When to break the OKR cycle
One of the most common questions I get about OKRs is about timing. How long should a cycle be? What do you do when the work or the period ends at the wrong moment? What do you do if an OKR feels wrong, or impossible to influence? I don’t see many good answers to this, so here’s what I tell clients.
Tempo and rhythm are important concepts in delivery. Using those learning, reflection and delivery muscles is something successful organisations and teams do naturally.
Rhythm is a forcing function. It creates the moments of assessment that might not happen naturally. It helps build the cycle of trying, learning and reflecting. Without the cadence the reflection can be deferred, sometimes indefinitely. It also forces prioritisation. Facing a period end forces choices that we don’t have to make when there are no time boundaries.
On the face of it OKRs are useful scaffolding to help build that rhythm. They are time based goals, best set to the needs of the organisation. Quarterly OKRs are the most popular.
But as with most things OKR related it’s important to mindfully adopt the framework for your context not the other way round. With OKR duration there are a few reasons why a rigid timeframe might not work.
- We quickly maximise the movement on the key metrics and are ready to move on.
- We find the KR isn’t the best metric to make progress against our strategy.
- We are deep into a learning cycle or mid-experiment at the end of a period.
Let’s take each scenario in turn. I scenario 1, If we do make enough progress on a KR and exhaust our best ideas in the process, what’s the logical thing to do? Carry on with slim returns and wait for the next quarter to start? Or should we look to revisit our OKR? It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen OKR coaches advise the team to keep plugging away at the initial KR! We can all agree that makes little sense.
In scenario 3, a team believed the best way to increase acquisition was to grow the top of the funnel. The KR was set accordingly. In practice, the broader messaging diluted their positioning and weakened their appeal to their ICP. Top of funnel grew, but landing page drop-off rose sharply and onboarded users actually fell. The KR was driving the wrong behaviour. My advice was to document the learning, share it, and start a new cycle immediately. There was no value in waiting two months to formalise what was already clear.
In scenario 3, it’s proving tricky to move the needle on a KR, but two weeks before the end of the cycle the team hits a rich vein of learning and progress. Stopping to reset and approve new OKRs would break the momentum. The sensible approach is to extend the cycle mindfully. Carry on with the opportunity, but reflect frequently. Is this still the right thing to be working on? Set a fixed checkpoint so the cycle doesn’t quietly become open-ended.
In all three examples we can readily get back on to the normal cadence in a future cycle.
So why might changing OKR periods be risky?
The thing to watch out for is continuous changes to timeframes. It can mask two failure modes. The first is rolling the same OKRs into the next cycle with different targets, no reflection on whether there’s a better use of focus. The second is giving up too quickly, a few weeks of limited impact and the team walks away. Both look like flexibility and shaping the framework to your needs. In truth neither is, it’s just an excuse for skipping some difficult discussions and choices.
Changing a period or an OKR should be a deliberate decision, not something that happens as a matter of course.
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About OKR Periods
One of the most common questions I get about OKRs is about timing. How long should a cycle be? What do you do when the work or the period ends at the wrong moment? What do you do if an OKR feels wrong, or impossible to influence? I don’t see many good answers to this, so here’s what I tell clients.
Tempo and rhythm are important concepts in delivery. Using those learning, reflection and delivery muscles is something successful organisations and teams do naturally.
Rhythm is a forcing function. It creates the moments of assessment that might not happen naturally. It helps build the cycle of trying, learning and reflecting. Without the cadence the reflection can be deferred, sometimes indefinitely. It also forces prioritisation. Facing a period end forces choices that we don’t have to make when there are no time boundaries.
On the face of it OKRs are useful scaffolding to help build that rhythm. They are time based goals, best set to the needs of the organisation. Quarterly OKRs are the most popular.
But as with most things OKR related it’s important to mindfully adopt the framework for your context not the other way round. With OKR duration there are a few reasons why a rigid timeframe might not work.
- We quickly maximise the movement on the key metrics and are ready to move on.
- We find the KR isn’t the best metric to make progress against our strategy.
- We are deep into a learning cycle or mid-experiment at the end of a period.
Let’s take each scenario in turn. I scenario 1, If we do make enough progress on a KR and exhaust our best ideas in the process, what’s the logical thing to do? Carry on with slim returns and wait for the next quarter to start? Or should we look to revisit our OKR? It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen OKR coaches advise the team to keep plugging away at the initial KR! We can all agree that makes little sense.
In scenario 3, a team believed the best way to increase acquisition was to grow the top of the funnel. The KR was set accordingly. In practice, the broader messaging diluted their positioning and weakened their appeal to their ICP. Top of funnel grew, but landing page drop-off rose sharply and onboarded users actually fell. The KR was driving the wrong behaviour. My advice was to document the learning, share it, and start a new cycle immediately. There was no value in waiting two months to formalise what was already clear.
In scenario 3, it’s proving tricky to move the needle on a KR, but two weeks before the end of the cycle the team hits a rich vein of learning and progress. Stopping to reset and approve new OKRs would break the momentum. The sensible approach is to extend the cycle mindfully. Carry on with the opportunity, but reflect frequently. Is this still the right thing to be working on? Set a fixed checkpoint so the cycle doesn’t quietly become open-ended.
In all three examples we can readily get back on to the normal cadence in a future cycle.
So why might changing OKR periods be risky?
The thing to watch out for is continuous changes to timeframes. It can mask two failure modes. The first is rolling the same OKRs into the next cycle with different targets, no reflection on whether there’s a better use of focus. The second is giving up too quickly, a few weeks of limited impact and the team walks away. Both look like flexibility and shaping the framework to your needs. In truth neither is, it’s just an excuse for skipping some difficult discussions and choices.
Changing a period or an OKR should be a deliberate decision, not something that happens as a matter of course.
