Measure What Matters
About this book
Doerr's account of Objectives and Key Results, drawn from Intel and applied at Google and elsewhere. Objectives are qualitative and directional while key results are numerical and time bound. Covers focus, alignment, commitment and stretch as OKR properties, the difference between committed and aspirational objectives, and the conversations, feedback and recognition that go alongside them. Largely case studies.
Description via Product Digest.
Topics
Related concepts
- How to Write Product OKRs with Measurable Outcomes and GuardrailsWrite objectives and key results that connect to strategy, define baselines and avoid confusing delivered features with customer outcomes.
- Measuring valueValue is established by evidence rather than assertion, and the Increment is what makes it inspectable.
- Product Economics: Cost of Delay, Opportunity Cost, LTV and CACUse product economics to compare investments, calculate customer contribution and avoid misleading lifetime value or prioritisation claims.
- Specification gaming and goal misgeneralisationTwo ways a system does exactly what it was trained to do and still fails, and why that is harder to fix than disobedience would be.
- Leading vs Lagging Indicators: Choose Product Strategy MetricsConnect early signals to customer and business outcomes, define metric denominators and time lags, and avoid treating correlation as proof.
- Adopting generative AI in a businessMatching a solution type to a business need, the constraints that decide it, the steps to get it into an organisation, and how to measure whether it worked.
- Goodhart's law and metric gamingCharles Goodhart's 1975 observation, the three ways a product measure gets gamed once a team is judged on it, why most gaming is done by people acting in good faith, and the defences that keep a measure honest under pressure.