OKRs and roadmaps work beautifully together, and are a perfect replacement for the outdated timeline roadmap way of working. OKRs are a framework for setting and measuring objectives, which as we already covered earlier in this guide, are a key ingredient in your lean roadmap. They help give your roadmap structure and purpose.
O(I)KRs
Even if you identify what you need to achieve (the Objective) based on the company strategy, and determine what good looks like (the Key Result), you’re not going to get very far if you’re unable to clearly communicate the actions you plan to take in order to get there (the Initiative).
- Mapping Initiatives out on a roadmap helps you communicate how you’ll hit your objectives
Time-Based Planning and OKRs
OKRs are usually time-bound.
- Top-level objectives are reviewed annually, whereas department and team level OKRs (i.e., department or team level objectives) are reviewed quarterly. This gives the best blend of alignment and autonomy for your team.
Everyone else is doing it
Other divisions around your company are already operating in this way
- VP of Sales doesn’t make a report on which sales will land, from which customers, and when
- Marketing is an experimentation driven division
- If sales and marketing can work in a lean, experimentation-driven way, then so can your product team
Lean roadmapping and OKRs
The product team acknowledges the Objectives, which they should be on board with as they took part in the conversations to help set them, and commits to spending the next quarter finding ways to tackle them
- At the point where OKRs are set, the team doesn’t know up front what features will be built or when, but they do know that they have 3 months to run as many experiments as possible, and to iterate, measure, and learn along the way
- Instead of spending all that time trying to get estimates for work that may or may not have an impact, they focus on floating the experiments that are most likely to have the most impact to the top, and get through considerably more work
Everyone else is doing it
Get your team on board
- Convince your boss, execs, customers, investors, salespeople, etc.
- Time on a Lean Roadmap
- Hard dates make sense
- Agency Trap
- The power of discovery
- No deadlines?
Autonomy + Alignment
Using OKRs and lean roadmaps give your team the best blend of autonomy and alignment
- Your execs give clear direction on the core drivers of success and make sure the team is pointed in the right direction
- Flexibility of the experimentation-driven roadmap gives autonomy, as it allows the team to work out the best way to solve the problems outlined
OKRs and lean roadmaps create high performing teams
Good objectives should leave enough room for interpretation
- If your company has an Objective around getting your onboarding conversion rate up, then it’s important for management not to dictate how it should be done
- By leaving flexibility you might find that the best experiments surprise you
- There are lots of paths forward, and so allow for interpretation
