Measure What Matters by John Doerr, published in 2018, is the book that made OKRs a household term in startups. Doerr learned the method as a young engineer at Intel under Andy Grove in the 1970s, then introduced it to Larry Page and Sergey Brin soon after his firm Kleiner Perkins invested in Google in 1999. The book explains how a simple goal format can keep a growing team pointed in the same direction.
What is Measure What Matters about?
An OKR has two parts. The objective is a short, inspiring statement of what you want to achieve. Under it sit three to five measurable results that show, without debate, whether you achieved it. Doerr’s point is that writing goals this way forces clarity: a team cannot hide behind vague ambitions when the results are numbers with dates.
The book is built around stories, many told by the people involved. Doerr opens with Intel’s campaign in the late 1970s to win back the microprocessor market from Motorola, a push organised entirely around OKRs. He follows with Google’s early years, the growth of YouTube, the Gates Foundation’s health work and Bono’s ONE campaign against poverty. Smaller companies appear too, showing how teams of a few dozen people use the same method.
Doerr groups the benefits into four ideas he calls superpowers: focus and commitment to priorities, alignment across teams, tracking for accountability, and stretching for ambitious goals. The later chapters introduce CFRs, short for conversations, feedback and recognition, which he presents as the human side of OKRs. Regular check-ins replace the dreaded annual review, and goals are discussed openly instead of judged once a year.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- Write goals you can check. An objective like grow faster needs results such as 200 paying customers by 31 March. If you cannot measure it, rewrite it.
- Pick fewer goals. A startup with ten priorities has none. Choose three objectives for the quarter and drop the rest.
- Make goals public inside the company. When everyone can see everyone else’s OKRs, people spot overlaps and gaps without a meeting.
- Separate stretch goals from commitments. Mark which results you must hit and which are ambitious bets. Missing a stretch goal at 70 per cent is still progress.
- Check in weekly, grade quarterly. A five-minute weekly update keeps goals alive. A quarterly score shows what you learned about your own planning.
Who should read Measure What Matters?
It is most useful for startups between roughly 10 and 200 people, when the founders can no longer keep every priority in their heads and teams start pulling in different directions. Team leads in larger companies who are told to adopt OKRs also benefit from seeing where the idea came from. Investors and board members get a common language for discussing progress with founders.
Solo founders and very early teams can skip it. With two or three people at one table, a shared to-do list and a weekly conversation do the same job with less overhead.
How do you put Measure What Matters to work this week?
- Write one company objective for the next 90 days in a single sentence that would make your team proud.
- Add three measurable results with numbers and a deadline, and ask each team member to draft one OKR that supports it.
- Put a 15-minute weekly check-in in the calendar where each person scores progress from 0 to 1.
Turning goals into a weekly plan is easier with a list, and the free Startup checklist tool from Fe/male Switch helps you break each objective into concrete tasks.
Where does Measure What Matters fall short?
The stories feature giants and celebrities, so the book can make OKRs look like the secret behind Google’s success, which overstates what any goal format can do. Doerr says little about how OKRs fail: teams gaming numbers, goals multiplying until they become paperwork, or measurable results crowding out work that is hard to count. Small startups get only a handful of examples. Doerr is also an investor in several of the companies he praises, which colours the tone. For the original thinking behind the method, read High Output Management by Andy Grove.