direction — objectives and key results
Objectives and Key Results
An Objective is the quarterly commitment that makes a Goal falsifiable right now. It names what the team will specifically change this quarter. Key Results are the signals that confirm whether the Objective was reached — not outputs, but outcomes: observable changes in someone's situation.
This distinction is where most OKR implementations break down. An output Key Result tracks whether the team did something. An outcome Key Result tracks whether doing that something changed anything for anyone. The first can be satisfied while the situation for the people the team serves remains entirely unchanged.
Output KR vs Outcome KR
✗ KR: "Ship the grading feature by end of Q2."
You can ship it and Gal still spends 47 minutes per exam cycle. The KR is satisfied. The retrospective is positive. Nothing changed for Gal or any teacher like her. The chain ended at delivery and never verified what it delivered.
✓ KR: "Manual grading time per exam cycle drops from 47 minutes to under 10 minutes — confirmed by session recording with Gal 30 days after release."
This cannot be gamed. Either Gal's Wednesday afternoon changed or it did not. If it did not, the retrospective opens with the only question that matters: what did the model get wrong about the problem?
Outcome KRs close the loop described in Volume I: the second question — did it actually change what we said it would change — becomes unavoidable at the end of every quarter.
In the chain, the Objective is what connects the initiative to Direction. An initiative says: "We believe closing this gap will move the current Objective." Without the Objective written down, the initiative is a bet placed on nothing — there is no way to know if closing the gap moved anything, because the target was never named.
How to apply this
- ✓ Measure the baseline for each KR before the quarter begins. A KR saying the metric dropped by 30% means nothing if the starting point was not measured before work began.
- ✓ Write the baseline as a fact, not an estimate. "47 minutes — session recording with Gal, 14 April" is a baseline. "Approximately 45 minutes based on what teachers told us" is not.
- ✓ Is each KR falsifiable? If there is no world in which the team would say the KR failed, it is not a Key Result — it is a description of activity.
- ✗ Do not use shipping as a Key Result. Shipping is an output. Key Results measure whether shipping changed something for someone.