About this podcast episode

Allan Kelly, author of Succeeding with OKRs in Agile, discusses OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and why they are crucial for driving meaningful outcomes.

Allan and Bill provide practical strategies for integrating OKRs into your agile teams, empowering them with the tools to overcome common challenges.

In this podcast, you will learn the following:

✅ The fundamentals of OKRs

✅ How to align OKRs with your team’s goals and objectives

✅ Best practices for setting and measuring OKRs

🎉 Real-world examples and success stories of OKRs in action

Transcript

(transcripts are auto-generated, so please excuse the brevity)

[00:00:00] Introducing Allan Kelly

Bill Raymond: Hi, and welcome to the Agile in Action podcast. My name is Bill Raymond, and I’m excited to introduce today’s guest, Allan Kelly. Hi, Allan. How are you today?

Allan Kelly: Bill. I’m doing well today.

Bill Raymond: Wonderful. Allan, you are the author of Succeeding with OKRs and the Art of Agile Product Ownership.

[00:00:17] Allan Background and Agile Philosophy

Bill Raymond: Before we get started, can you share a little bit about yourself?

Allan Kelly: Yeah so, um, I live here in beautiful London, England um so why some of your listeners may hear a funny accent here. I like to describe myself as a guide, an Agile guide or a management guide. I think I have problems with the word Agile coach, along the same lines I like to think I’m guiding companies and teams to more modern ways of working.

Allan Kelly: And those ways of working normally include Agile and these days OKRs.

[00:00:47] Understanding OKRs

Bill Raymond: Maybe you could define what an OKR is before we get started.

Allan Kelly: Ah, so an OKR is an objective and a key result. So the objective, the outcome you want to bring about and the key results. There’s a little bit of debate there. For me, the key results are the acceptance criteria. They describe the world when you meet that objective. And when you think about key results as your success criteria, OKRs start to look a lot like test first management.

Allan Kelly: And I’m sure we’ll come back to that.

Bill Raymond: We will. The whole podcast is about objective driven agility, so we’re going

Bill Raymond: So we will drill into this.

[00:01:26] OKRs in Agile Management

Bill Raymond: Now, when we talk about these, it’s a management term, right? This concept of OKRs, it’s a way of allowing us to lead an organization with some objectives that don’t necessarily strictly define how exactly you’re going to do something.

Bill Raymond: So teams still have some autonomy and how they actually deliver on that objective, right?

Allan Kelly: Yes, that is where the tension starts There’s an awful lot of people in the world who hear about OKRs and they think oh this is how managers tell teams, particularly agile teams, what to do. And that kind of partly comes from the history of OKRs. They were originally a variation on what was called management by objective.

Allan Kelly: And so the people at the top decide and it cascades down. But as your listeners probably recognize that is not agile. Agile is all about getting the people doing the work to contribute and having a voice and having a say and that more of a bottom up movement. So that’s one of the tensions that carries in OKRs.

Allan Kelly: So I like to differentiate between those, if you like, legacy OKRs. The OKRs that might be used in 1975 and the OKRs we use today, 2024, which you might call Agile OKRs, where we can incorporate more of a bottom up movement.

Bill Raymond: Let’s talk a little bit about how that works. I think you’re actually going to be podcast number 165, if I’m not mistaken. Yay! We haven’t talked a lot about OKRs. We’ve talked a little bit about OKRs, but they come up frequently throughout the podcast and the importance of them.

[00:03:03] Product Ownership and OKRs

Bill Raymond: Very often we have this role called a product owner and a product manager. Maybe they’re one person, maybe they’re two people.

Bill Raymond: It all depends on the, how you’re forming the team. But there’s always this concept of someone that’s on the team defining the customer value and prioritizing that value so that the team has some direction. Not that the team doesn’t do that too. But they’re kind of, if you will, responsible for it.

Bill Raymond: So is this where OKRs start at this level, or is, or maybe you could describe how you propose that it occurs?

[00:03:37] Aligning OKRs with Team Goals

Allan Kelly: So the way I see it is that unless you’re working at a startup, which you’ve just founded, that there’s going to be somebody in the organization or some people in the organization who are responsible for the overall organization, the overall purpose the objectives of the company, the purpose, and they have a big say in culture, resource allocation, the leaders of the organization, your C sweet people.

