Design OKRs for your Product Design team
Design OKRs for your Product Design team
OKR — Objectives and Key results process is adopted by Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and other high-achieving companies to achieve desired common goals.
What are OKRs?
OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, are a simple tool or framework that helps an organisation to achieve goals by building specific and measurable actions as well as communicating and monitoring progress toward them.
Objectives define where you want to go. They are short and inspirational. Companies typically create three to five high-level objectives per quarter. Objectives should also be ambitious. While choosing the right objective is one of the most challenging aspects of this practice, when you do it correctly you’ll be able to tell if you have reached the objective..
Thats an Overview of OKRs. You can read a lot of article online if you want to deep dive into this topic.
The purpose of this article is to focus on Design OKRs. How we set OKR’s for Design team at Insider .
Before jumping into how we set the OKrs , it’s important to understand the parameters of OKrs and how we can use them to get the maximum benefit
Focus and Priority : It’s very important that everyone in the organization, including the company itself, chooses 2–3 objectives that they will focus on for the quarter. This simple limitation enforces everyone to focus on the most important objectives.
Alignment with organizational objectives as well as within the team : It’s very important that Design OKRs are aligned with company’s OKRs. Everyone should work together in the same direction to achieve the common goal.
It’s also important to understand current objectives. The OKRs might change based on the situation and everyone should align to be on the same page.
Accountability and Engagement : People perform better when they are accountable for their actions however Engaging with them , regular communication and showing that how we are together working in the same direction can boost the morale of your design team.
Clarity and transparency : Well defined goals with clarity and open accessibility of every team’s OKRs adds the feeling of unity and it reinforces the designers to align their goals with interdependent goals of other team and Overall company objectives.
How does all this fits in the User Experience / Creative Department?
Quantifying designs is a challenge faced by world top design leaders. Setting goals and measuring proficiency is another challenge. Often Career roadmaps, Team growth is decided by the management and often designers find themselves being judged on metrics which they don’t even understand.
To overcome these challenges, we created Design OKRs.
How we Started? The Setup
We applied card sorting techniques to involve the designers in the OKR setting process.
- We asked designers to rate the maturity level of the team in terms of
- Design — Product Design / Design System / Visual Design/ Iconography / Illustrations
- Research- Methods/ Documentation
- Communication — Presentation / Collaboration
- Ownership — Proactiveness / Owning the product
- Exposure — Promoting Insider as the best place to work, share knowledge, articles
We wrote on a white board in a sentence -
The Objectives and key results which will help to achieve those goals.
We WANT TO …………………. (Objective) as measured by
We wrote the Objectives and the key results on sticky notes for card sorting
Key Results 1
Key Results 2
Key Results 3
Example for one of the Design OKRs
OBJECTIVE : Having a world class User experience
Key Results
- Reduce task completion time for users from 15 minutes to 9 minutes
- Creating Design system for the products
- Meet and collect feedback from 20 partners from Europe, APAC and the US
Setting up OKRs are important however regular alignments, maintaining focus and engagement will be needed to make your OKRs effective.
OKRs are new methodology for us. There are not a set way to set OKRs however they are something which really motivates the design team to openly discuss the improvement areas and help them to work together in the same direction.
