(2020-03-02) Cagan Team Objectives Empowerment

Martin Cagan: Team Objectives - Empowerment. The essential point of team objectives is to empower a team by a) giving them a problem to solve rather than a feature to build; and b) ensuring they have the necessary strategic context to understand the why, and to make good decisions.

• see recent (2020-02-24) Cagan Team Objectives Overview

The most important point to understand about team objectives is that first and foremost, they are intended to give the product team the space to come up with solutions to hard and important problems.

The best people to determine the most appropriate solution are those closest to the problem, with the necessary skills – the product team.

So Team Objectives are comprised of an objective (the problem that needs to be solved) and some measures of progress (the key results). (OKR)

Objectives

but typical examples of good objectives are:

• Reduce the frequency of parcels delivered to the wrong address.
• Reduce the subscriber churn rate.

Notice also the example objectives are all qualitative. The quantitative dimension will be discussed in the key results.

It’s also important to acknowledge here that many of the most important objectives will require the product team to either collaborate with other product teams, or in many cases, to collaborate with different parts of the organization to achieve the goal

Key Results

While the objective is the problem to solve, the key results tell us how we define success

The second most common reason that teams go wrong with OKR’s is that they end up listing activities or deliverables as their key results.

Generally speaking, we want two key results for each objective. The first key result is the primary measure. The second key result is a measure of quality, sometimes called a “backstop,” to ensure that the first key result is not inadvertently achieved by hurting something else.

Notice that while these key results do imply specific KPI’s, we don’t yet have the expected values or timeframes, because those will need to come from the team.

We need to share the strategic context, especially the product strategy, with the product teams for four main reasons:

First, it’s critical that the team has a deep understanding of the ultimate goal, and why this is an important problem to solve

Second, we want teams to start thinking about how they each might be able to contribute to solving the key problems.

Third, we want the teams to start thinking through the implications of the upcoming work. Perhaps there are dependencies that are not immediately visible

Fourth, we love it when teams express a special interest in working on specific problems.