Allan Kelly: And they are responsible for saying, hey, this is why the company exists. And this is what we’re trying to do. And they set those big goals and they may even set the strategy around it. And once upon a time, they would have issued orders that cascade down the organization and you’d be told what to do. The whole Agile or whole Agile movement wants us to see teams that have autonomy and authority and involved with this. And if you’re being given orders from above that just flies in the face there. So the way I see it is, our leaders are still responsible for the purpose and the big objectives, and they’re even responsible for the strategy.

Allan Kelly: But that’s where they stop and they say to the teams, they say, hey, teams, how can you help us? Because actually the people at the top of the organization are often the ones who are most removed from the customers. It’s the people lower down the organization. It’s your everyday product owners, product managers, who are meeting customers.

Allan Kelly: It’s your engineers who are helping out with support desk calls and meeting customers at conferences and wherever. They know a lot more about what customers want. And so your senior leaders set the big picture, the height, the broad picture, rather, and then they say to the teams, how can you help us? And the teams reply with these OKRs.

Allan Kelly: Now on most teams, you’re going to find a bunch of engineers and testers and other specialists. People who are the specialists in knowing what customers want, they are the people we call product owners or product managers. And I see product managers as a type of product owner. And they’re concerned with what do the customers outside of this building want?

Allan Kelly: What do customers outside of this building value? What will make them part with their hard earned cash? So their specialist skills are not JavaScript or test frameworks, or even user interface design. Their specialist skills is deep customer understanding and being able to understand what customers value.

Allan Kelly: And so when we’re talking about OKRs, we’re talking about delivering things that move the business forward. It’s natural that those product people are going to lead on what the OKRs are going to be, because they’re the best informed on what the customers want. Doesn’t mean they’re the only voice, but they’re going to know more about what customers value.

Bill Raymond: What you just shared sounds natural. You, the teams are defining what exactly the customer is going to receive because they’re the closest to the customer and the particular need that their team serves.

[00:06:19] Challenges and Best Practices with OKRs

Bill Raymond: But very often, when we do look at a larger organization, especially when they get larger, we see these OKRs come from the top and then they just trickle down and it does sound a little bit more like a, here is what you’re going to do as opposed to figure out how to do something within your own framework.

Bill Raymond: That might fly in the face of what some people are listening to. Can you describe what a good if you will, executive OKR would look like, and then what that might look like from the team level?

Allan Kelly: I sometimes think the only objective an executive has is for his teams or her teams to succeed. This is classic servant leadership. The leader is there to help the people in the organization deliver. And I would say number one for any leader is helping your people deliver. Now, key results should be measuring how they deliver.

Allan Kelly: And key results will be quantified. So I’m going to want some kind of measurement in there about how many of our teams are delivering value to our customers. So we might want to consider how we’re going to measure that and that might take you into customer metrics, how many of our customers are satisfied, how many customers are renewing the contract, and I’d really want to get some numbers in there.

Allan Kelly: We also start to run up against here one of, one of the catches with OKRs. OKRs also contain this ambition agenda. You hear people talk about moonshot OKRs and 10X OKRs, and they’re saying, you know, shoot for the sky. And we don’t mind if the team don’t get there as long as they do something.

Allan Kelly: So some of our metrics, we have to step a bit outside of the OKR framework and say, we’re not going to measure this on how many OKRs our teams complete. What we’re going to measure this on is, are the outcomes, are satisfied customers are sales increasing, are our revenues going in the right direction, those kinds of things.

Allan Kelly: OKRs are a way of delivering that. So when I think about the exec suite, help your team succeed. Help your teams grow the revenue, help your teams have satisfied customers, help your teams want to work there, satisfied employees, reduce the turnover by keeping your employees satisfied and reduce the turnover, more satisfied employees.

Allan Kelly: One might hypothesize that leads to happier customers. So at the exec level, that’s the kind of stuff I’m looking for. A bit ambitious, maybe.

