Best Practice OKR Drafting Process

Best Practice OKR Drafting Template 

The best practice OKR drafting template offers a clear structure for brainstorming and drafting company-wide quarterly Objectives and Team OKRs.

The process of brainstorming OKRs will help you to see your most critical business issues and improvement opportunities clearly, and not mix them up with day-to-day operations.

Who will find it useful?

Cross-functional alignment is a must if you want your teams to move in the same direction. But leaders often struggle to keep everyone on the same page.

The OKR drafting template will provide a straightforward step-by-step process for leaders when writing and aligning Company Objectives and Team OKRs. 

It will help you: 

• Visualise how goals on different levels fit together 

• Draw the line between outcomes (results) and outputs (deliverables) to prioritise better 

• Communicate the most important priorities at the ideation stage and get feedback from other teams 

• Figure out dependencies among different functional teams

What is the structure of the template? 

1. Define what you want to achieve (which high level metrics or strategic priorities to impact).

2. Brainstorm business directions: what is your organisation-wide focus?

• If you have a lagging Key Performance Indicator (for ex., website traffic has dropped from last quarter), where does this problem come from? In other words, what is broken? What do you need to fix?

• If you are doing great in general but you want to grow faster, what is the most impactful improvement area you can go after? Is it a new market? A new audience? A new service line? Upselling to current customers? Building relationships? Forming partnerships?

3. Draft Team Objectives with the prompt: we will focus on [driving this change] to [solve this problem]

4. Draft Key Results: how will you measure change?

5. Draft initiatives: what are you going to do to drive the outcomes you want to achieve

What are the benefits of OKRs? 

Objectives and Key Results cover the areas you need to improve: from the ways you work (internal processes) to the ways you think about growth opportunities.

Whenever you feel like there are a billion improvements you absolutely have to implement, remember that in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. 

So keep your eyes on the prize, and don’t give in to distractions. 

Good OKRs unite teams, create long-term improvement habits, and put you on a rocketship to success.