Book: Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.

This one is hard to rate. I’m not sure if I liked it or not, and it’s probably related to the structure of the book.

It starts as a non-fiction/business book, as I expected it to be, but out of nowhere, it became “a novel” (big quotes here). This “novel” part was not too bad, I liked it in the end, but it was totally unexpected. I really like The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win which follows the same idea of narrative, but the whole book was created with that goal in mind.

When we get this structure out of the way (or if you expect that from the beginning) the book is good. It shows how OKRs work in a simple way and gives you some examples to help you implement it (or not!) in your own company.

Here are my raw notes about the book:

  • The O in the OKR is for those who are not numbers people. The K and R brings the numbers
  • The important x urgent matrix
  • We should focus on important and urgent tasks. We should also spend time on important and not urgent, but not on urgent but not important ones.
  • We should time constraint things that are important but not urgent to make them urgent
  • The OKR set goals, the weekly priority help you to reach them
  • You don’t want people to work more, you want them to work on the right things
  • List three things you have to do this week to meet the objectives. These are your priorities
  • Weekly report with a confidence level to reach the goal. It should be discussed in case it looks wrong
  • You should not add all your tasks in the weekly report, just the 3 p1 and one p2. The goal is not to tell people everything you’ve done, but to let them know about the important things or things they should want to be aware of
  • By repeating the goal on every weekly meeting, you keep it on people’s minds
  • Urgent things get done because we feel the urge of time. We have to bring the urgency to other important things
  • You WILL fail in the first time you try to implement OKRs
  • Before starting OKRs you have to have a good and clear vision in mind
  • O is qualitative and KR are quantitative
  • The objective is something that makes people want to get up of the bed to make things happen
  • KR answers the question: how do we know if we met the objective?
  • In companies where failure is punished, employees learn not to try — 💭 OMG, I saw it so many times… so true.
  • There are always many interesting things you can spend your time on, but you have to focus on the objectives
  • Focus your OKRs on the product team level. Focus the individuals on the product teams’ objectives
  • Set the mood of the status meeting as a team trying to help each other to reach a common goal instead of individuals trying to prove the reason for their existence in the team by posting everything they did (not just the priorities)
  • When doing MVPs, you can change objectives to hypothesis and try to prove or disprove them at the end of the cycle
  • Set OKRs for a week or a month