Bill Raymond: No that’s great. I appreciate that. And then how does that. Trickle down, I guess we’re, I’m trying not to use the word trickle down because what we want to do is align to that overall objective while also still delivering. And what I think I’m hearing from you is that so long as you can find ways to test and validate that you are moving the needle on that, if you will, executive driven OKR, then how you do it is more focused on the team.

Allan Kelly: Yeah. I want the teams to be saying, look, here’s the company mission. Here’s the company purpose. We are a drugs company. We are, we have many missions. We are in the vaccine department. The company’s purpose is to help people recover or to avoid illness. We’re in a department that creates vaccines that stops people being ill.

Allan Kelly: Our team’s mission is to try different vaccine combinations, test things out, and we are going to invent vaccines, and we’re going to run trials, and some of those trials are going to flop, and some of those trials will succeed, but even the ones that flop, we can learn from them. And because of what we’re learning, We might see new vaccines we can create or new formulations we can create.

Allan Kelly: And we are furthering the company mission by doing what we do best. And that is creating and testing vaccines. The team themselves can write OKRs that fit their situation here today. And they’re going to last for the next few months.

Bill Raymond: That’s great. And and is that what you typically recommend?

[00:10:12] Implementing OKRs in Agile Teams

Bill Raymond: Is it the OKRs do just last that few months or a quarter?

Allan Kelly: So the typical cycle in the OKR industry, if you’d like to call it that, is the OKRs last three months, 12 weeks, 13 weeks, and that generally seems to work. There’s a couple of catches with it. One is that at the 13 week mark companies often have lots of other cycles, you know, your sales quarter reporting your stock market reporting, and it’s There might be an argument for having slightly longer cycles to decouple it from everything else.

Allan Kelly: I also see an argument for shorter cycles, particularly when you’re starting off. When you’re just starting off with OKRs and you’re learning to set them and you’re learning to measure them, you’re learning to focus on them. I would advise people who are just starting with OKRs, instead of running a 13 week cycle, run a 6 or an 8 week cycle. Maybe run a 6 week cycle and back it with another 6 week cycle.

Allan Kelly: So do 6 cycles of setting your OKRs, executing against your OKRs, reviewing what happens at the end, setting some OKRs, executing, re-evaluating at the end. And by doing two short cycles, you’ll get twice as much experience and then fall back to a three month cycle or four, whatever your organization is using.

Bill Raymond: Oh, that’s great. Thank you. And I guess one of the things that we talk a lot about on this podcast as well is with agile teams, we tend to have this backlog where we’re constantly grooming all the capabilities and features that we want to put into our product. It doesn’t matter if it’s software development or not.

Bill Raymond: We have this backlog of work. And I think sometimes we get too caught up in this backlog. And sometimes it can get a little bit large and unwieldy. And, there’s some good arguments against trimming that down, but there’s also this automatic mindset I think a lot of us get, which is we want to be able to measure everything.

Bill Raymond: So if you think about a backlog of work that we need to do, and you think about the OKRs, do we have to align all of that together? Is there some sort of an alignment process that has to happen between OKRs and our backlog?

[00:12:19] OKRs and Backlog Management

Allan Kelly: First thing, let me say, OKRs should not be in addition to your backlog and everything else you’re doing. And I sometimes come across this. Organizations say, look, this is how we work, this is our backlog, and by the way, we’re now going to have OKRs in addition to all of that. This is a really bad idea.

Allan Kelly: This potentially just increases your work in progress. And we all know what more work in progress happens. It makes things worse. So do not just add OKRs. If you’re going to use OKRs in an Agile setting, this backlog question is the most important question you need to answer.

Allan Kelly: How do your OKRs line up with your backlog or vice versa? So let me tell you a story. Back before the pandemic, I was coaching with the team and the organization decreed, thou should use OKRs. I think the big management consultancy told the execs and the execs told the coaches and the coaches were told to do it.

Allan Kelly: And um, I had teams in London. And there were teams in Belgium and I was, I sat down with one of the Belgian coaches once, and we were both trying to figure out how do we put the backlog and the OKRs together? And she said, I’m going to sit down with my architect, my product manager. We are going to work out what we’re going to do for the next three months from the backlog and we’re going to write OKRs to describe what we’re doing for the next three months.

