Who Does What By How Much?: A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs

The authors of Lean UX and Sense and Respond return with this deeply practical guide to Objectives and Key Results.

OKRs are a simple but powerful goal-setting framework used by leading companies in every industry imaginable. This book will help you learn how to succeed with OKRs by using them to put your customers at the center of everything you do.

Every team and organization wants to improve. OKRs help you get better, because they help your teams focus on the right work. Too many companies waste time, money, and energy working on the wrong things. Why? We lose track of what our customers want and need.

Everyone has a customer. (Yes, everyone—that includes you.) We all make something in our work, and we make it for other people. Those other people are our customers—though you may call them patients, students, constituents, or even coworkers. Our success depends on how those customers respond to what we make—and they’ll only respond positively if we deliver something that’s valuable to them. So, to succeed, we must figure out who our customers are, what customer responses drive value, and how (and how much) to change our customers’ behavior to achieve better results.

Objectives and Key Results help organizations do all of this by focusing teams’ goals on the question, “Who does what by how much?”

However, using OKRs isn’t just about writing goals in a new way. It requires changing the way you work, the way you think about your work, and the way you plan the work you’ll do in the future.