What is a great Product Manager OKR Example?
Objective: Make our user onboarding a delightful experience
Key result: Improve onboarding conversion rate from 20% to 40%
Above you’ll find various examples of OKRs for Product Managers. Each of them dives into an area that a Product Manager might be responsible for or partly influencing.
Because Product Managers work in cross-functional teams, their OKRs are rarely about the work they do themselves, but more about the work that their team achieves and the outcomes they create.
What does a Product Manager do?
A product manager is the manager (sometimes referred to as the mini-CEO) of the product. The "product" is often in a digital form, and the job title is most frequently used in software-as-a-service businesses. The PM's responsibility can vary across specific roles and companies, but most often the core job of a PM is to make the company product a success. This takes many shapes, so it’s easier to describe with an example.
A Facebook Product Manager’s OKR could look like this:
Objective: Improve the value that users are getting from Facebook Live
Key Result: Increase avg. time spent watching Facebook Live from 80 seconds to 16 seconds
Achieving this OKR is far from easy and requires way more work than just “making sure users do”. A PM should work with a designer, maybe even a user researcher, and definitely a team of engineers.
Together, they should iterate on various solutions that could drive this metric up. And because Facebook has such a large user base, they can deploy experiments to small cohorts of users and observe how their behavior changes over time.
Why Product Managers should work with OKRs
Very often, well-known and seasoned Senior (or Managing) Product Managers underline what a PM should and shouldn’t focus on. The conclusion is always that PMs should deliver value to the user, and focus on just that, instead of things like building new features. It’s often about growth of some form (which we have more OKR examples for)
Users getting value can often be measured one way or the other. Various KPIs will indicate if a user is continuously getting value from a product, or if it’s declining over time. Since OKRs work very well with very data-driven roles and departments, this fits product management perfectly, which should be noticeable in the way that the OKR examples are listed at the top of this page.
What elements are important for OKRs for Product Management?
Every OKR in Product Management should focus on the following:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Results-oriented
Time-bound
OKR Criteria: Specific
Your OKR should be specific enough so that when other people within the organization, that aren’t necessarily on your team, know what you’re working on. No one ever got punished for having an OKR that was a bit too long. Instead, writing fuzzy or unclear OKRs is a definite no-go.
OKR Criteria: Measurable
Because OKRs are usually working with specific metrics, it’s a lot easier to check the box that the OKR is measurable. We measure things that are relevant to the progress of the products that the PM is working with.
OKR Criteria: Achievable
It’s important to have achievable OKRs. They should always be ambitious, but nothing is more demotivating than unachievable goals. A rule of thumb is that the chance of achieving a Key Result should be around 50% from the start. If you reach 70% and above, it’s considered a success.
OKR Criteria: Results-oriented
Being focused on results is a very important aspect of OKR. It’s so important, that we’ve dedicated an entire section to describing why you should focus on outcomes over outputs below.
OKR Criteria: Time-bound
A key part of defining a goal is also defining when you’re expecting it to be met. For OKR, your goals are usually divided into different cycles and your goals should of course be reached within the end of the cycle.