Allan Kelly: And I said, we are going to take the opposite approach. I’m going to sit down with my people and we’re going to decide the OKRs and we’re going to ignore the backlog. We’re going to put it in the backseat and we are going to drive everything from the OKRs.

Allan Kelly: Now, if when we come to do an OKR, there’s a story in the backlog, which would be very useful, by all means, we’ll do it. If we need to do something to meet the OKR and ignore the backlog, we’re just going to write it out and do it. And so we set off, we had an experiment here, same company, different teams, different locations. So we meet back together three months later to debrief with each other. And we started debrief and she says, I’m doing it your way next time. And the fact is how many of you, how many of you listening to this can tell me which backlog items you’ll be doing in 10 weeks time? And the fact is, the world is a very uncertain place.

Allan Kelly: We are recording this. In 10 weeks time, there’ll be a new government in Britain. We could be in a far worse war situation. There’s, God knows where inflation will be. what I’m saying is remove your backlog altogether. I sometimes say nuke the backlog and perhaps more realistically put it in the back seat, use it for reference, use it for ideas, work out what your OKRs are, align your OKRs with your business strategy, with your customer needs, what’s going to create value in the organization.

Allan Kelly: Think big and set some OKRs. And then every time you go into a planning meeting or a replenishment meeting or however you do it. Check where you are with the OKRs and ask yourself and your team, what do we need to do to advance on the OKRs and drive through the OKRs? Because, you know, that backlog over there, you might have 100 items, you might have 500, you know, I know teams with thousands and many of the items in there, they haven’t got to the top in 12 months or two years.

Allan Kelly: They’re unlikely to come to the top. They’re just getting in the way. If the OKRs are aligned with your strategy, they derive from what your customers want, if you’ve agreed them with your senior leadership, then why would an item in the backlog that’s been there for six months get in the way?

Bill Raymond: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And I have a good example of that as well.

[00:15:41] Real-World Examples and Case Studies

Bill Raymond: I was recently talking to a product team and they create a software application and the product manager, the team knew that the customers were looking to expand outside of the U.S. they wanted to start having other people use it in other countries, which would be fine and dandy if everyone spoke US English, but in fact, a lot of their customers did not.

Bill Raymond: But there was always this priority within the company that was, if you will not aligned with that kind of growth. And so when the organization said we are going to do OKRs and the executives said that they want to expand their growth internationally, that gave the product team an option to come back and say, we’ve done some research.

Bill Raymond: We know that this is the primary language that our current user base has, we know that these are the next two languages that they want to roll out to. We need to re-engineer our product in some ways to allow for that internationalization. Cause we all know that, the words "hello world" don’t appear the same exact length on every screen in the world based on language.

Bill Raymond: So what they did was they took that OKR to grow. And they said, here’s how we’re going to do it. And so they decided here is our larger four month plan to provide for internationalization and up to these different languages. And then they just started breaking that up into the backlog and in their two weeks sprints, they were slowly building that out and beta testing it and testing it with customers.

Bill Raymond: And I think that was a kind of similar example to what you just used.

Allan Kelly: I think that’s a brilliant example, Bill, and that’s the way I want teams to go connect up what the teams are doing with strategy, with the big questions. You don’t want to be one of these feature factories or story factories where you’re just doing backlog items. People get demoralized by that.

Allan Kelly: And the other thing is one of the, one of the big drains on our agility. Is in many ways debt, and everyone’s familiar with technical debt, but there’s also a kind of backlog debt. We’ve got a backlog of a thousand items and people expecting to see a burndown chart going down and coming to zero. And if you are not doing backlog items, if you’re not bringing the burn down chart down, then they’re on your case.

Allan Kelly: And how are you supposed to be agile and react to customer requests and strategy changes if you’re being constantly expected to do items that have been in the backlog for years?

Bill Raymond: This is a really good point, and I think that really drives home the point that we sometimes focus on this list that could just be nice to haves, and it could also be a list of things that just aren’t going to move the needle forward. We still have them. They’re still ideas. They might find their way into the product at some point, but we really have to focus on the here and now.

