently hinders another's. This promotes transparency and coordinated effort towards a common outcome. The entire OKR-setting process, from high-level communication to team drafting and reconciliation, should be timeboxed to ensure agility, ideally within a month.

5. The OKR Cycle: A Continuous Loop of Learning and Execution

The OKR Cycle rotates around one shared question: Is our work making a difference for the people we serve?

A new rhythm of work. OKRs are not just a framework; they're a dynamic process—the OKR Cycle—that redefines how work gets done. This cycle moves away from long, linear projects towards continuous iteration, learning, and adjustment. Its core components are:

• Organizational Strategy & OKRs: Set annually.
• Team-Level OKRs: Set quarterly, aligned with strategy.
• Execution: Teams actively work on solutions.
• Learning: Continuous discovery and testing of ideas.
• Checking In: Regular reviews of progress and adjustments.

Execution for outcomes. Since OKRs don't prescribe solutions, teams must figure out how to achieve their Key Results. This involves brainstorming multiple ideas, framing them as testable hypotheses, and then executing them in small, measurable increments. The goal is to generate outcomes continuously, not just complete tasks.

Embracing an experimental mindset. When uncertainty is high, an experimental mindset is crucial. Teams should:

• Prioritize ideas: Based on potential value and risk.
• Learn quickly: Conduct rapid experiments (e.g., minimum viable products, customer interviews) to test hypotheses.
• Iterate: Continuously measure results, evaluate learnings, and adjust tactics or even OKRs as new evidence emerges. This iterative loop is the "heartbeat" of the OKR Cycle, fostering true agility.

6. Plan for Agility: Outcome-Driven Roadmaps, Not Fixed Deliverables

What we want then are plans that are not brittle, are not useless, and that help us recover when things go wrong.

Beyond brittle plans. Traditional roadmaps often focus on fixed outputs, dates, and budgets, which are ill-suited for a world of continuous change. OKRs demand a shift to outcome-based planning that embraces uncertainty and encourages agility. The goal is to create plans that are resilient and adaptable.

Filter with OKRs. When transitioning to OKRs, teams must filter existing to-do lists and new requests through their OKRs. This involves categorizing work into:

• Keep Doing: Directly supports KRs.
• Maybe: Potential alignment, needs further investigation.
• Stop Doing/Not Now: Doesn't support KRs; eliminate or defer.
• Start Doing: New ideas to achieve KRs.
  This rigorous filtering ensures focus and prevents wasted effort on misaligned work.

Outcome-based roadmaps. These dynamic roadmaps communicate intentions, not fixed commitments. Key components include:

• Strategic Themes & Org OKRs: High-level direction.
• Quarterly KR Goals: Specific outcomes to achieve.
• Potential Work Items & Solution Ideas: Expressed as hypotheses, acknowledging variability.
• Learning Activities: Explicitly planned research and experiments.
• Time Horizons: Less detail further out, reflecting increasing uncertainty.
  Roadmaps become living documents, reviewed and adjusted regularly during check-ins, allowing teams to navigate complexity and pivot based on evidence.

7. Data is Destiny: Measure Progress with Quantitative and Qualitative Insights

Without data, you’re going to have problems.

The lifeblood of learning. Data is fundamental to successful OKR implementation, enabling teams to understand if their work is making a difference. Organizations must prioritize universal access to both quantitative and qualitative data, unfettered by technical or political barriers.

Two types of data:

• Quantitative data (numbers): Measures what is happening and how much progress is being made (e.g., website visitors, purchase rates, email open rates). This is the "by how much" in your KRs.
• Qualitative data (words): Explains why things are happening, gathered through customer interactions (e.g., interviews, observations, feedback). This helps understand the "who" and "does what."
  Both are essential for a holistic understanding of customer behavior and for making informed decisions.

Actionable insights. Collecting data is only half the battle; it must be shared widely and used to inform decisions. Leaders should invest in user-friendly analytics tools and ensure all systems provide reporting capabilities. Even if a desired metric is difficult to measure initially, teams should commit to it and find creative ways to track it, using proxy metrics or qualitative insights until robust measurement systems are in place.

8. Check-Ins: Your Regular Pulse for Progress and Pivots

Frequent and transparent check-ins are one of the most important parts of OKRs and critical to your success in using them.

Mitigating assumptions. OKRs are built on assumptions, making regular check-ins vital for mitigating risks and ensuring agility. These structured meetings are where teams review progress, analyze data, align activities with outcomes, and decide on next steps. They foster alignment, transparency, and the ability to quickly change course.

