Measure What Matters

Measure What Matters Plot Summary

Introduction

Picture this: A young company with ambitious founders but no clear way to track progress toward their lofty goals. Or a large corporation where different departments work in silos, each pursuing their own agenda with little coordination. These scenarios play out daily in organizations worldwide, leading to wasted effort, missed opportunities, and unfulfilled potential. Enter Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a goal-setting system that has transformed how the world's most innovative companies operate. This powerful framework helps organizations focus on what truly matters, align teams around common goals, track progress transparently, and stretch beyond comfortable limits to achieve extraordinary results. Through compelling stories from tech giants, nonprofits, and startups alike, we discover how this deceptively simple methodology—when implemented correctly—creates a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Whether you're a CEO, team leader, or individual contributor, you'll learn how to set meaningful objectives, measure what truly matters, and create the conditions for breakthrough performance in your organization.

Chapter 1: The Birth of OKRs: Andy Grove's Intel Legacy

In the mid-1970s, a young John Doerr joined Intel, where he would encounter a management philosophy that would change his life—and eventually transform Silicon Valley. Andy Grove, Intel's legendary CEO, had developed a system called "Objectives and Key Results" (OKRs) to help the rapidly growing semiconductor company stay focused and aligned. Grove's approach was refreshingly straightforward. An Objective was simply WHAT needed to be achieved—something significant, concrete, action-oriented, and inspiring. Key Results defined HOW that objective would be accomplished, with specific, time-bound, measurable milestones. "If the objective is to reach the moon," Grove would say, "the key results might include building a spaceship, creating a launch plan, and recruiting astronauts." What made OKRs different from other goal-setting frameworks was their transparency and cadence. At Intel, everyone's objectives—from the CEO to entry-level engineers—were visible to all. This radical openness eliminated silos and fostered collaboration. And rather than setting annual goals that quickly became stale, Intel teams updated their OKRs quarterly, allowing them to adapt to changing conditions. Doerr witnessed firsthand how this system helped Intel navigate existential threats. In 1979, when Japanese competitors were overtaking Intel's memory chip business, Grove launched "Operation Crush" to refocus the company on microprocessors. Using OKRs, he rallied the entire organization behind this pivot. Within months, Intel had reclaimed market leadership with its 8086 processor—the chip that would power the PC revolution. The beauty of OKRs, Doerr realized, was that they combined ambitious vision with disciplined execution. They created what Grove called "the magic of ambitious goals" while providing a practical framework for achieving them. When objectives are clear and measurable, teams become more focused, more aligned, and ultimately more successful.

Chapter 2: Focus and Commit to Priorities

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were building Google in its early days, they faced a classic startup challenge: too many opportunities, too few resources. After hearing Doerr's pitch about OKRs in 1999, they embraced the system to help the young company focus on what mattered most. One of Google's first company-wide OKRs was deceptively simple: improve the search experience. The key results included specific metrics like reducing page load time to under 0.1 seconds and increasing the index size to 1 billion pages. This clarity helped everyone understand exactly what "improve search" meant in practice and how success would be measured. The power of focus became even more apparent as Google grew. In 2009, when Chrome was struggling with just 3% market share, Sundar Pichai (then Chrome's leader) set an audacious objective: reach 20 million weekly active users by year's end. With this North Star guiding them, the Chrome team ruthlessly prioritized features that would drive adoption while deferring less critical work. They made tough choices about resource allocation and said "no" to good ideas that didn't directly support their primary objective. "If you try to focus on everything, you focus on nothing," Andy Grove often said. Google took this wisdom to heart, limiting itself to 3-5 top-level OKRs per quarter. This constraint forced leadership to make hard choices about priorities. As Larry Page put it, they needed to "put more wood behind fewer arrows." The discipline of focus extends beyond selecting objectives to crafting effective key results. Well-designed key results are specific, measurable, and time-bound. Rather than vague aspirations like "improve customer satisfaction," effective key results specify "increase Net Promoter Score from 32 to 45 by quarter's end" or "reduce customer support response time from 24 hours to 4 hours." When you commit to a small set of clear priorities, you gain the freedom to say no to distractions. This isn't just about efficiency—it's about effectiveness. By concentrating your limited time and resources on what truly matters, you dramatically increase your chances of achieving breakthrough results.