Bill Raymond: And what you’re proposing is to let’s not go and try to envision where we’re going to be in a year or three years in terms of where the product will be we almost have to keep that focus to just a few weeks, a few months.

Allan Kelly: And if I can just say a word for the poor product owner here. They are little more than backlog administrators. There’s somebody else, often somebody called a product manager. Although if you think about that relationship, who’s the most important people in the company?

Allan Kelly: It’s the owners. Managers are hired guns. The owners call the shots for the managers. But so often you see this situation where a product manager is superior to a product owner and the product owner is reduced to being a backlog administrator. Just do these items, do more items. And those items aren’t necessarily aligned with strategy and everything else we’ve just been saying.

Allan Kelly: I think if we can look at OKRs as a way of bringing strategy back in and we can try and get our product owners to talk strategy and they can talk about the product managers and everyone else. Then we can get away from this tyranny of a backlog and poor product people who are just expected to do story.

Bill Raymond: But that’s so true, isn’t it? If you do have those two separate roles, the product manager and the product owner, I agree with you.

Bill Raymond: That’s usually how it goes, right? The product manager has a little bit more control and the product owner is more of the helping to implement, but then the kind of just turns that into, I’m sorry to all of my friends, I am a project manager, but it does turn you into a project manager. Doesn’t it?

Bill Raymond: It’s, It’s more like, okay, I have the marching orders that were told to us from above. Here they are, and I’m just going to make sure that they get implemented in this next two weeks.

Allan Kelly: And that might explain why so many of these product owners who are backlog administrators used to be project managers before everyone went agile. And they don’t have much autonomy I, I can see a case for there being two different roles. And in fact, in Art of Agile Product Owner, I talk about this SPO TPO model.

Allan Kelly: Strategic Product Owner, Practical Product Owner. And to be honest, I don’t care what labels you put on them, as long as the two people who are doing the job agree amongst themselves who’s doing what. And there is a case for having somebody who we can call for this, perhaps this conversation, a strategic product owner who is looking longer term, perhaps years out, who is spending a lot of time on the roads, meeting customers, going to shows, trying to understand where the product is going.

Allan Kelly: And having somebody back at base who’s spending most of their time with the teams who are working on the detail of stuff, and I’ll call that person a tactical product owner. Now, in an ideal world, these two people are joined at a hip. And if one goes on holiday, the other can deputize for them. But one person, it’s simple time.

Allan Kelly: If nothing else, one person needs to be out with customers and one person needs to be with the team. So I can see an argument for this strategic and tactical role, but we need to be clear that these are equals, and they both have their role to play, just because one has a title that sounds grander than another.

Allan Kelly: Doesn’t mean they’re superior.

Bill Raymond: Yeah. And I think that brings us back to this OKR discussion with these roles too, though, is the whole point is that the team are developing these together, right? Just because we might have, let’s say a higher pay grade, or we’re a little bit higher up in the food chain, the team has to agree on these so that they can align and start delivering

Allan Kelly: And let me throw something else in there. You know, Neurodiversity. If we’re going to really get the best from our neurodiverse people, and I myself am dyslexic here, so those of us who have neurodiversity, we have so much to add, because we see the world a bit different, and sometimes we’re the ones who stand up and say, the emperor has no clothes, you know, uh, you know, whether it’s, remember the Amazon Fire phone or when Netflix were going to split themselves into two, a CD delivery and a streaming side, there are countless examples of where somebody should stand up and say, excuse me, sir, but you’ve got no clothes on. And if we want those kind of voices and we want those, neurodiverse people to have their input Then we can’t simply have priorities decided by the pay chart. We have to allow people to have a genuine say and when you let people have a genuine say They become more enrolled in the process become more engaged become more motivated. It’s their thing as well.

Allan Kelly: So I think everyone benefits.

Bill Raymond: If you have defined these OKRs and the team agrees to them and you are working towards them. How do we step back and just check ourselves and ask, are we meeting the OKRs?

