Setting the right goal for an OKR

Setting the right goals for your OKRs can be challenging. It's all about finding a balance between showing progress as a business while achieving measurable success by the end of the quarter.

Let's face it. You aren't going to earn the Amazon Best Seller tag in a single day or hit a 100% click rate on all your campaigns within a few months. And that's OK. 

Instead, you need to understand the bigger picture and think about OKRs as the next step towards your bigger goals.

When setting your goals for OKRs, you'll need to consider a range of disciplines across your company, as well as your product history, challenges, and competitors.

In the end, it all comes down to a simple question: "What are the low-hanging fruit for the short run and how can you change them over time in a meaningful way?"

This is the key to setting significant but achievable goals for your OKRs.

Look out for overarching and unrealistic goals

When setting goals for your OKRs, there are two main things you need to look out for:

1. Overarching goals that could never be achieved by a single unit
2. Unrealistic goals that risk hurting your business

Let's explore those in a little more detail, starting with overarching objectives.

If you want to be the top seller on Amazon, you'll need to advance your physical product, ship a top-notch app, develop your support team, and tailor your user journey. As a company goal, it makes perfect sense. But for your engagement marketers, "Increase five-star Amazon reviews by X%" makes more sense.

Now for unrealistic goals. Imagine you set a goal of getting 1,000 new reviews by the end of the quarter. One month in, you've only got 30 reviews, leaving you way off target.

So maybe you decide to send out a campaign to your whole user base asking them to leave a review. Suddenly, the reviews are flying in. But you have no control over the quality of those reviews, and even though your review tally has increased, your score could take a hit.

Another example: "Sell XXX devices this month". While achievable, this approach can burn your user base, minimize the effectiveness of future campaigns, and make a dent in customer and brand satisfaction.

Set smaller goals on the way to your OKRs

An excellent way to look at OKRs is the path to them.

If you set a goal for some time in the future, you should set smaller ones on the way to keep your team on the right track.

In Copilot.cx, we look at the OKR and measure what daily impact we need to achieve to make it happen. This gives us an honest perspective on how we can achieve the goal and lets us utilize ongoing campaigns to hit the right people at the right times.

Now it’s a calculation game of understanding the effect you should have. If you’re on 3.9 stars on your retail store and want to get to 4, you’ll need to almost double your five-star ratings in comparison to the current history of reviews. And that’s not taking into account that you still need to negate reviews on a daily basis.

This means that if you have 9,000 reviews across the board and 100 new reviews a day, you’ll need to steadily send another 33 five-star reviews over the span of 90 days to achieve this goal.

The end result of all this mind-bending is that, if you achieve an ongoing goal of sending 33 people a day to rate your product five stars, you should hit the star mark in a single quarter.