​How do Google, Intel, and Amazon set goals? Understanding the OKR method

[jisansorkar12]

Once, a friend of mine was interviewing for a marketing position at a large company. In the past, he had only worked in startups and quit with the thought "no more startups" because he was tired of having to do everything. Even so: he did everything and got bogged down in this routine, did not see much of a result and did not understand where the project was heading as a whole.


When he told the interviewer that he had done almost everything and therefore considered himself a great specialist, the marketing director who interviewed him asked a question that stumped the friend. It sounded like this: “Don’t you think that in that startup you were marking time?” He implied that all those efforts could have been in vain. The friend could not answer such a question.

How can we really work effectively then? How can we set goals for employees and different teams so that they actually work and do not create the appearance of productivity? To understand this, let's look at the OKR method, which is very popular in such well-known corporations as Google, Intel, Amazon, Avito, Yandex and many others.

Background of the OKR Method
In 1954, American scientist Peter Drucker published the book "The Practice of Management", where he described the MBO system for management by objectives. Its essence is to set the organization's goals and choose development directions through joint efforts. And this should be done not only by managers, but also by everyone else, in order to involve the entire team in setting goals and objectives. According to this method, teams are first given goals that can affect the business, and then team members are assigned KPIs, or indicators that need to be achieved.

A proponent of this system was Andy Grove , co-founder of Intel Corporation, who uae whatsapp list developed Peter Drucker's idea into the Intel MBO model - iMBO for short. According to his model, when setting goals, you need to answer two questions:

Where do I want to go and what steps do I need to take to get there?
How will we measure that we have achieved our goal?
And, if in the MBO methodology the goals were set for a year, Andy suggested setting short-term goals - for a month and a quarter. And then he came up with a new hypothesis: the goal should be ambitious, so that it would be impossible to achieve the result. This approach helped the company a lot in the late 1970s - then Intel became the market leader in the production of microprocessors. When competitors Motorola and Zilog appeared and began to take away customers in order to hold on to the market, Intel created the first 16-bit microprocessor, and Andy Grove set the team an ambitious goal to make it the most popular among 16-bit ones.

This was super ambitious, because to achieve the goal it was necessary to conclude about two thousand agreements with new clients. Therefore, the Intel team revised its approach to working with the target audience: it began selling microprocessors not only to developers, but also to directors. The company managed to exceed the plan, conclude 2,500 agreements and win the competitive war - their microprocessor took 85% of the market.

At that time, John Doerr was working at Intel , who in 1999 joined the board of directors of Google and there refined the iMBO system, presenting the OKR model to the company's founders, which has since been used to set goals for each employee.