A Colorado Tech Leader Offers Advice on Adjusting OKRs

April 7, 2020
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As the world slowly embraces a new normal, there is an increasing need for businesses to maintain focus and control. And while some adjustments may be made to the course of companies’ usual operations, the need to set goals and achieve them remains the same for many businesses. 

Across the nation, companies are using our present crisis as an opportunity to make some adjustments — particularly regarding KPIs and OKRs. At Denver-based Gtmhub, where OKRs are at the root of their operations, the team is finding ways to maintain clarity, focus and transparency within their goal-setting and strategic processes. 

We checked in with Gtmhub to learn how things have changed for their business and how they’ve made adjustments to their goals and business strategies. 

 

Harry Siggins
Chief of Staff • Quantive

First, tell us a bit about what's changed for your business in recent days? How has that impacted your OKRs? 

Adjusting the team to an entirely remote setup has been the most obvious change, but as an already distributed team with offices and teammates in Bulgaria, Germany and the U.K., we were quick to adjust to a new reality. With that being said, we have had to look at our OKRs in a new light. Our business outlook has not changed, and our objectives have stayed relatively the same, but we have had to focus more on how we will execute on a daily and weekly basis to achieve our OKRs, given the new variables at our disposal. Of course, we have the advantage of understanding an OKR’s DNA, which means that as individuals we have clarity and focus on our critical actions, and these are transparent to all of our colleagues across the organization.

 

In light of this, how have you adjusted your OKRs? How did you determine these were realistic goals for your team?

Coincidentally, we typically review and revamp our OKRs quarterly, so we were already in the mindset of recalibrating things as needed. It’s also in our OKRs fabric to allow for consistent adjustment. Rather than focusing strictly on the output of their work, our teams always know the outcome they are looking to achieve while having the flexibility to adapt and derive new plans with the bigger picture in mind. Each team has data at its core, allowing decisions to be made with confidence and ease, leading to a strong mix of realistic and aspirational goals. We happen to instrument our business within our OKRs framework, so identifying how environmental changes might ripple through our outcome environment is much easier than it might otherwise be.

 

What adjustments are you making to your business strategies in order to hit these new OKRs?

Over the last few weeks, we have seen very strong interest from around the world in attending our webinars that have covered everything from OKR best practices to product demonstrations. Our marketing and product teams have now decided to leverage this by setting OKRs around establishing an even stronger webinar presence going forward, expanding the webinar content to new functions such as our partnership program and establishing OKRs around the performance and interest of our new podcast, “Dreams with Deadlines.”

 

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