You know the feeling. Just when you are wrapping up the meeting about the definitely last changes to a report — the last ones, they swear — you are distracted by a Slack notification in the management channel: “@here, don’t forget that next Tuesday we are going to discuss our next quarter’s OKRs. Start adding your suggestions! 😊”
At this point, you have already started scratching your head, trying to come up with some possibilities. You already know the theory. Yes, the objective needs to be inspiring. Yes, you want your key results to be SMART! By then, you have probably forgotten what each letter of that acronym means, except for the M (hint: measurable). After all, aren’t metrics exactly what the data department is good at?
After writing a couple of sentences, you soon discover it is a dead end. A couple of hits to the backspace key puts you back at the beginning. Clean slate. After trying again, you hit the backspace key again. This time, harder. Yes, setting OKRs as an analytics team is frustrating. There’s something in the whole OKR setup that does not quite seem to capture the wide array of activities an analytics team regularly conducts.
OKRs: the case for radical focus
The real power of OKRs stems from their capacity to focus efforts around one or two bold objectives a company wants to achieve within a defined timeframe. That is Christina Wodtke’s argument in her book Radical Focus. It is this sense of clarity and alignment that allows companies to track progress, stay accountable, learn and celebrate all the actions contributing towards their goals.
If you are a data lead reading Wodtke’s book, you probably won’t find that any purely analytics objective should make it to the winners’ podium of your company’s OKRs. And that’s fine. Don’t get me wrong, analytics and reporting tasks are really important, but they are not the core of your business. In Wodtke’s terms, these are supporting teams, much like finance or legal.
Making OKRs work for your analytics team
So, how can you tie your analytics team back to the OKRs and reap the benefits they are set to bring? After all, there are two important things OKRs provide: focus and a sense of accomplishment. These are key drivers for team productivity and morale.
There are a couple of ways.
Working with the company OKRs, making them your own
Emphasize both within and beyond your team how your work is supporting the company’s OKRs.
Let’s say this quarter’s objective is all about conversion. Why not highlight that dashboard your team created to help track conversions? Or the tracking setup your team put together? Or the experiment you helped to run?
These are all meaningful contributions your team made that helped drive this OKR. In this way your team will not only internalize that OKR (and as a by-product help them prioritize their work) but also help them establish a direct connection between their work and the company’s larger objectives; something analysts consistently struggle with.
Creating your own team OKR, tuning your processes
Think about that team process that is not quite working yet. For example, you have identified serious gaps in the data onboarding process you provide for other teams that you want to close. Or, perhaps, your experimental setup is not quite where you want it to be.
These are all activities worth turning into a proper objective. If you decide to go that route, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
First, make sure you get buy-in from leadership. After all, OKRs are about sending a strong message about what you want to focus on and should help you prioritize. It will also keep you and your team accountable. A good way to secure that buy-in is to make a clear connection between the process gap you want to address and the company’s quarterly OKRs.
Second, remember that this is a team OKR and your team is there to support the company. If you ever have to choose between your team’s OKR and the company’s, the choice is simple: company OKRs always come first.
These two strategies are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. The first one (working with the company OKRs) should be part of your regular quarterly exercise. The second one (tuning your processes) is not a must. You can turn to it whenever you feel your team and organization could benefit from some process tuning.
Radical support to achieve radical focus
OKRs can be wonderful when done correctly. In Wodtke’s framework, they enable your organization to radically focus on those one or two objectives you want to achieve. For analytics teams, this means admitting that your work is there to support the company and probably won’t be directly reflected in a company goal.
This is not a bad thing. It does not mean your team’s contributions are unimportant, or that OKRs have nothing to offer your team. The trick is doubling down on your supportive role. As great films need great supporting actors, companies need radical support to achieve radical focus. And there is nothing small about that.