Chapter 3: Align and Connect for Teamwork

At MyFitnessPal, brothers Mike and Albert Lee built the world's most popular health and fitness app, helping over 140 million users track their nutrition and exercise. But as their company grew from a two-person operation to dozens of employees, they faced a common challenge: keeping everyone rowing in the same direction. "If you put two people in a boat and have one row east and the other row west," Mike Lee explains, "they'll use up lots of energy going nowhere." This was precisely what started happening at MyFitnessPal. The engineering team had infrastructure goals, the product managers had feature goals, and the marketing team had user acquisition goals. Each department was optimizing for its own metrics without considering how their work affected others. The turning point came when they implemented transparent OKRs across the organization. Suddenly, everyone could see not just their own objectives but also how they connected to the company's top priorities. When the Premium subscription team set an objective to launch a paid version of the app, they made their dependencies on the engineering team explicit. Engineers could now see how their work directly contributed to the company's revenue goals. This transparency transformed cross-team collaboration. Instead of the engineering team being caught off guard by marketing's needs, they began holding regular integration meetings where department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. "No one left the room until we'd answered some basic questions," Mike recalls. "Are we meeting everyone's needs for buy-in? Is a team overstretched? If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?" The alignment extended beyond internal teams to MyFitnessPal's relationship with its parent company after being acquired by Under Armour. When Albert took over the MapMyFitness product team, he examined the roadmap and immediately said, "We need to cut half of this, right? We need to strip it down to the things that really matter." By using OKRs to focus on the highest-impact projects that aligned with Under Armour's strategic goals, they avoided the post-acquisition chaos that derails many mergers. Perhaps most importantly, alignment doesn't mean rigid top-down control. The best OKR systems balance alignment with autonomy, with roughly half of objectives flowing from the top down and half emerging from the bottom up. This hybrid approach ensures strategic coherence while empowering teams to determine how best to contribute to the organization's success.

Chapter 4: Track for Accountability: The Gates Foundation Story

When Bill and Melinda Gates established their foundation in 2000 with an initial $20 billion endowment, they faced an unprecedented challenge: how to effectively deploy at least $1 billion annually toward their mission of ensuring "a healthy and productive life" for people worldwide. The stakes couldn't be higher—lives literally depended on making the right decisions about resource allocation. "We had the beautiful gift of a blank sheet of paper," recalls Patty Stonesifer, the foundation's first CEO. "But the gift also had a huge weight to it. Because when you have that big of a goal, how can you know you're making progress?" The foundation needed a system that could bring discipline and accountability to their ambitious mission. After learning about OKRs, the Gates Foundation adopted the framework to track their progress against concrete metrics. For their work fighting malaria, for example, they set a clear objective: global eradication by 2040. The key results included proving a radical cure-based approach could lead to regional elimination, developing necessary diagnostic tools, and sustaining global momentum. What made the system work was its emphasis on data-driven decision making. The foundation adopted a metric called Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY) to compare the impact of different interventions. This allowed them to objectively assess whether investing in vaccines would save more lives than fighting river blindness or other diseases. "OKRs made it all so clear," Stonesifer says. Bill Gates himself embraced the system's accountability mechanisms. "When we used OKRs with our grant reviews, I felt good about what we were going after," he explains. The framework helped him make difficult decisions, including turning down grants when objectives weren't clear enough. The regular check-ins and color-coded progress tracking (green for on track, yellow for at risk, red for behind) provided early warning when initiatives were faltering. The foundation learned that tracking isn't just about monitoring compliance—it's about learning and adaptation. When a malaria team initially set an objective to eradicate the disease by 2015, they quickly realized it wasn't realistic. "When a goal is too aspirational, it's bad for credibility," Gates notes. The OKR system allowed them to adjust timelines while maintaining their commitment to the ultimate objective.

Chapter 5: Stretch for Amazing: Google's 10x Thinking

In 2004, when Gmail was still in development, Google's leadership faced a crucial decision about storage capacity. Earlier web-based email systems typically offered 2-4 megabytes of storage, forcing users to constantly delete old messages. Google's team initially considered offering 100MB—a significant upgrade that seemed ambitious but achievable. But Larry Page wasn't interested in incremental improvement. He pushed the team to think bigger—much bigger. When Gmail launched to the public, it offered a full gigabyte of storage, up to 500 times more than competitors. This wasn't just a quantitative improvement; it qualitatively transformed how people used email. Users could now keep messages indefinitely, making email a searchable archive rather than a temporary communication tool. This exemplifies what Google calls "10x thinking"—the philosophy that true innovation requires aiming for improvements ten times greater than the status quo, not just 10% better. As Page explains, "If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you'll still achieve something remarkable." This mindset became embedded in Google's approach to OKRs, with the company explicitly dividing goals into two categories: "committed" objectives (expected to be achieved 100%) and "aspirational" objectives (with a target attainment of 70%). Sundar Pichai experienced the power of stretch goals firsthand when leading Chrome's development. In 2008, his team set an objective to reach 20 million weekly active users by year's end—starting from zero. "I thought it unlikely we would reach our target in time," Pichai admits. "But I also considered it important to keep pushing to the limit of our ability and beyond." Though they missed that initial goal, the ambitious target forced them to rethink their entire approach to browser distribution and marketing. The following year, they set an even more audacious target of 50 million users, and again fell short. Undeterred, in 2010 they aimed for 111 million users—and this time, they succeeded. Today, Chrome has over a billion active users. "If we had set more modest goals," Pichai reflects, "we might have achieved them, but we wouldn't be where we are now." The key to making stretch goals work is creating an environment where falling short isn't seen as failure. Google expects to achieve only about 70% of its aspirational OKRs. This approach creates psychological safety for teams to take risks without fear of punishment if they miss ambitious targets. The focus shifts from hitting arbitrary numbers to maximizing progress and learning.

