What are good OKRs for product management?

This could really range based upon the company, your users, your target goals, where you are in your business lifecyle, etc.

The most basic ones are: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral

You could also be measuring customer lifetime value. 

Again this will really depend upon what type of business you are in.

Objectives and Key Results are meant to encourage cross-functional alignment and collaboration. In product management, it is essential to think of OKRs as a method for prioritizing scope that will help drive the top business KPIs, so that your product roadmap has a built-in mechanism for considering how to help the business succeed. 

The below example is one I have seen work well: 

• Top Level Business Objective: Increase enterprise ARR by 20%
• Product Key Result: Deliver paid feature X to help compete and close 3 sales pipeline deals
• Product Key Result: Implement use case documentation for paid features to support Field Team

A good framework I use follows the product adoption lifecyle curve:

• At Introduction (think MVP) the main objective is establishing product-market fit.
• At Growth you need to shift objectives to focus on maximize growth & share. If you're not profitable at this stage, focus on getting to profitability.
• At Maturity, maximize profit and aim to extend the lifetime of the product through diffentiation or adjacent products/segments.
• At Decline your focus is to remain profitable and transition cusotmers to what is next. 

That said, the best OKRs for PMs are to tie Product Management to whatever the company cares about. 

If you can't tie your work to what is important to the business, then it's going to be very difficult to get funding (e.g. engineering and UX resources, marketing support) for your product so working hard to tie your effort with what hte company cares about is time well spent.

Some tips on product management OKR if your organization uses OKR framework and cascading down to functional teams

• Use this opportunity to align product priorities with company goals. Especially focusing on customer adoption and product engagement drivers  

• Think beyond feature completion and also focus on customer/business outcomes. Leverage this to align with Engineering and use this opportunity to change definition of done from ‘release complete’ to ‘meeting customer/business goals’ with roadmap features  

• It's also a great way to align with x-functional teams, especially Sales and Marketing functions for successful operational execution for product launches

I'm not sure there's a good, one-size-fits-all answer for this question.

OKRs (objectives and key results) are meant to drive behavior change and create focus for your team. I think most teams that use OKRs intend to use them in this way, but fall into a few common traps:

• Using OKRs as a management tool to drive outputs instead of outcomes

  • If you're like me, at some point you might have been assigned an OKR without measurable "key results"

• Creating too many OKRs, which completely undercuts the purpose of OKRs in the first place

• Setting OKRs in a vacuum (detached from business strategy)

• Sets goals for results that you don't currently have a good way to measure and track

• Being under-ambitious or overly ambitious

  • In the classical framework, OKRs are meant to be stretch goals, but if they are clearly unachievable it undercuts the value of setting OKRs right out of the gate

So what makes a good product OKR?

Generally speaking, I think there are a few good rules of thumb for creating good OKRs:

1. Create a clear line of sight

   • Each OKR should be connected directly to the company strategy

   • It must be measurable (by definition) and time-bound

     • This is an important call out - its easy to set aspiration goals, but if you can't actually measure the key result it is a bad OKR

2. Focus on outcomes instead of outputs

   • Bad OKR: "Release feature X"

   • Good OKR: "Increase feature adoption by X%"

3. Balance multiple horizons / is measurable across multiple dimensions

   • A good OKR might include results across dimensions like customer impact (NPS, adoption), business value (revenue, market share), and/or product health (performance, quality)

4. Be ambitious, but attainable

   • An OKR that will be attained without doing anything doesn't change behavior

   • An OKR with unrealistic results will deflate your team

Like I said above, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to good product OKRs, but here are some examples of good OKRs for different product scenarios:

Objective: Successfully establish our new analytics product in the mid-market

Key Results:

• Achieve $500K ARR from mid-market segment

• Maintain 85% user retention in first 90 days after launch

• Reach average setup time under 30 minutes for new customers

Objective: Become the central hub for our customers' workflows

Key Results:

• Increase the number of active integrations per customer from 2 to 4

• Grow adoption of our API from 5% to 15%

• Reduce the average time to integrate new tools from 2 days to 4 hours

Objective: Transform our product into a self-serve solution

Key Results:

• Reduce customer support tickets per user by 50%

• Increase users who complete onboarding without assistance from 40% - 80%

• Meanwhile, maintain a CSAT score of 8/10

True OKRs should be cross-functional and not limited to specific areas such as Product Management, Design, UX, or SRE. The "Objective" (O) in OKRs should promote alignment across teams, helping to avoid local optimizations. Key Results (KRs) can be function-specific and have asynchronous relationships with KRs from other functions.

If functional OKRs are necessary, ensure that objectives remain aligned across functions.

Regardless of the logistics of OKR training, Product Management can leverage OKRs to maintain alignment among cross-functional teams throughout the product lifecycle and foster a data-driven product culture.

Tactical Production Objectives OKRs

• Improve user experience by X%.

• Increase monthly active users (MAU) and weekly active users (WAU).

• Enhance performance by Y%.

• Achieve scalability improvements by a specified number.

• Drive revenue growth by Z%.

Strategic Innovation and collaboration OKRs

• Dedicate X% of time to user research

• Improve Net Promoter Score (NPS) by Y%.

• Increase funnel conversion and productivity by Z% through collaboration between Product and Sales teams.

This is the best question to start with!

Objectives and Key Results are often praised because of the stakeholders’ expectation of clarity, alignment, and clear/standard reporting. OKRs are often hated by teams because of being badly defined, in a way that misrepresent success or progress, and get costly to update with little meaning.

Before going into details it’s important to note that there is often confusion between Key Results (KR in OKR) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI). While both are meant to be a single meaningful number, KR express progress towards an objective, KPI express a behaviour of the business or market that might not be related to an objective (yet!). As such a KR is often a leading metric (progress toward a future state), KPI is often a lagging metric (observing the result of various past dynamics).

For OKRs, Objectives are usually easy to come by, but the core of OKRs’ success are good Key Results. The best Key Results have those characteristics:

• Concise to communicate succinctly and efficiently horizontally and vertically,

• Reflect incremental progress (ideally evolves linearly from starting point to finish line),

• Are leading metrics (can be updated as we progress towards the goal),

• Meaningfully targets a successful milestones towards the Objective.

Here are a few examples of Key Results I have been using in the past:

• Example about fixing a situation expressed as a percentage from current number to future number: Bring quality issue resolution turn around time to matches [product] median [at target number] by [date]

• Example about ensuring consistency expressed as a percentage of total delivery over the period: Deliver [product] roadmap updates to the community [at frequency] during [period]

• Example about a single delivery broken down in somewhat equal phases or deliverable: Deliver sales enablement material for [product] for each [identified categories] by [date].

• Example of an exceptional case when a KPI has a lifecycle so short it can be used as a Key Result: Turn community sentiment towards [product] from [baseline] to [target] by [date].

See question “What are some of the worst KPIs for Product Managers to commit to achieving?” for patterns to avoid.

See question: “How do you approach setting crisp KPIs and targets for Engine features and linking them to your topline metrics?” for my step by step process for realistic OKRs.