Thinking of your OKRs as newspaper articles

Quick tip of the day:

When you give work to a team in the form of a problem to solve and success metrics, an OKR (Objective & Key Results), and when you receive work this way as a product team, I’ve noticed that both sides can sometimes misplace their focus.

Typically, both product leaders and product team members tend to overfocus on the exact phrasing of the Objective, and underfocus on developing the reasoning and data that build real understanding of the value and how to achieve it.

I’ve coached many teams and their directors lately, and this is something I see quite often.

Here’s one thing I sometimes tell them to help avoid this:

Imagine that the work you're giving to your problem-solving teams, or receiving as such a team, is like a newspaper article. It has a title, but also a rich body of text. You need to develop the whole article, the part that communicates the facts and tells the story. Then yes, you need a title that fairly and concisely represents that article.

Your description of your OKR becomes the front-page headline, and the article is the richer context - why that problem is valuable, for whom, our constraints and everything we know (data) about where we’re starting from.

To create that article, product leaders first need to do some research (problem discovery, etc), think and make some choices.

And as a team, we need to read and understand the whole article, not just the headline. We may also need to do some homework to make sure we understand our starting point and what we’re aiming for.

When both product leaders and teams see their work this way, both sides can have a more intelligent conversation about what’s actually valuable that we are targeting and how best to represent it with measurables that will indicate real progress.

This helps avoid confusion and the over-focus on the “headline” (form) or blind metric optimizing, while reinforcing the essence of OKRs: giving teams problems to solve, success metrics that guide them, and real context that enables teams to drive meaningful results.