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How Google sets goals: objectives and key results

On the day Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner closed in 2007, it was also the first day of a new quarter at Google. My new manager at Google asked me to draft my OKRs for him to review. I had no idea what he was talking about.

I’ve now gone through the process of setting my Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) 24 times, and each time I marvel at what an effective mechanism they are for focusing my effort as well as aligning my work with the company’s objectives. Last fall, I led a workshop about OKRs at the Startup Lab, which we’re making public today.

John Doerr originally presented OKRs to Google’s leadership in 1999 when Google was less than a year old, and they’ve been in use ever since. In the video, I present a portion of John’s original deck, then lay out how we’ve implemented them at Google over the years. I also shared a few of my OKRs from my time as a Product Manager on Blogger, and answered some questions from the employees at our portfolio companies who were present for the workshop.

Though the video goes into more detail, here are a few keys to what make OKRs work at Google:

• Objectives are ambitious, and should feel somewhat uncomfortable
• Key Results are measurable; they should be easy to grade with a number (at Google we use a 0 – 1.0 scale to grade each key result at the end of a quarter)
• OKRs are public; everyone in the company should be able to see what everyone else is working on (and how they did in the past)
• The “sweet spot” for an OKR grade is .6 – .7; if someone consistently gets 1.0, their OKRs aren’t ambitious enough. Low grades shouldn’t be punished; see them as data to help refine the next quarter’s OKRs.

One comment: in talking recently with one portfolio company who’s implemented OKRs, I realized that I should have been more emphatic in pointing out that OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations. OKRs are about the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals. Performance evaluations – which are entirely about evaluating how an employee performed in a given period – should be independent from their OKRs. We’ll cover employee evaluations in an upcoming workshop.

About the Startup Lab workshops

Since its inception, the Google Ventures Startup Lab has held more than sixty workshops. These sessions are open to every employee of our 160+ portfolio companies and are held on a variety of topics: everything from privacy to Javascript testing to business development. Speakers are drawn from experts at Google and beyond. More than 95% of our portfolio companies have attended at least one workshop, and our recorded talks have been viewed thousands of times. We began releasing public versions of select workshops to share with the broader entrepreneurial community, and will release new videos several times a month.

Since its inception, the Google Ventures Startup Lab has held more than sixty workshops. These sessions are open to every employee of our 160+ portfolio companies and are held on a variety of topics: everything from privacy to Javascript testing to business development. Speakers are drawn from experts at Google and beyond. More than 95% of our portfolio companies have attended at least one workshop, and our recorded talks have been viewed thousands of times.

We’ve decided to make several of these workshops available to everyone in the world on our YouTube channel. The first three — A/B testing done right, Meetings that don’t suck, and Cohort analysis — are available today and embedded below.

We’ll be releasing new videos every week, continuing with “How Google sets goals: objectives and key results” next week. That workshop will show you how Googlers have set goals since John Doerr introduced the system to the founders in 1999.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date:

A/B testing done right

This workshop led by Optimizely CEO Dan Siroker, covers when to use A/B testing, how to implement it, and most importantly, how to measure the results.

Should that button say “click here” or “learn more”? Will the layout of your homepage materially impact app downloads? Have a hunch about how to describe that new feature that you’d like to test out right away? Instead of going with your gut (or worse, going with a committee’s consensus), let data drive your product development, marketing decisions, and site layout.

Meetings that don’t suck

This workshop focuses on what makes for a good meeting, what kinds to avoid, and how to run them effectively.

Meetings can suck the life out of a startup, and can prevent teams from executing. When done correctly, meetings can keep everyone informed, help the company move more quickly, and identify and resolve obstacles.

Cohort analysis: measure the impact of product changes over time

This workshop led by Google engineer Brett Slatkin digs in to cohort analysis. He’ll walk you through how he does it, show you a tool he built to simplify cohort analysis of log files, and answer your questions.

Do users who signed up a year ago use your product differently than those who signed up last month? Just because your active user numbers are “up and to the right” doesn’t mean that all is well.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from a Jeff Smith, SEO Director of Google Ventures portfolio company Whaleshark Media. Jeff teamed up with us at the Startup Lab to host an SEO Summit for Google Ventures portfolio companies.

At the Google Ventures SEO Summit last month, people were ready to talk shop about something that is critical to most if not all websites: search engine optimization (SEO).

A hallmark of the SEO community has always been sharing insights based on data, tests and practical experience. Since sharing and learning are core to the mission of the Google Ventures Startup Lab, it’s not surprising that the SEO Summit last week complemented the Startup Lab’s regular workshops, which focus more on Google products and startup concerns.

The summit, attended by about 20 people from product, marketing and SEO functions from as many portfolio companies, focused on leveraging the collective SEO experience of all attendees rather than learning from one subject-matter expert. The websites represented were at different stages of maturity in the SEO life cycle, meaning they had different challenges and opportunities. Some companies were grappling with foundations (getting indexed, good page titles) while others were ready for advanced topics (testing, mobile).

