Some would say this is the “most wonderful time of the year.” Would you agree? I find it the most exciting at times — the urgency to wrap things up before spending quality time with the ones you care about most. Each year, the WhatMatters.com team festively gathers to review our company-level OKRs for the year and grade our results. These conversations allow us to reflect on the past year and to set our intentions for the New Year ahead. 

12 months ago, I signed on as your OKR Wingwoman and, no matter when you jumped into the cycle, we’re about to complete our first year! If you’ve been with me from the beginning, you’ll remember that I shared one of my 2023 company-level Objectives: To help our readers achieve operating excellence using OKRs.

My promise was, as it remains, to help you get started with OKRs and help you stick with them. Together, we’ve completed an entire annual OKR cycle, and I hope that you’ve found the process worthwhile.

🔍 Review 2023 and Plan 2024

If you continued to plan 2023 month-to-month as a result of the “pandemic pivot,” think about shifting back to a longer-term planning stance. This means a return to annual company OKRs keyed to longer-term goals and quarterly OKRs that capture your more immediate goals. 

As part of planning for 2024, you need to score, grade, and reflect on 2023. If you feel that you’re running out of time, you can plan 2024 immediately upon your return in the first week of January — it’s not too late. 

🚀 Stretch for Amazing in 2024

You may also find the following tips helpful when reviewing your company-level OKRs or writing new ones for the new year ahead:

• Some organizations like to set committed OKRs, or goals that an individual, team, or company agree to complete and accomplish 100%. But, for company-level goals, aim for aspirational OKRs, or how you’d like your company or team to be. Aspirational goals are where you should start for your company-level Objectives for 2024. If you’re in an exploratory or experimental phase, set a learning OKR to effectively gather data and determine the best path forward.

• Reach for your North Star. The raw material for your top-line OKRs is often in your mission statement.

• Your leadership team can plan 2024 over a few weeks, so it’s less strenuous, but don’t put it off.

• Consider reviving or restarting Objectives from 2023 that you may have dropped or sidelined due to changing priorities this year. 

💫 Our Annual North Star Review

In their most basic form, company-level OKRs capture your organization's ambition through Objectives. Key Results clearly define what needs to be accomplished to achieve the Objective. 

Grading OKRs is an opportunity to reflect on accomplishments and what you might do differently the next time around. Low scores force a reassessment, while high scores provide empirical proof of delivery. Our team adopts the Google approach, scoring each Key Result on a scale where “0” equates to failure and “1.0” means the Objective was completely achieved. We grade each Key Result within these metrics and then take their average to score the Objective.

Using our team as an example, let’s look at our results. Taking a radical step to increase the transparency within our organization, we focused on one team goal for 2022: to help 1,000 teams implement OKRs. We continued to aim higher as we carried this Objective over into 2023 and this year: to help another 10,000 teams achieve operating excellence through OKRs. Together.

While we absolutely achieved our Objective to help another 10,000 teams, as measured by our face-to-face coaching work and online support and resources, we also noticed that we couldn’t measure our results easily due to a spread of data across many platforms. It was challenging to develop a singular metric for grading — we knew we had the results we wanted, but they were difficult to measure as a whole. Next year, we’ll adjust how we measure our results to correct this. 

We also learned that we needed to set the bar higher; the Objective wasn’t aspirational enough. In all honesty, with hard work from the entire team, we will hit our target — which is amazing! But, for the new year, we will aim higher. 

🧭 Looking Ahead

We have exciting things coming up in 2024. We listened to your feedback, and we will continue to do what we did well last year: sharing the whats and hows of leadership through the videos, stories and resources on our website.

And, if you’re looking to level up your OKR skills for 2024, now is the perfect time to enroll in our OKR Certification course on Coursera course. Join the first ever cohort of learners, and over the course of four weeks you’ll learn directly from us how to write and use transformative OKRs within your organization. It’s the most comprehensive OKR training ever made!

We ring in the new year soon. I’m excited not only for our team but for yours too! There’s a new year full of possibilities on the horizon. It reminds me of one of my favorite things about OKRs: They’re always about the future, never the past. 

I hope you’ll take the time to reflect on the year and enjoy a well-deserved break if you can. Let’s hit the ground running in January. 

Thank you for being Audacious this year! 

How Giggster is Using OKRs to Scale their Business

When Leanne Beesley joined Giggster, she had one primary mandate — lead the company’s rollout across the United Kingdom and Europe and scale the business to be international. Although the filming locations and event venue platform startup had a somewhat established US presence, Beesley had to start from scratch when it came to the launch in Europe. She needed a tool to get started, identify the most significant priorities, and stay on track without getting distracted. Enter OKRs.

How Pinterest uses OKRs to achieve stretch goals

Pinterest, the social curation and visual discovery platform, has committed to staying true to being the “last positive corner of the internet.” It’s a lofty and challenging goal for any company — especially during a period when negativity continues to dominate the news cycle, and in turn, the internet. Luckily, the company has established goal setting processes that allow them to stay true to their commitment.