Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

In this chapter, Doerr provides a case study to illustrate the importance of focusing on only the most significant metrics to drive success. He profiles an education company called Remind, whose product enables safe and secure text communication between teachers, students, and parents. As with his other case studies, most of the chapter consists of text provided by the company in question. This chapter is largely written by Remind cofounder Brett Kopf.

As a young student, Kopf struggled with organization and time management. He was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. A teacher was able to help him focus by coaching him to work on only one thing at a time.

In college, Kopf was overwhelmed by the amount of information and tasks he had to juggle. To cope with this overload, and to help other students do the same, he took class syllabi and entered them into Excel, then created Excel macros to send out rudimentary reminders to students about upcoming assignments and deadlines. This project laid the foundation for what would later become Remind.

Kopf says that some of the company’s early problems arose from not talking to teachers, the end users of the product. Once the company started interviewing teachers and gathering feedback, the importance of focusing on the metrics that truly mattered to teachers became clear.

However, Kopf acknowledges the importance of curating and clarifying goals and ignoring goals that aren’t top-line priorities, even if they are proposed by end users. Kopf also credits OKRs with helping him delegate and relinquish control as the company grew. Overall, he believes that OKRs played a significant role in Remind’s success.

In Chapter 6, Doerr uses the company Nuna, a healthcare data platform, as an example of how important commitment is in implementing OKRs. Most of the chapter is written by Nuna cofounder and CEO Jini Kim.

Nuna’s first attempt to implement OKRs in 2015 failed, as the company went forward too quickly and without proper commitment. Not all the executives were fully onboard. In Nuna’s next attempt, the company approached implementation with greater commitment from the executives. Accordingly, Nuna saw significant improvements in alignment and employee engagement. Kim advises that, even if OKRs do not work the first time they are implemented, it’s worth persevering to see the benefits of implementing them with full commitment and alignment.

Doerr discusses the importance of transparency in organizations, especially when it comes to goal setting. Public goals, he argues, are more effective than private ones, as transparency leads to meritocracy as well as collaboration. However, even though it’s crucial for employees to align their goals with the organization’s mission, such alignment is rare. OKRs help bridge this gap by providing a framework for clear and shared objectives.

Doerr discusses two ways to achieve alignment: through cascading or through bottom-up goal setting. To illustrate cascading, which is a top-down goal-setting approach, he uses the example of a hypothetical football team. On this team, the top-level goal is set by the owner. The owner then sets their objective as well as the key results that will help them get there, and their key results become the objectives for their subordinates, cascading down to the head coach, assistant coaches, and then players. Doerr notes some drawbacks: the cascading approach can be rigid and slow and leave lower-level employees feeling marginalized.

Doerr next discusses the second approach, bottom-up goal setting, which involves skipping over levels of hierarchy or trusting employees to set their own goals in alignment with the company’s objectives. Doerr argues for avoiding micromanaging and for giving employees some autonomy, which fosters innovation—a vital component for companies to survive and thrive. He again gives the example of Google, which allows employees the equivalent of one day per workweek to work on projects of their choosing. One employee’s project, for instance, gave rise to Gmail.

Doerr says it’s important to not only align goals with top-level company objectives but also to foster connectivity between teams and to acknowledge dependencies between different teams.

In Chapter 8, Doerr includes a case study of the company MyFitnessPal, with a passage written by cofounder and CEO Mike Lee, to illustrate the importance of alignment within organizations. Doerr contends that OKRs can help companies align in every direction, fostering vertical, horizontal, and diagonal connections between different layers and departments.

At MyFitnessPal, Lee and his organization struggled with alignment. Their engineering team, specifically, felt siloed from the rest of the company and disconnected from its mission and goals. Their OKRs were mostly concerned with infrastructure and technical improvements. Additionally, the engineers were often confused on what they should be working on. At the same time, their role was vital to the company’s success as their product relied heavily on technology.

OKRs helped the company align. Lee started holding periodic meetings so that the team could identify dependencies between departments. Once Under Armour acquired MyFitnessPal, forcing the company to face the issues of scale and integration, OKRs became even more crucial.

Chapter 9 includes a case study of the company Intuit, with writing by Atticus Tysen, the company’s chief information officer. Doerr describes Intuit as an especially transparent company, noting that quality was fostered with the help of OKRs. At Intuit, employees set about half their goals in alignment with company-wide objectives.

Tysen claims that the OKR system is successful because it is simple and transparent. The fact that OKRs are visible throughout the organization helps create a sense of alignment and shared purpose among employees.

In the information technology (IT) department, which Tysen ran, he found OKRs to be especially helpful because IT was the department that was constantly juggling multiple competing priorities. Moreover, Tysen’s department had remote teams in other parts of the globe, such as Bangalore. He found that OKRs helped align and motivate employees located in different geographical locations, despite the physical distance and time difference.