Set quarterly goals as a short why, 3-5 commitments, and a task list

Ravi Mehta… stool, and then he says, OKRs solve for two of the legs. And the important thing that's missing from OKRs is the third leg existed in a very clear and direct way at companies like Intel and Google because they were designed around OKRs. And so OKRs could work in a system where you had the strategic why really well-defined, but if you don't have that strategy framework to go alongside with OKRs, OKRs tend to break down because they're incomplete.

Ravi MehtaAnd so the idea behind narratives, commitments and tasks is that they are the three legs of the stool and that they are independent. And so you can work with just them without any other strategic dependencies. Narrative is what is the story strategically that we're trying to solve with this set of work? Commitments are the things that you are committing to do to make progress on that story. And tasks are the things that you'll need to do in order to deliver on your commitments. And so the narratives are the why. The commitments are the what and the tasks are the how. And collectively those three pieces work together to provide you with a set of goals that can stand on its own, that standalone that doesn't need to exist within any other system. And so as a result, I found that people that have adopted them have found a really good alternative to OKRs that in some ways it's similar, but it works better for people. Got those three parts.

Jacob EitingHow do you differentiate between a commitment and a task? It's just accountability on completion or,

Ravi MehtaI think there is a problem just around process and exactly what you're saying, which is people sort of shape themselves around the system they're working in. One thing that I have found really effective is the word commitment is kind of scary. And so people don't enjoy making commitments as much as they do making goals or making OKRs. It's like, oh, I got it. I'm committing to do this. I take my word very seriously.

Ravi MehtaAnd so people tend to come up with fewer commitments and then are really focused on them during the quarter. And actually the fact that people are talking about commitments is a great forcing function for conversation before you actually say, we're finalizing our NCTs for this quarter. So I found that that really helps. The narrative helps like, okay, let's spend one or a couple sentences describing the why. The commitments help because people only want to commit to the fewest possible things. So it's usually like three to five things. And then the tasks I think about is just a scratch pad. It gives us a warm start on the quarter. The goal is not to come up with these lofty goals, and then all of a sudden it's day one of the quarter and nobody's talked about how you're actually going to implement any of those.

David BarnardYeah. I love getting down to this blocking and tackling level, which we don't always do on the podcast, but I mean this is the messy work of actually building great products is that you need to think about these kind of things. If you just go right to tasks and you don't have any kind of narrative for why they matter, what are you even doing? But yeah, how do you fit in all the paper cuts and other things? Does that become a commitment we're …