Why set an objective and key result (OKR)?

Objectives and key results (OKRs) are important markers for measuring success. 

They make it easy to gauge the impact of your activities at a glance and communicate those results with management or the rest of your team. 

This can be helpful for highlighting the success of your personnel, a new system, and other work streams.

Let's look at how OKRs work with a few examples.

A quick guide to OKRs

To put it simply, an objective is something you want to achieve. For example: "Get better ratings on Amazon". 

The success of this metric is then measured by a number of key results. For example: "Increase our product rating from 4.1 stars to 4.2 stars" or "Get 50 new five-star reviews across the quarter".

Companies of all shapes and sizes use OKRs to set tight, precise goals for their teams. From top management ("Support the team's service-level agreement") to customer success ("Increase the average speed of answering support tickets"), OKRs help to keep teams focused on specific goals that will have a material impact on the business.

How KPIs and conversion points support OKRs

For the top brass, OKRs are often all that's needed to track high-level performance.

But for the people trying to hit those OKRs, you have two critical measurements at your disposal:

1. Key performance indicators (KPIs) – the performance of each of your campaigns or activities
2. Conversion points – the moments in your funnel that make or break your sales success

Let’s take pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as an example.

You objective may be to "Sell 4% more products this quarter", with a key result to "Sell X devices per month over the next three months".

In this scenario, your KPI is the performance of your PPC campaigns. You can track these on a daily basis to optimize for higher click rates and conversions. And with each improvement, you give yourself a better chance of achieving your OKR.

Next are your conversion points. You may find that you get stellar click rates on your PPC ads, but are losing customers further down the funnel. By tracking conversion points for things like customers entering your store, add-to-cart (ATC) rate, and actual purchases, you can quickly identify and optimize weak points. Again, this has a huge impact on your ability to hit your OKR.

In essence, you should be setting the right OKR for each team or department's growth and look at an achievable goal that makes sense.