OKR is your 3-month company sprint

Imagine multiple teams/departments doing their best for the company; all pushing to move the revenue needle year over year. They are working their asses off to bring the best to the table; all equiped with necessary skills to get things done. The PMs are pitching their most innovative ideas, designers mocking up their fanciest UIs, engineers staying late to squash even the tiniest of bugs. Your team is agile, sprinting 2-week hackathons; the best work culture vibe there can ever be.

But at the end of the day, (or rather, when the whole board sits down for their year end's meeting) something doesn't feel right. In fact, nothing feels right. All the sprinting like hell the team has put on throughout the year, somehow, isn't adding up to what was expected.

Maybe expectations shifted somewhere between executives and stakeholders. Or maybe there were no clear expectations at all. Everyone was doing their best; just not aligned in the same direction toward what could’ve been achieved together.

Enter: OKR.

Wait. I didn't mean to sound that dramatic. Your company’s revenue problem won’t vanish overnight. And no, not every goal you set will be neatly wrapped up by year’s end.

What OKRs do is create a framework where everyone’s best efforts actually add up; not cancel each other out. The best for your comany might be increase in revenue, or launch the killer product, but if your best team isn't clear on what everybody else is doing and not aligned towards a common goal, no matter how best each one strives for, they'll just be firing in all direction with their eyes closed.

12 months. 4 quarters. What can realistically be achieved in three months adds up, one quarter at a time, to what’s achieved in a year. Treat each quarter as your company’s 3-month sprint -- one big epic with clear objectives and measurable key results, your “story points” for the quarter with a properly defined ACs. Yes, some targets will be missed and there'll be spillovers but that’s okay. Once the team finds its velocity, every sprint, every deliverable, and every "best" starts stacking toward the company’s biggest goals.