Chapter 6: Continuous Performance Management: Beyond Annual Reviews

Adobe was facing a crisis. Each February, after the company's annual performance reviews, voluntary departures would spike as demoralized employees took their talents elsewhere. The traditional process consumed 80,000 manager hours annually—equivalent to 40 full-time employees—yet created no discernible value. Meanwhile, the company was transitioning to a cloud-based subscription model that required greater agility and innovation. In 2012, Donna Morris, Adobe's HR executive, made a bold announcement to a reporter: the company would abolish annual reviews and stack rankings in favor of more frequent, forward-facing feedback. There was just one problem—she hadn't yet discussed this with her team or Adobe's CEO. But her candor became the catalyst for "Check-in," Adobe's new approach to continuous performance management. The results were transformative. Instead of once-a-year evaluations, managers and employees now engage in ongoing conversations focused on expectations, feedback, and growth. These Check-ins are initiated by employees, completely decoupled from compensation decisions, and involve no formal documentation or ratings. Managers receive training in having productive conversations, while employees learn to seek specific, actionable feedback. "Individuals want to drive their own success," Morris explains. "They don't want to wait till the end of the year to be graded. They want to know how they're doing while they're doing it, and also what they need to do differently." Under the new system, Adobe's contributors receive performance feedback at least every six weeks—and often weekly. This approach represents a fundamental shift from traditional performance management. Instead of looking backward at past achievements, continuous performance management focuses on future improvement. It replaces annual ratings with ongoing conversations, feedback, and recognition (CFRs)—the human complement to OKRs' structured goal setting. The benefits extend beyond employee satisfaction. When feedback is timely and specific, people can course-correct quickly rather than continuing down unproductive paths. Recognition becomes more meaningful when it's given in the moment rather than months later. And managers transform from judges to coaches, helping team members develop their capabilities rather than just evaluating them. Most importantly, continuous performance management creates alignment between individual growth and organizational goals. Regular check-ins ensure that people's efforts remain connected to the company's evolving priorities, allowing for agility in a fast-changing environment. As Adobe discovered, this approach doesn't just make employees happier—it makes the entire organization more effective.

Chapter 7: Culture Change: How OKRs Transform Organizations

When Bono, the legendary U2 frontman, co-founded the ONE Campaign to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease, he brought the same audacious ambition that defined his music career. "We never thought small," he says. "The stretch was always there." But the organization's goals were so gigantic that they stretched too thin and wore people out. ONE's turning point came when they implemented OKRs. "They gave us a frame to hang our passion on," Bono explains. "And you need that framework because, without it, your brain is just too abstract." The system forced the team to think clearly about what they could realistically achieve with available resources, while still maintaining their ambitious vision. The framework also catalyzed a profound cultural transformation. At a board meeting, John Doerr asked a simple but profound question: "Who are we working for? Who's the client here?" When ONE's leaders answered that they worked for the world's poorest and most vulnerable, Doerr pressed further: "Well, then, do they have a seat at the table?" This question sparked what Bono calls "the pivot"—a fundamental shift from working on Africa to working in and with Africa. ONE committed to organizational change, establishing offices across the continent and expanding their board and advisory network to include African voices. "I guess we've become better listeners," Bono reflects. "And I don't think we could have done it without objectives and key results." At Lumeris, a healthcare technology company, OKRs similarly drove cultural transformation. The company initially struggled with implementation because leaders hadn't addressed underlying issues of accountability and trust. "Without cultural alignment, the world's best operational strategy will fail," explains Andrew Cole, who led the change effort. After rebuilding the leadership team and establishing clear values, Lumeris relaunched OKRs with a focus on transparency and collective problem-solving. In monthly business reviews, executives would "sell their reds"—explaining which objectives were at risk and why. Instead of hiding problems, they collaborated on solutions, with colleagues volunteering to "buy" each other's challenging goals. "We're all here to help," COO Art Glasgow would say. "We're all in the same bathwater." The cultural impact extended beyond executive meetings. Teams began connecting across departmental boundaries, with operations staff tying their objectives directly to sales goals. "In the past," says SVP Jeff Smith, "you'd hear things like, 'I'm in delivery, you're in sales, just do your damn job.' Now it's more like calling in a wide receiver to run a play: 'I'm here, let me help you.'"

Summary

The true power of OKRs lies not just in what they help you achieve, but in how they transform how you work. This framework creates a culture of focus, alignment, accountability, and ambition—the essential ingredients for breakthrough performance in any organization. To implement OKRs effectively in your own context, start small and build gradually. Begin with just 3-5 objectives that truly matter, ensuring each has measurable key results. Make your goals transparent so everyone can see how their work connects to the bigger picture. Separate OKRs from compensation to encourage stretch thinking. And complement your goal-setting with continuous conversations, feedback, and recognition. Remember that OKRs aren't just a management technique—they're a vehicle for changing how people think, collaborate, and achieve together.

About Author

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John Doerr

L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951) is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America's economic downturn.

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