Measure What Matters (Summary)
In 1999, a venture capitalist sat down with the two young founders of a promising but chaotic startup with about 30 employees. He presented them with a simple goal-setting system he'd learned from his mentor at Intel, Andy Grove. That system, called OKRs, helped the founders focus their brilliant but scattered energy. The startup was Google. The rest is history.
Objectives Are the 'What'; Key Results Are the 'How'
The power of OKRs lies in its simple, two-part structure. Objectives are the significant, inspirational, and action-oriented goals. Key Results are the specific, measurable, and time-bound metrics that track whether you've actually achieved the Objective. This structure separates your aspiration from your execution plan.
Doerr gives the example of a professional football team. The Objective is ambitious and inspirational: "Win the Super Bowl." The Key Results are not vague ideas like "play better." They are concrete metrics: "Achieve an average of 250 passing yards per game," "Hold opponents to under 15 points per game," and "Maintain a 90% success rate on special teams plays."
Aim for the Roof, Not Just the Ceiling
OKRs are designed to be ambitious and push teams beyond their comfort zones. So-called "stretch goals" encourage innovation. Hitting just 70% of a truly audacious stretch goal can represent a massive success and a greater achievement than hitting 100% of a safe, easy goal.
In its early days, Google's Chrome team set an audacious Objective to build the world's dominant browser. A Key Result was to reach 20 million weekly active users in the first year. They only hit 10 million. By traditional metrics, this was a 50% failure. But for Google, this stretch goal pushed them to innovate at a pace that led to a massive success far greater than if they'd set a 'safe' target of 5 million.
Transparency Creates Alignment
A core tenet of OKRs is that they are public and transparent throughout the organization. From the CEO to an intern, everyone can see everyone else's goals. This creates radical alignment, prevents silos, and shows every employee how their work contributes to the company's highest-level mission.
At Google, any employee could look up the OKRs of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This allowed a junior engineer working on search latency to see exactly how their Key Result of "reduce server response time by 30ms" connected directly to the founders' company-wide Objective of "make Google's services faster for users worldwide."
Goals Are Useless Without Conversations
Setting OKRs isn't enough; they must be paired with a system of continuous performance management. Doerr calls this CFRs: Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition. These ongoing check-ins are what bring the goals to life and transform them from a static document into a dynamic management tool.
The book highlights how Adobe scrapped its dreaded annual performance review in favor of a "Check-in" system. Managers and employees now have frequent, informal conversations centered on OKR progress, career growth, and real-time feedback. This switch led to a 30% reduction in voluntary employee turnover.