Many Google Ventures portfolio companies don’t depend heavily on search to be discovered by their customers. But some, such as Rocket Lawyer and RetailMeNot, have the kind of content that lends itself to consumer demand expressed via search. Over the course of an afternoon, the topics ranged from crawl and indexing to link building in an increasingly social world.

With so many possible angles of SEO to discuss in the startup context, a straw poll focused the summit on the following: testing, measurement of SEO efforts, link building, search and social, and keyword research. Conversations about the first four filled the entire afternoon session, not leaving time for the always-important topic of keyword research. Here’s a brief set of takeaways on the top four topics (sorry, but you had to be there for the detail):

• Testing: It was agreed that testing was important, though it could be tough to for SEO, depending on the purpose of the test. Optimizely was the most popular testing tool discussed, not for SEO explicitly but for its ease of use and rapid route to results.
• Measurement of SEO efforts: From Google Webmaster Tools and others that aggregate multiple sources of data (links, rank, social) to Google Analytics, there is significant effort being put into measuring SEO and understanding the landscape. Crawl data seemed to be one area for which the only solution was something built in-house.
• Link building: This, of course, focused on content. Generating links at scale—by making every piece of content on your site shareable and providing incentives to your contributors to link back to you (leaderboards, etc.) — still came down to having content that users would value enough to share. The most successful link campaigns had other components, including participating in your site’s wider community by bringing data, insights and unique content to the conversation.
• Social: The link-building conversation easily transitioned to social, with a focus on Google+. Several companies have already seen increased click-through rates from +1 annotated results, which can be monitored in Google Webmaster Tools.

We wrapped up the afternoon with a loose commitment to following up in smaller, more focused sessions, possibly in Google+ Hangouts.

With investments in many companies, venture capital firms have an opportunity to leverage the experiences of individual portfolio companies for the benefit of the whole portfolio. When taken with previous Startup Lab sessions on big data, Google Analytics best practices, YouTube for marketers, and website performance optimization, this SEO summit underscores Google Ventures’ commitment to the success of its portfolio.

Thanks to all the members of portfolio companies who participated and to Google Ventures for hosting!

Posted by Jeff Smith, SEO Director of WhaleShark Media

In last week’s workshop “YouTube for Marketers,” Dror Shimshowitz, YouTube Product Manager for content creators and curators, shared his thoughts on how to build a successful YouTube brand presence.  Dror outlined ways in which YouTube can help you reinforce your brand, raise awareness, and receive feedback from the YouTube community.

YouTube can reinforce your brand through storytelling on channel pages.  Channel pages are brand destinations that are customizable with your logo and colors, featured content, descriptions, and links.  Though adding quality content may seem daunting, some businesses have leveraged their communities by curating customer-created videos.  Furthermore, available tools such as the YouTube Video Editor can improve your video’s quality through image stabilization, color correction, and sound and visual effects.

You can also use YouTube to raise product awareness.  Given that YouTube is now the second largest search engine on the web, there are a few tricks to generate traffic and subscribers:

• Bootstrap the view count of a video by getting the video embedded on external sites such as blogs, review sites, and company pages.  Doing so increases the video’s virality potential and will surface the video on YouTube’s search and top charts.
• Get the video featured on another popular YouTube channel.  Channel owners often seek relevant content and can be easily reached through comments or posted contact information.
• Create video content around trending topics or internet memes.  Views will then be generated by referrals from search or the suggested videos section on other videos.

Finally, YouTube is a powerful way to interact with your customers and receive feedback.  Unlike television, you can communicate with viewers through comments.  Additionally, YouTube Analytics can provide information on audience demographics, and a video’s drop-off points and hotspots can help you better understand if your content is interesting to viewers. For real-time interaction, Hangouts On Air allows businesses to engage with up to nine customers at once.  This video can be broadcast live or watched on-demand by viewers on your YouTube channel after the conversation concludes.  It is a great and easy way to generate more content for one’s channel.

For more YouTube marketing tips, check out the playbook on the YouTube Creator Hub. Thanks to everyone who attended; we’ll see you at an upcoming event in the new Startup Lab in a couple weeks!

Yesterday we hosted a Startup Lab workshop on Google Analytics best practices for our portfolio companies. Josh Knox, Google Analytics Global Operations Manager, recommended five steps on how to approach the tool: setting strategy, designing key actions, implementing tracking, refining data, and optimizing for insights.

1. Setting strategy: stakeholders across business units should identify goals, set key performance indicators, and set targets. For example, a community site may want to create ongoing engagement around local events. A key performance indicator could then be visitor loyalty, measured by targeting a 50% rate for repeat visits.
2. Designing key actions: businesses need to determine which website elements and actions need to be measured to capture the site’s performance. Key website actions include anything from form submission and checkout to search or social actions.
3. Implementing tracking: the basic Google Analytics code snippet covers basic tracking for pageviews, geographic location, browser types, etc. However, richer tracking for events, e-commerce, or social plug-ins require additional integration. Spending the effort to set up goals and funnels can help you identify bottlenecks in your web flows.
4. Refining data: this step focuses on ensuring data is clean and organized for processing. It involves confirming that all key actions have been tagged properly, thinking about account permissions, integrating dashboards with other Google products, and creating easy-to-consume reports.
5. Optimizing insights: Lastly, there is the optimization piece that is usually forgotten. There are various features, such as custom alerts, dashboards, and multi-channel funnels, that can help reveal insights about your website.