Allan Kelly: So I think when you’re setting them You know, you, the team draft up what they want to set, and then they’re going to show them to the leadership and the leadership are going to give them feedback. So I like to think of this as a strategy debugger, that the leaders have set out the, the ultimate destination and the team responding.

Allan Kelly: And then the leader looks at them and says, this isn’t what I expected. And the team say, okay the way we interpretted what you are asking for. But I think the same kind of conversation is going to occur at the end when you’re saying, we got to the end of our three months, how have we done? And, famously at Google, they say 70% of OKRs, you meet 70%, 30% we expect you to miss. Many organizations struggle with that because as much as they can say, Google do this and Google is good.

Allan Kelly: People in organizations still want predictability. And when you say we’re going to miss 30%, it’s like, what? But I think when you get to the end of the cycle and you look at what you’ve achieved. You’ve got to step outside of the OKR framework to say, have we succeeded? Because if you need a 100%, or even if you just insist on 70%, people can game the system.

Allan Kelly: Whereas what you really want to say is, have we made a difference to our customers? Have we advanced the company? Have we as a team learned something? Has the organization learned something? You could spend an entire quarter working on an outcome and in the end, that completely fails. But you know what?

Allan Kelly: You’ve got really important learning in there. And by any measure you’d set at the beginning, you’d say you’d failed. So you have to step out and again, have this conversation about what is wanted and what is valuable. Be able to say we missed completely, but you know what? We’ve only written off three months.

Allan Kelly: We’ve learned what customers don’t want. We’ve learned what will not work in that market. So rather than spending a year developing a product customers don’t want, we’ve just spent three months developing a product customers don’t want.

Bill Raymond: I think that leads me to a really good question then, which is if you just described, learning, right? So you described what happens if you don’t meet your OKRs, you just talked a little bit about measuring them and recognizing that there can be failure, and failure is not necessarily bad, so long as you can internalize it and understand why this happened and how you can address it the next time. And what are some changes that you’re going to make? That’s a really good retrospective to have, and we can celebrate that. But you also kind of described that in a way that feels like the way you get started with anything, right?

Bill Raymond: So if I’ve never written software before, it’s probably going to take me about three months to get up and running, and it’s probably going to take me a better part of a year before I feel really comfortable doing what I’m doing. And this is the same thing for any job, right? You start writing marketing copy, and you don’t necessarily understand the writing style that is for your customer.

Bill Raymond: So you learn over a few months, how to do the writing. And then after a year, you’re a pro at it.

[00:25:58] Starting with OKRs

Bill Raymond: And so I’m curious, how do you start off working with OKRs? What’s the, if you will, way to slowly phase this process in.

Allan Kelly: I will note that I think the way most people start working with OKRs is it comes down from above. The big brand name consultancies like OKRs, and they have a habit of whispering in the CEO’s ear and you just get told um, and like the old Dilbert cartoon, that was your training. What I would like to think happen is the teams themselves or somebody on the team Starts to say we should think a bit more broadly rather than just thinking story Let’s think about what are the outcomes we’re trying to create here.

Allan Kelly: How do we want to change the world for the better in the next three months. And again, the obvious person to lead this conversation is a product person. Now, if you’re not a product person, I think you need to go and start helping your product person see the world this way, but at least start asking the questions and what you really want is for a product person to start to think less about here’s a list of features I want, and more, this is the outcome I want for my customers. Because, remember that given any problem, any desired outcome, there are multiple different solutions you can use. And one of the things engineers do, is to craft solutions within constraints. And if you give an engineer three years to solve a problem, they’ll take three years.

Allan Kelly: Give them three weeks to solve a problem, and they’ll probably solve it. Give them three hours, they may well solve something. Or they may at least try. The obvious example here is the Apollo 13 film, or the Apollo 13 mission. And anyone who’s seen the film knows how engineers, you know, in a matter of days, did things that it would normally take NASA years to do.

Allan Kelly: Engineers engineer within constraints. Time is one of the big constraints. So rather than saying here’s a solution I can imagine. And here’s all the Lego bricks. How long will each Lego brick take me, take you to build? Add them all together. That’s how long it will take. You say the outcome I want our customers to be able to do something.

