A good OKR champion works towards no longer being needed

First, what it is not, because this is where companies most often get it wrong. The champion is not an expert in the method or its evangelist. When they become one, the thing described by the saying about the man with a hammer happens: every problem in the organisation starts to look like a problem to be solved with objectives. Hence two traps we name plainly in this episode. The first is turning the role into administering the process: calendars, templates and checking how well-known companies do it, instead of looking at your own organisation as a living mechanism and finding the places in it that need support. The second is perfecting the method itself, meaning a great deal of time spent on how best to write an objective, with zero movement in the direction the company was meant to go. I name both from the inside, not from the sidelines. We can sit over a single sentence of an objective for longer than we would care to admit, and even knowing the theory, we can justify to ourselves a return to the old habit.

So what does this person do. Their quarter starts a month before the end of the previous one: the quarterly and annual retrospective, plus a review of whether the strategy still holds, what the financial situation looks like and what is happening in the external and internal environment. Then planning, in which everyone first prepares their own versions of objectives, and only then does everyone sit down to negotiate. On top of that, alignment on two axes: vertically, whether all the teams are really heading in the same direction, and horizontally, what the teams from one division contribute to the same objective. Then an information session for the whole company, in the form of a webinar with time for questions and doubts, after which it sometimes turns out that the objectives themselves still need correcting. During the quarter there is one-to-one work with the objective owners, led by questions: why this metric in particular, why this way, from when do you want to measure it. Answering them is in itself a way of learning the method, more effective than training. And one thing checked every week: that the conversation is about results, not about a list of actions completed.

Who is suited to it. The criterion isn't knowledge of the method but an understanding of the strategy and the business, plus soft skills, so a champion can come from the board, from a product role, from being a scrum master or from a unit that supports the rest of the organisation anyway. It isn't a full-time post. In a company of more than 800 people there are several champions, from different locations, each doing it alongside their normal work, and they share knowledge among themselves. The name of the role doesn't matter, and neither does the name of the method itself: a team that adapted the tool to its own context after the workshops and gave it its own name is closer to the goal than one that faithfully reproduces the textbook.