,,OKRs present a heavy-weight answer to the problem. OKRs tend to require hours and maybe even days to determine what are the right goals and metrics. ''
If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is doing.
John Doerr wrote the great book about OKRs to explain how important they were in setting the strategy for Intel when it went out of the memory business and focused just on processors: achieving that in 1 quarter is only possible with very clear communication.
If it's not rare enough (quaterly or yearly) or not short enough (few items), it doesn't work, it's just a wish list. I have seen them working and not working (when the whole team knew that doing all the strech goals were impossible).
> If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is doing
Typically, focusing the team on the strategy for the next 24 hours.
Depends if the leader is in the weeds contributing or not.
My experience with quarterly goals at an early startup was that it made an artifact for what was most important at that given moment. Only later we're we able to prioritize a quarter ahead
For a startup an example objective would be an MVP launch and a key result would be an MVP being tried out by 10 people in a coffee shop, or getting 100 views from various blog posts. Something like this would set an expectation for the whole team (sales, marketing, engineering...) for the quarter. It shouldn't be complex, but it has to be something well thought out and serious.
I would get crazy if I would get a new strategy every 24 hours. The details of the execution can change, but the objective and the key results shouldn't change that often.
I assume you're referring to being consistent - keeping the team focused on the (predefined) strategy, not getting distracted and going off on tangents...
If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is doing.
John Doerr wrote the great book about OKRs to explain how important they were in setting the strategy for Intel when it went out of the memory business and focused just on processors: achieving that in 1 quarter is only possible with very clear communication.
If it's not rare enough (quaterly or yearly) or not short enough (few items), it doesn't work, it's just a wish list. I have seen them working and not working (when the whole team knew that doing all the strech goals were impossible).