How do you develop quarterly/annual revenue operations OKRs and tie those to individual projects?

I'd start by reading Measure What Matters by John Doerr. It's a great resource to truly understand the OKR system with actionable templates and examples. Buy copies for your leadership team and work on developing this muscle as a team. The trick is not so much the OKRs themselves, but it's behavior that it reinforces with your teams to ensure your revenue operations team is staying proactive and focused and doesn't get whipsaweed by the demands of the organizations they support.

1. Work closely with your functional teams and leaders across the different go-to-market teams at your company to identify their primary needs and objectives.

2. Within each of those, understand where the gaps are that can be filled by revenue operations. These might include deep data/analysis needs, reporting or attribution gaps, technical work, revenue attribution, etc.

3. Once you have those, identify the KPIs associated with each objective and determine where you have strategic vs. technical needs on the revenue operations side.

4. Outline your revenue operations specific OKRs and clearly articulate how those tie back to GTM team objectives.

5. For every individual project that comes out of this planning process, tie that back to one of your OKRs so that your teams have clarity on how their work ties back to broader objectives.

When developing successful OKRs that maximize impact and have greatest impact, I recommend two rules:

1. Develop OKRs that directly or indirectly align with your company's topmost business priorities

2. Keep the same OKRs throughout the year and have quarterly targets rather

Align OKRs to Company Prios - you set and track OKRs ultimately to help your company achieve its key priorities (e.g. grow revenue, increase margin, increase market share, etc.). If you aren't able to articulate how your OKRs directly or indirectly align to your company's top priorities for the year, then you're creating objectives that are taking valuable resources (people, time and money) from helping the company reach its priorities. Thus define your rev ops OKRs after your company top level priorities are developed. And as you define each OKR, pressure test that they each align to and can be categorized under a company OKR.

Maintain the Same OKRs Year Round - it takes time to develop OKRs, educate the team on them, drive their adoption and make progress against them. Swapping out OKRs midway through the year will undermine your team's momentum and progress against OKRs and undercut your impact on the company's top priorities. Assuming you set reasonably aggressive targets for OKRs, you will need to give your team time to develop and execute against plans for reaching OKR targets as well as identify and surmount blockers/headwinds that arise. Thus spend more time up front defining and aligning against a shortlist of OKRs, commmit to tracking them for the whole year, and set quarterized targets that stretch your teams.

There are lots of good guides available that explain the OKR process and how to set them. I think your preferred ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity answer to this question is probably quite useful and you could even feed in some specific context to your business that would help do this better than I can without any more context.

The one maybe valuable thing I can add to this is a suggestion that everyone coordinate their OKRs in your reporting chain. If your company runs a good OKR process, your boss should have a set of OKRs that you can use to guide yours. Most things will ladder up nicely to hers and a few might be less direct (in which case you should have a lot of conviction that it merits being an OKR for you). Then if you're a people manager, your team can set individual OKRs that ladder up to yours. This creates nice alignment and commitment to getting a few things done really well (vs. having everyone doing whatever without having thought about dependencies on other people or projects). Then naturally the individual level OKRs are the individual projects that tie this together.

See my response above for what I think every RevOps OKR should be every quarter. I do recommend a practice for each individual to state every quarter how they are contributing to hitting the number, increasing predictability/visibility, and keeping long-term growth prospects. Most of the time for RevOps ICs it is a combination of excelling at their day-to-day responsibilities and completing projects that move the needle forward. So that's what I'd track.