Thanks to the over 30 portfolio companies who attended at the Startup Lab or remotely via livestream. Tomorrow we’ll be back at the Startup Lab to talk about “YouTube for Marketers” — if you’re at a portfolio company, please sign up to be reminded of upcoming events!

Posted by Jennifer Gee, Google Ventures Intern

Following the recent launch of our Portfolio Dogfooding Program, this workshop will focus on getting the most out of a dogfood program — how to prepare, how to collect feedback from your users, and how to ensure the most important feedback is acted upon. We’ll meet in person at the Startup Lab, and will broadcast live to attendees not in the Bay Area.

This will be an informal workshop — I’ll discuss how we’ve managed dogfood trials at Google in the past, and answer questions from the group about the program. Registration details went out to the Startup Lab announcement list; make sure to sign up for future workshop announcements! (Please note that this list is open to portfolio company employees only.)

A little more than a year ago, we opened a new building, separate from our main office. It was, like many things we do, an experiment. As a nod to its experimental nature, we called it the Startup Lab.

In the last few months, the Startup Lab has become a dual-purpose space. Employees at about a dozen of our portfolio companies occupy desks on one side of the building; the growing number of workshops we host take place on the other side of the building. On an average day, most conference rooms are occupied with company meetings, candidate interviews, and calls with customers. One of the rolling whiteboards is parked next to the ping pong table and documents a recent  portfolio company tournament.

I’m happy to report that the Startup Lab is no longer an experiment, though we’re by no means done experimenting. We’ve outgrown the first space, so we’re moving into larger, more permanent digs in a couple months. By the time we’re in our new building, we’ll be averaging one workshop per week, each led by Googlers and/or industry experts with one goal in mind: help you learn (or add to) the skills you need  to execute more quickly. We’ll be trying new things — frequently as a direct result of your suggestions, so keep them coming.

This site will announce upcoming workshops, will feature the occasional post from your colleagues in the portfolio to showcase a best practice they want to share, and will of course keep you up to date on the latest experiments. Stay tuned!

Construction on the new Startup Lab continues, and we are on target for an early-July move-in date. This picture is from a couple weeks back, when the construction crew was framing out the walls. The walls are now up, paint’s next, and floors and furniture are just a few weeks away.

As Bill noted in last month’s Fast Company interview, the Startup Lab is one of the keys to our investing strategy. More than just a building, it’s also the collection of workshops, office hours and guest speakers we bring to the portfolio on a regular basis. Our current location has served its purpose well, but no longer really fits our needs (or those of the portfolio). Though we’ve cobbled together a good solution for broadcasting our workshops, neither the lighting nor acoustics lend themselves to the quality we’d like. When we host larger events with breakouts, we run out of space pretty quickly, and that can be disruptive for the companies who use the Startup Lab as their office. And let’s not talk about the alarm system, which, well, has issues.

We’re nearing the end of a nearly 9 month process to construct a dedicated building that met our exact needs. This new Startup Lab will feature dedicated conference space for workshops (with seating for up to 100 people), a full-time UX lab for use by the portfolio, live HD broadcast support for all events, and office space for portfolio companies (including conference rooms of various size and several phone/interview rooms) — whether they are in town visiting and need a temporary desk, or are in the Bay Area and need a place for the team to meet that isn’t someone’s living room. We’ll also have rooms suitable for team offsites, large rooms for board meetings, and several open work areas with more whiteboards than you could possibly hope to fill.

We’ll share more details as we get closer to moving in. Stay tuned!

A number of you asked about the current state of workshop broadcasts, as the last few were less than ideal for remote participants. I won’t bore you with all the details (for that, you can go read more than you ever wanted to know on my blog), but I figured a quick summary of where things stand was in order.

Starting with the next workshop, we’ll return to using Hangouts for the presenter to show slides, screenshare their desktop, etc. If you’re attending the workshop remotely and would like to be able to ask questions face-to-face, you can join the Hangout (up to 9 of you). The rest can watch the Hangout via our livestream — the URL and password are shared in the confirmation e-mail you receive after registering for the event.

Q&A will be live (via Hangout or in person) and via Google Moderator. For each event, we’ll open up a Moderator topic several days ahead of time so you can submit questions early and give folks a chance to vote on which questions are most interesting.

Thanks to everyone who shared feedback on what was working and what wasn’t. I’m excited with this outcome — it’s a much more usable setup that should eliminate the hiccups we’d run into in the most recent workshops. See you online soon!