Allan Kelly: And we have three months. So what kind of solution could we create within three months that we would all be proud of and let’s think about what that solution is and let’s drive through that.

Allan Kelly: So you want your product people to be thinking along those lines, which for some will be a jump, for some will be a relief to say, let’s get away from tiny stories and think about the outcomes and just get the conversation going. And then I think. I think if you’ve got a team of people who are willing to do this, if you’ve got the product person on board, I think you should start to have that conversation with the other people, the other leaders and teams around you and say, we are going to, over the next three months, orientate ourselves around this goal and we’ll still be, we’ll be working with you, but this is what we’re going for.

Allan Kelly: This will be our guiding light, our policy, our north star, some people call it, for the next three months. And so what we are going to select. And we will remain in conversation with you and just try it as a team. And you know if you’re successful I think there’s every reason to believe other people will start to get interested and want to copy you.

Bill Raymond: I think that sometimes these ideas, they might start from thou shalt do OKRs, but, I think sometimes we don’t even get the training, right? At that, sometimes the training never even gets down to the team level, which is probably the most important part.

Bill Raymond: So I like this idea where either you’re starting from the ground up, you’re the team level saying we’re going to try this or an executive comes down. I don’t think too many executives would be upset with you if you said, you’ve told us to do OKRs. We sat down as a team, we talked to our customers, we understand what we need.

Bill Raymond: Here is how we’ve interpreted this, and this is what we hope to do. And then get that feedback, and I am sure that if it makes sense, there’s not going to be any pushback. Even if it’s not based on some framework that some outside company brought in.

Allan Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. And and if you find the OKR framework isn’t quite what you need, then at least set some kind of objective and start working towards that and start having those conversations. As you say, Bill I’ve never heard an executive complain about a team. thinking too ambitiously or too broadly.

Allan Kelly: I’ve often heard, senior people complain about teams being in the detail or losing the big picture or working too smallly, but I’ve never heard it the way it happened.

Bill Raymond: So it will work out.

Allan Kelly: Often, people say to me, you often hear people say, give me a case study. And you’re going to say, there are no case studies because what I’m describing here is a better world. If there was a case study, people would do this and you’re playing catch up. What I’m, what I really want is I want you to dream about a better world, a world where everyone succeeds.

Allan Kelly: And that will give you an advantage over other people.

[00:30:44] Conclusion and Contact Information

Bill Raymond: I think this is a great way to wrap up our podcast. Allan Kelly, this has been a great conversation. Before we wrap up, I’d like to know if anyone is listening to this podcast and they might want to discuss this with you further. How might they be able to reach you?

Allan Kelly: So this is really easy. I am Allan Kelly and I have two L’s in Allan. Look at the name of, look at the title of the podcast. I’m Allan Kelly and I own the website allanKelly.net on the web. Secondly. Allan Kelly net is my ID on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn slash in slash Allan Kelly net.

Allan Kelly: And that’s me, please connect to me.

Bill Raymond: Perfect. And I think you’re giving us a little gift to our podcast listeners. Can you share a little bit about that for

Allan Kelly: Yes my book Succeeding with OKRs in Agile, now in its second edition. I know because they’re listening that your listeners love listening. So I’m going to give away the audio version of this book to all of the listeners. There’s a URL, which I think you’re going to put in the show notes, http://www.allankelly.net/agileinaction. And your listeners just come along there and they can download the book.

Bill Raymond: Wonderful. I really thank you for that. I’ve started listening to it and I’m listening to it on my walks. I’m learning as I walk.

Allan Kelly: Excellent.

Bill Raymond: Allan Kelly. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Allan Kelly: Oh, thank you for having me, Bill, it’s been a lot of fun!

Speaker: Thank you for listening to the Agile in Action Podcast with Bill Raymond. Subscribe now to stay current on the latest trends in team, organization, and agile techniques. Please take a moment to rate and comment to help us grow our community. This podcast is produced in affiliation with Cambermast LLC, and our executive producer is Reama Dagasan.

Speaker: If there is a topic you would like Bill to cover, contact him directly at Bill.Raymond@agileinaction.com.