The rhythm of review. Three types of check-in meetings are essential:

• Weekly Check-in (30 min): A quick pulse check for immediate teams to monitor progress, share highlights, and identify urgent issues. Focus on status and quick alignment, not deep problem-solving.
• Monthly Check-in (60-90 min): A broader review with immediate team and stakeholders. Focus on learnings, obstacles, opportunities, and confirming/adjusting OKRs.
• Quarterly Check-in (Strategic): A major milestone with senior leaders and peer teams. Emphasizes strategic course correction, evaluating overall OKR achievement, and deciding on new OKRs for the next quarter.

"No Surprises" rule. Continuous, proactive communication outside of formal meetings is crucial. Teams should regularly share updates, learnings, and potential issues with stakeholders to ensure transparency and prevent major problems from surfacing unexpectedly in formal check-ins. This builds trust and allows for early intervention.

9. Leaders as Enablers: Cultivating Trust and Psychological Safety

The most important predictor of success when going through any change is consistent and continuous leadership support.

Beyond implementation. OKR success hinges on active, continuous leadership support. Leaders must do more than just introduce OKRs; they must create the environment for them to thrive. This involves:

• Starting with "why": Clearly articulating the problem OKRs solve and the positive future state they enable.
• Providing clear strategy: Offering high-level OKRs as a compass, not a command.
• Trusting teams: Empowering teams with autonomy to discover solutions, rather than prescribing tasks.

Fostering psychological safety. A culture of learning, essential for OKRs, requires psychological safety—the belief that one won't be punished for speaking up, asking questions, or admitting mistakes. Leaders must:

• Celebrate learning: Value insights from experiments, even if they lead to abandoning an idea.
• Model humility: Demonstrate willingness to learn, adjust, and admit when initial assumptions were wrong.
• Change questions: Ask "What did you learn this week?" instead of "What are you working on?"
  This encourages risk-taking, innovation, and honest communication, preventing teams from hiding failures or avoiding crucial research.

10. Managers as Navigators: Guiding Teams and Managing Up

OKRs change managers’ responsibilities in a way that allows you to use your skills in new ways, helping you truly lead instead of just (micro-)manage.

Evolving the manager's role. OKRs transform the manager's job from taskmaster to strategic navigator. Instead of assigning work, managers empower teams to determine the best path to achieve outcomes. New responsibilities include:

• Ensuring strategic alignment: Keeping the team focused on the overarching vision and OKRs.
• Setting clear constraints: Guiding the team's scope of work to deliver value in smaller, consistent batches.
• Clearing hurdles: Removing organizational obstacles and ensuring teams have necessary resources and access to data.
• Making key decisions: Providing decisive guidance when teams face ambiguity or deadlock.

Managing up effectively. Managers must proactively "manage up" to senior leadership:

• Tie everything to OKRs: When receiving new requests, connect them to existing OKRs or highlight the trade-offs.
• Tell your story constantly: Proactively communicate team progress, learnings, and challenges to build trust and secure support.
• Practice customer-centricity with leaders: Understand their goals and concerns, framing requests in terms of how they contribute to leadership's success.

Rethinking performance management. A critical shift is decoupling individual performance from individual OKR achievement. Instead, evaluate individuals on behaviors that drive OKR success:

• Focus & Prioritization: Effective use of time towards OKRs.
• Agility & Learning: Contribution to research, use of evidence, willingness to pivot.
• Collaboration & Alignment: Teamwork, communication, balancing individual/team/company needs.
• Transparency & Knowledge-Sharing: Open communication within and across teams.
• Customer-Centricity: Understanding and advocating for customer needs.

11. Scaling OKRs: Experiment, Learn, and Adapt for Organization-Wide Impact

Operationalizing OKRs at scale across a large organization can often take years.

Strategic foundation is paramount. Scaling OKRs across a large organization requires a robust strategic foundation. Without a clear, communicated organizational strategy, efforts to align hundreds or thousands of teams will fail. Strategy provides the essential anchor for all OKR efforts, ensuring everyone pulls in the same direction.

Align, don't cascade. Avoid rigid "cascading" of OKRs from the top down, which stifles autonomy and ignores ground-level insights. Instead, foster alignment through a "family tree" model: every OKR must have a parent OKR it clearly supports. This ensures:

• Lineage: Goals trace back to the core strategy.
• Ownership: Clear accountability at every level.
• Flexibility: Teams contribute creatively while maintaining alignment.
  Dependent teams can also share OKRs to prevent hyperlocal optimization and encourage coordinated effort.

Treat rollout as an experiment. Implement OKRs at scale by treating the rollout itself as an experiment:

• Start small: Begin with a pilot team or small workgroup to identify and smooth out obstacles.
• Keep it transparent: Make the pilot's process, learnings, and challenges visible to the entire organization. Over-communicate progress and pivots.
• Learn and adapt: Use the data from pilot efforts to refine the OKR process, training, and support structures before broader deployment.
  This iterative, learning-centric approach, championed by leadership, de-risks the transformation and builds organizational buy-in over the multi-year journey.

Last updated: November 20, 2025