Many companies, even those that are doing well, don’t grow, they survive. They move forward by inertia, they just move because that’s the way it’s always been done. You run from one meeting to another, you put out one fire and immediately start another. And at the end of the day, everyone feels productive because they’ve been running from one place to another all day… but no one has any idea if you’re really building anything.
That’s the point: You can’t grow if you don’t know where you’re going.
And you can’t improve if you don’t have tools to understand whether what you are doing is working or not.
Hence a simple but powerful system:
- Define an objective (OKR)
- Do things to achieve it (Task)
- Check if you are doing well (KPI)
Yes, it may seem trivial. But few actually do it. And almost no one does it well.
OKR, that is, where do we want to go?
The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) are a high-sounding acronym that defines those objectives that give a company direction. To be perfectly accurate nthey are not just objectives: they are challenging but achievable goals, accompanied by measurable key results.
A well-done OKR forces you to look far, to lift your head from the urgencies and ask yourself: “What do I really want to achieve, in the next 3 to 6 months?”
Concrete examples of OKR:
- Customer retention:
- Objective: To improve retention of active customers
- Key results:
- Reduce the churn rate from 12% to 8%.
- Increase repeat purchases by 25%.
- Implement a loyalty programme within 3 months
- Customer satisfaction:
- Objective: To deliver a customer experience that leaves an impression
- Key results:
- Increase Net Promoter Score from 45 to 60
- Reduce open tickets by 30% in the first month after purchase
- Get 100 new 5-star reviews
- Brand growth:
- Objective: To increase visibility in the national market
- Key results:
- +50% organic traffic to the site
- 3 new media collaborations
- 2 press campaigns in vertical publications
Do atake care, however: OKRs must have precise characteristics, otherwise they risk doing more damage than anything else: they must be ambitious, but not unrealistic. If they are too easy, no one will commit. But if they are out of scale – like ‘become a market leader in 2 months from scratch’ – the team gets demotivated, stops believing in themand ignores them. And there, you lose.
Task – What we have to do, every day
Between the OKRs and the results, there is work. The tasks are the operational part: the concrete actions to be carried out to get closer to the objectives. That is: OK the objectives, but what do I have to do operationally to achieve them?
And this is where the project manager plays the key role: translating objectives into tasks. If, for example, the result you set yourself is “to reduce the churn rate”, then the tasks will probably be something like:
- interviewing lost customers,
- improve customer activation (or if you like, ‘onboarding’)
- send customised follow-up e-mails
- update FAQs with common problems.
Without task, OKRs remain on the sheet. Without task, KPIs will never change.
KPIs – How are we doing?
The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the cruise. They are the metrics that help you understand whether what you are doing is working.
Examples of KPIs (related to customer experience)
- Monthly churn rate
- NPS (Net Promoter Score)
- Average customer service response time
- Onboarding completion rate
- Percentage of customers who make a second purchase within 30 days
If you are not familiar with some of these concepts, I invite you to read this article.
These metrics should be monitored constantly, week after week, month after month. They tell you if the tasks are bringing results, if you are going in the right direction or if a course correction is needed.
So?
So, today nit is no longer enough to ‘do a lot of things’. And neither is it enough to ‘look at the numbers’. This is because ‘working a lot’ is not synonymous with ‘working well’ and then because numbers, if you cannot compare them, are often useless.
What is needed is a strong structure:
- Goals that are challenging and motivating but not so difficult as to be stifling
- Actions that turn strategy into motion
- Indicators that tell you if you are alive or just going round in circles
As you will have realised, despite the fact that these things are often couched in English and big words, in fact it is nothing impossible, it is just a matter of putting your own ideas in order and applying a method to your daily business actions. It may seem difficult at first, especially in those places where practice has become a boulder and where chaos reigns supreme. But one step at a time, perhaps with the help of the right tools, it is doable. And the results come.
