Product Ownership

What Happens After OKRs?

How managing by outcomes impacts your prescriptive, feature-centric product roadmap and what you can do about it.

Jeff Gothelf

Jul 26, 2018 • 3 min read

4.10 (29)

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OKRs

Product Discovery

Goal Setting

Goals

Product Roadmap

Summary

The article delves into what really happens after shifting your team to leverage OKRs for organizational goals. It states that if the team doesn't know how to do continuous learning, the deployment might not be a success. Thus it suggests that project leaders should consider training the team on product discovery when implementing ORKs. Read the text to find out more about what is product discovery and why teams should be taught how to go about it, and some of the steps that a team should take when OKRs have been confirmed.

Takeaways

Objectives and Key Results, when done right, are the right alignment and goal-setting mechanism for building customer-centric, continuously learning teams. However, if your teams don’t know how to practice continuous learning, teach them how to do product discovery.
Product discovery is the work your teams do to test their ideas. It’s research. It’s designing, experimenting and it’s proof of concept. And much more.
Success is defined by our Key Results, not by the deployment of a specific feature. Teams work in cross-functional collaboration to propose ideas, test them, validate/kill them, and move forward in the most objective, the evidence-driven way they can.
When well-written OKRs are given to teams as their new measure of progress and success those teams have to now figure out what the right combination of code, copy, and design is that will result in those changes in behavior. Diving into the initial product roadma[ through "Product Discovery'' might help spark some ideas in the team.