OKRs for Product teams

Product OKR themes

Depending on what stage your product is in, you may find the below examples relevant. Most teams will look at the company goals and strategy to decide where to focus. Product teams are usually structured around the following stages. To learn more about these stages and the AARRR Framework, watch this video and read this post by Dave McClure

Anatomy of a good OKR

A good product OKR consists of the following elements

Inspiring Objective or Goal:

Project-based key result:
When a project needs to be completed to achieve the KR and the project will take a significant amount of time and is a prerequisite to the KR. Tracking as a project key result could give the teams good visibility.

Input key result:
Input metrics are the things that you can control. these are the metrics when moved, will move the output metrics.
e.g. % users that sent at least 1 invite in week 1

Output key result:
Output metrics are the things that you cannot control. these are the metrics you want to ultimately achieve but are not directly in your hand.
e.g. User retention, stock market price, annual recurring revenue (ARR)

Examples of product OKRs

Output OKRs vs Outcome OKRs

Another OKR mistake product teams make is to use OKRs as a project management tool. a classic example is to use OKRs to track product sprints and not focus on product outcomes. Look at the two examples below:

Tip: Product teams have to do learning and building work before they measure outcomes like Retention or Revenue. This work is captured as milestones in North. Read more about Key Results vs Milestones.

New Product Launch OKRs

◎ Objective: Validate the product-market fit for our new fitness product

• KR 1: Complete the Design Sprint to explore solutions by end of the month
• KR 2: Validate top hypotheses by talking to 5 users
• KR 3: Launch MVP in 60 days
• KR 4: 10% of our users should be retained for 8 weeks

◎Objective: Launch our MVP to help people get fit

• KR 1: Get the first 100 users to sign up
• KR 2: 40% of users should be retained by week two
• KR 3: Get to an NPS score of 35
• KR 4: 10% of our users should upgrade to our paid plan

Onboarding and Activation

◎ Objective: Improve our onboarding funnel for better retention

• 🚩 Ship new onboarding flow by 2nd week
• 🏳 Improve product onboarding completion rate from 50% to 70%
• 🏳 Increase the activation rate of new users from 60% to 70%

◎ Objective: Deeply understand the onboarding needs of users

• 🏳 Interview 5 users who drop out of the onboarding process
• 🏳 Interview 5 users who complete onboarding and are active
• 🚩 Publish findings on a customer journey map by end of the quarter

Product Led Growth

◎ Objective: Launch our MVP to help people get fit

• 🏳 Get the first 100 users to sign up
• 🏳 40% of users should be retained by week two
• 🏳 Get to an NPS score of 35
• 🏳 10% of our users should upgrade to our paid plan

Retention and Engagement

◎ Objective: Improve our product engagement

• 🚩 Discovery top reasons why teams are not engaging
• 🏳 Improve week 4 engagement to 20%

◎ Objective: Improve the product’s reputation

• 🏳Establish product leadership by speaking at 3 industry events
• 🏳Personally reach out and learn from the top 10 users
• 🏳Shorten first-response time to user-flagged errors by 10%

Monetisation or Revenue

◎ Objective: Accelerate revenue growth for our product

• 🚩 Launch paid feature x to all users by end of November
• 🚩 Run 3 pricing experiments to get to 100k MRR
• 🏳 Generate x% of total revenue from this feature

Recruitment and People

◎ Objective: Build the world’s best product team

• 🏳 Create a career growth framework for PM
• 🏳 Identify 3 required courses every PM should take
• 🏳 Publish internal PM Processes for better visibility

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