Implementing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) has seemed to work in favor of various organizations. Compiling realistic and structured OKRs has evidently amped employee engagement, employee performance, and employee productivity simultaneously.
In a nutshell, we can all agree that OKRs are a potent organizational tool for businesses. However, there is one downside to it, and that is their creation. Unlike sales and marketing, setting up meaningful OKRs for product development could be a bit challenging.
So, for a better comprehensive understanding, we will highlight some OKR templates for product development in the following sections.
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Insights into the OKRs for Product Development
Settling down OKRs for product development has always been a tricky task for the production team. As a result, the team often circles doubtful questions like:
- What should we consider as the measuring factor in OKRs?
- Can our key results be based on numerous activities?
- What is the key to writing a good product development OKR?
- What do product development OKRs include?
The questions regarding product development OKR are endless, but thankfully, the answer revolves only around one thing: the product life cycle. Product development primarily deals with problem statements. Their goal is to design a product that will help their customers somehow, and that way, people will be willing to pay for their products.
Therefore let us have a look at the entire functioning of the production team. And present several OKR examples for product development within their description.
A product development team undergoes various product designing stages during the product development process. The stages include:
- User Research
- Architecture and Manufacturing
- Product launch
- Focusing on the Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue (AARRR) metrics
- Working on team delivery of the product, customer satisfaction, and other internal processes
Taking all these product development stages into account, we shall discuss some OKRs they can include. Product development teams can use these OKR examples as a reference for their project and align them well with their requirements.
Stage 1: User Research
This stage involves researching your users or customers. First, the team conducts surveys and research that reveals what problems the users are facing currently. A team discussion follows this, and the productions team comes up with a solution that could take down their user’s concerns.
At this point, the team focuses on validating their ideas, introducing new prototypes, testing prototypes, conducting user surveys, etc.
So, you can incorporate OKRs here in the following ways:
Objective 1: Come up with a solution that counterfeits the problem of users
Key Results:
- Hold up a design sprint to test the solution.
- Interviewing 20 people from the target audience regarding their problems.
- Validate 5 top-notch hypotheses.
Objective 2: Hosting robust user testing of the product
Key Results:
- Hold a user testing session prior to the launching of the product.
- Conduct 20 live interviews with paper prototypes of the product for clear user-testing feedback.
- Reach out to usertesting.com for video interviews related to user testing of the prototype.
Stage 2: Architecture and Manufacturing
Once the idea is validated, the product development team works towards drafting a blueprint of the entire solution. This is the phase where the product development team shifts its focus from solution testing to working on delivering iterations.
Objective 3: Enhancing the performance of the product development team
Key Results:
- Enforce performance metrics for the product development team.
- Cut down deployment time from 15 minutes to 1 and half minutes by installing AI-driven or CD.
- Hike unit test coverage rates from 50 percent to 60 percent.
Objective 4: Optimizing the delivery speed of the newly added features
Key Results:
- Hold product educational sessions one week per quarter for the product development team.
- Increasing the velocity of the sprint team from 40 points to 65 points.
- Reducing the average lead following time by 25 percent.
- Cutting off bugs per feature metrics from 1.5 to 1.
Stage 3: Product Launch
The metrics related to product launch include only the figures related to the product. The product development team does not record metrics related to product sales or marketing. Things that fall under the marketing metrics are:
- Number of sign-ups for product
- Number of users
- Sale rate etc.
Product development metrics do not influence the marketing metrics in any way.
Objective 5: Amplify the product launch procedure
Key Results:
- Increase NPS score from 7 to 9.
- Reduce after-release bugs by 40 percent.
- Work towards improving the app store rating of the product from 3.5 to 4.5.
- Reducing the churning of sign-up flow by 25 percent.
Objective 6: Host a successful v2 launching for the product
Key Results:
- Boosting referral revenue rates from 30,000 dollars to 60,000 dollars.
- Increase the conversion rates of sign-up to trial from 20 percent to 25 percent.
- Raising the conversion rate of trial to premium from 40 percent to 70 percent.
Stage 4: Focusing on the Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue (AARRR) metrics
After the product launch, the product development team monitors and supervises the AARRR metrics. From these metrics, extract two to three categories that influence your product the most and focus on them.
Objectives can have more than five key results, but you can filter 2-3 key results that are most critical to your product.
Objective 7: Encouraging product referrals
Key Results:
- Implementing new referral offers
- Boosting referral revenues from 10,000 dollars to 15,000 dollars each month.
- Increasing the offered discounts on each referral from 5 percent to 10 percent.
Objective 8: Easing up user onboarding
Key Results:
- Reduce sign-up flow churn by 25 percent.
- Increase active user numbers from 50 percent to 60 percent.
- Increase onboarding students by 15 percent.
Stage 5: Working on team delivery of the product, customer satisfaction, and other internal processes
Objective 9: Branding the product team with the community
Key Results:
- Host a conference for the product with 50+ participants.
- Participate in 5 local meetups.
- Publish 5 blogs about the product development process.
Objective 10: Boosting product team learning
Key Results:
- Conduct 12 knowledge exchange sessions per week.
- Award the team with 10 percent of learning time
- Increase personal development plan from 70 percent to 90 percent
Wrapping Up
These are some of the best examples of OKR for Product Development. Following these 4 stages would help build an effective product, and ultimately build an effective team that delivers. Here is a list of OKR Software on SaaSworthy, that your team could explore while setting up OKRs for Product Development. Also, check out our article on OKR examples for Marketing here, to get your Marketing game on point.
