FY22-Q2 KR Planning: Product + UX + Engineering + Quality Shared KRs
Overview
Product Management has the potential to drive and influence growth as well as company goal attainment in ways that other organizations in a company cannot.
When we consider our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) across the Product, Engineering, UX, and Quality organizations, we can do more to make them connected and concerted. One of the key implications for alignment across teams is that you share goals and KPIs.
We want to focus on Essentialism to drive results that matter most for the customer across the product group.
As it is written in the handbook, GitLab's OKRs is meant to be the "how to achieve the goal" of a KPI. So, the question we need to consider is are we optimizing our goals to achieve the KPI in the best way?
Context & details on the execution
This initiative is to get ahead of the executive OKR process and provide the e-team with our opinionated view of what we plan to do. We will create shared key results across the quad planning team (Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Product Designers, and Quality) at the Product Group-level. I see two benefits of this approach:
- We leverage the DRI-ness to empower the teams to use existing prioritization systems to accomplish these targets, rather than this being a top-down initiative
- The Product Group has the most context on the customer, the technology, the quality, performance, and usability of the product to really come up with a goal that can be successfully delivered to move the needle for the business
Two "cons" or challenges to this approach:
- There is overhead in coordinating/planning/thinking with your Quad-group about what KRs to prioritize
- There is a manual exercise of aggregating the individual KRs from each group into the themes and then attaching the KPI that is relevant and submitting this to the CEO for reporting. Then this will be updated periodically as a single unit, rather than individual functional departments which is not currently how the system is set up for tracking the performance of KRs.
In response to these cons, we will be aggregating the provided KRs into the "guiding themes" indicated below. As these themes are provided ahead of time, you can use them to inform your planning discussions with your Quad.
Guiding themes for shared KRs (Relevant KPIs)
- Drive a meaningful impact on Usability (SUS, S1 and S2 Bugs, .com Availability, TMAU, Stage Dashboard & Dogfooding)
- Deliver the on the monetization of our product (PNPS & Paid TMAU)
- Capture new product usage and increase adoption (Stages per Organization, MRARR & MR Rate)
Q2 KRs [Do Not Edit]
To be added
Proposal
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In your Quad Product Group (Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Product Designer, Quality Teammember), identify at least 2 key results you'd like to accomplish with your team in Q2 -
Add a comment under the thread for your Section name with your Group name listing your Key Results,
Tip: Part of the KRs will be what causes changes in KPIs, so think through the goals you'd like to influence in Q2 with your team. Based on your Product Group and Team PIs. Resources: Product KPIs, UX KPIs, Engineering KPIs, and Quality KPIs. Example: Impact SUS by 2 points by with the resolution of 100% of non-blocked S1 & S2 bugs, availability, performance, and security issues, and MR experience related UX issues older than 60 days
Next Steps
- If you need help thinking through setting OKRs, consider attending an AMA or adding a comment in the "Comments" thread
- Once all KRs have been added, they get aggregated by stage and section
- Product KRs Theme is mapped and a formal KPI quantity target is set
- OKRs for CEO is submitted
- Planning issue is closed