April 28, 2023
I believe it’s vital for a business to have clear Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), or some form of goal-setting framework, in place for two reasons beyond ensuring organization-wide alignment. OKRs need to focus on the business outcomes, and this is no different for community professionals. Community must be designed to impact outcomes while balancing the needs of your members and allocated resources as a strategic, value-add Go-To-Market (GTM) function. For Community professionals, those reasons are:
Shoutout to my time at Lattice for helping me learn why OKRs & Goals are valuable as an employee, so these conversations are grounded in reality – the facts.
Let’s first define what OKRs are before diving into how to build meaningful ones for your community. OKRs, a common goal-setting framework, are utilized by organizations to set and track desired outcomes across all levels. Here’s my explanation of OKRs. And, yes, I’m about to use sports to help illustrate it.
The Objectives part of OKRs are supposed to be your aspirational goal(s) you’re working to achieve (e.g., win every game) within a specific timeframe (e.g., the season).
The Key Results of OKRs are meant to be the clear, measurable outcomes you plan to do to achieve your Objective(s) (e.g., run 3 miles at a 6-minute even split twice a week during the season).
The Objectives and Key Results are the two key elements that create OKRs. However, I like to then add for myself, and others, the point to think about the specific work item(s) (e.g., begin running a mile at a 6-minute pace before the season starts) you’ll do to hit the Key Result, hopefully, ultimately leading to the successful achievement of your Objective.
Pro Tip: Whether using OKRs in your organization makes sense or not, your clearly articulated goals should be standardized through a goal-setting framework that is adopted company-wide. It’s vital to work with your manager and peers when developing them for your function. This ensures that they’re aligned to business outcomes set by the executive team.
Now that you’ve learned what OKRs are, how to structure them, and why I believe they’re necessary for Community professionals, let’s jump into a few examples of OKRs for 4 types of communities typically found in the B2B tech/SaaS space:
With the examples above and a Quarterly OKRs Template from Lattice, I hope you feel equipped and ready to build meaningful OKRs for the community function in your organization to support strategic business outcomes.
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