OKRs

Considering company growth, how do you keep startup spirit and strong focus on our client needs? This is an important question for most companies, especially companies that grow as fast as Infobip. With the growth of our client base, product portfolio and number of employees and departments, it is easy to lose focus from important things. Being busy is easy but focusing on valuable outcomes is hard.

So how do we stay focused on the most important things in Infobip? Well, we try to. Having 4000 people on board and having razora sharp focus is a hard thing to achieve. We use a methodology called OKR – Objectives and Key Results. OKR methodology is based on best practices from companies such as Intel and Google. It is all about having a focus on important goals (Objectives) and understanding how to measure progress and achieve these goals (Key Results). Each objective is based on one or usually more key results which we need to satisfy in order to achieve that particular objective.

How do we implement OKRs at Infobip

By the end of each calendar year our management sits for a couple of days and talks about previous year and achieved objectives. OKR success is important for each employee as well because Infobip yearly bonus schema is tied to Objective success rate. Then we focus on next year – what are 3-5 most important things that we want to achieve next year? This Objective planning sessions are both top-down and bottom-up. Our management set thes Top Company Objectives – our north star, where do we want to focus our effort next year.

Management makes presentations to all departments and then all teams in departments need to contribute to these Top Company Objectives, but also add their own objectives. After planning is done and we have goals for next year, our management team makes communication to each employee and at that point we, as a company, commit to achieving our yearly objectives.

Does it really work at Infobip? Here‘s an example

Yes it does, but maybe not as you would expect. OKRs are not your typical Sprint planning, they are not a source of your daily tasks. We don’t put development tasks in OKRs, we put company aspirational goals in OKRs. The point of OKRs is to be a north start of your company, your general direction. OKRs are a great tool for understanding our company vision and strategy. Your source of daily tasks would will be Sprint plannings and product backlogs, but your product backlog should be based on company direction expressed in OKRs.

Here‘s a Top Company Objective (2021) as an example - to Become an Important Player in the USA. (can we really share OKRs in engineering book?). This TCO was a guideline for a lot of decisions this year. From a business perspective Infobip acquired OpenMarket company, a large and successful cPaaS company which has corporate headquarters in Seattle, US. From an engineering perspective we started building few data centers in North America, started working on implementing US regulations in our products etc. And yes, we were successful in achieving all these goals! So as you can see, OKRs are not your daily tasks in Jira, but they have to be underlying principle of everything we do on daily basis.

We don’t limit ourselves to us OKRs only for business goals. We use OKRs to set objectives regarding organizational changes, employee benefits, company events and similar things. All things that actually matter have to be in our OKRs.

Why should engineers care about OKRs?

We use OKRs to differentiate important things from less important things. If you understand the company strategy, you understand how to contribute to Infobip‘s goals.

What happens if I fail to achieve objectives or if we fail as a company? Nobody commits to outcomes, nobody knows the future. You commit to your effort; you commit that you will do whatever is in your power to achieve relevant company goals. A lot of things do change during one calendar year, some goals may become irrelevant or less important. In those case we will revisit OKRs and commit to some other or new objectives. If objectives have not changed but we still haven’t achieved them, then we do a retrospective. What happened? What can we do differently in the future? What can we improve?

OKRs are all about direction and focus, understanding what are company goals and how to achieve them.