How to Use OKRs to Become a Better Product Manager

If you’re a product manager, congratulations! You fulfil one of the most valuable but often misunderstood roles at your company. As one of the pilots in the cockpit steering your company towards success, you get to define what success looks like. You’re lucky because your team’s objectives and your organization’s objectives or company OKRs are closely aligned. At the same time, you’re under a lot of pressure to keep different teams focused on the central goal: maximizing value for your customers. This, in turn, translates into maximizing value for your company. But how can you define success if you aren’t able to articulate what success looks like for your business?

If you are facing any of these problems, then you might not be setting OKRs effectively:

1. Your teams struggle with prioritizing different strategies and managing timelines
2. Your teams aren’t moving in the same direction, creating conflicts and inefficiency
3. You are feeling ineffective and off-balance, like your progress is stuck in place

What Do OKRs Mean For Product Management?

OKRs are the defined priority goals that keep everyone within an organization focused on what truly matters. A strategically aligned vision leads to a shared sense of purpose. As a product manager, it’s your job to turn that collective focus into the passion that inspires everyone on your team.

OKRs help you answer two of the most important questions for any organization.

1. Where do we want to go?
2. How do we know we’re getting there?

Remember, OKRs are not only there to document tasks. They exist to energize and motivate. They should be ambitious and give your teams a target to aim for. Keeping track of your OKRs forces you to continually reinforce your goals in the context of your shared ambition. What is the best way to keep track of your important OKRs? While some teams try to use spreadsheets for OKRs, they are not scalable or agile enough to truly benefit your organization. Instead, you should use an intuitive OKR management software such as Profit.co to help you focus, measure, and achieve your goals. You can get started on Profit.co today completely free of charge!

Key Benefits of Applying OKRs in Product Management

If you set appropriate OKRs, they’ll offer immense benefit for your entire organization. Here are two key benefits:

1. They teach teams to be result-oriented.
2. Reviewing OKRs gives you regular opportunities for reinforcing direction and focus.

By identifying the key results that you are targeting, your entire team is on the same page. They know exactly what to do and whether they have achieved their goals by the end of each cycle. While focusing on process is important, clearly setting out the desired results ahead of time ensures that no one spends time on solving issues that are not on the priority list. Setting OKRs also gives you an excellent opportunity to review your team’s achievements at the end of each quarter. This is a reasonable amount of time to see what works and what doesn’t. In addition, it helps you stay on track and decide what direction to pivot towards.

The Dos and Don’ts of Product Management OKRs

When setting effective OKRs, be ambitious and specific. Here’s an ineffective objective: “Grow revenue over the next few months.” It’s too general and doesn’t point towards an inspiring target. Instead, set a more inspiring, specific, time-bound goal: “Achieve record 2nd quarter revenue growth.” When it comes to defining key results, make sure that they are quantifiable and lead to objective grading. An ineffective key result might be: “Improve customer acquisition.” Instead, aim for quantifiable, specific results: “Onboard 250 new clients in the 3rd quarter, and reduce customer loss by 10%.” Remember not to take on too many OKRs at once. You should focus on 3-5 OKRs in each quarter. For each objective, you should have between 3-5 key results. Having too many OKRs can lead to unbalanced OKR progress.

Product Manager OKRs Examples

Here are some examples of product management OKRs broken down into each step of the product life cycle:

User Research OKRs

Design and Development OKRs

Product Release OKRs

User Metrics OKRs

Internal Team Operations OKRs

How Your Product Team Can Make OKRs Work

Setting effective OKRs for your product management team can help solve issues with managing timelines or prioritizing development strategies. They allow you to avoid conflicts by ensuring that you’re all pulling in the same direction and have the same goals in mind. In product management, every objective is key to the success of your organization. You can’t afford to waste time trying to achieve vague aspirations. That’s where OKRs come in, allowing you to work smarter, not harder. Do you want to learn more about defining and tracking OKRs on the Profit.co software? Schedule a free demo today with our OKR experts to find out how our software can help you achieve your goals effectively and efficiently.

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