About two years ago, I clearly remember stepping into the CPO’s staff meeting on day one. In the room were several engineering and product management leaders. As the discussion shifted to product design, I could sense shared sentiments:
- ‘We don’t know what designers do.’
- ‘What they do seems to be combined with PM’s work.’
- ‘How do we know designers are spending time on the most important priorities?’
It took some time for me to grasp why these perceptions existed. Each Business Unit’s planning was led by product management, and the majority of goals in OKRs belonged to product management or engineering. While product designers were doing exceptional work, their visibility was constrained as they lacked accountability as owners of KRs.
Fast forward to the present, and the company’s OKR structure has undergone significant improvements—simpler, cleaner, and better structured after much hard work. It was at this point that I decided to create team-level OKRs for my product design team.
While it was a journey, I saw clear benefits from this process. Transparency to executive leadership was the first win. It was also an opportunity for designers to reflect on their priorities, accountability, and where they can grow. For design leaders, this makes the quarterly planning much easier as there is something to base on.
Preparing and Crafting Design Team OKRs: To initiate the yearly OKRs for the design team, I kicked off the process during the summer. Goals don’t just appear; they need buy-ins from the team.
Step 1: Organizing and Prioritizing: Firstly, I set up an offsite session to explain design OKR concepts. We brainstormed on current pain points and crucial design debt, resulting in several prioritized objectives with clear goals. Adapting to my team’s hybrid model (All ICs dedicate 80% of their time to their product teams, and 20% time to design team initiatives), our OKRs blended product team goals from each Business Unit with design team-level goals.
Tips for Design Team OKRs: Consider adding holistic design concepts, essential design fundamentals, empowering design processes, and innovative ideas for enhancing end customers’ experiences.
Step 2: Integrating Design-related OKRs from Higher Level: In my organization, the highest level of OKRs is represented as Business Unit OKRs. I delved into the upcoming year’s plans and encouraged team leaders to invite product designers to identify key goals directly related to user experience. Combining these steps, we derived the main ingredients:
[Design OKRs = Design Team OKRs + Design-related KRs from BU’s OKRs].
Additional Ingredients for Design OKRs: Ideas from team retrospectives, engagement surveys, and industry trends can be considered in the design team OKRs as they cover important design debt, blockers for the team’s productivity, as well as more advanced practices from other teams.
Step 3: Automated Operations with tracking mechanisms: OKRs, often created as a document can be cumbersome to track. How do we ensure KRs are progressing and predict resource gaps or blockers without having manual updates and frequent meetings. For my team, I converted every OKR with Jira tickets with target dates and T-shirt sizing, and posted the Jira ticket links on the Confluence page instead of static text. This process ensures our page reflects the real-time status of each OKR. For example, design team objectives for the year became an initiative on the product design Jira board, where KRs were converted into epics for detailed tracking at the story level. Jira ticket’s status updates are simultaneously synced on the Confluence page. (If your organization uses more advanced tools such as Aha, this process can become even simpler.)
Tips: Utilize the “In-line” view when pasting Jira links into Confluence. This view provides real-time status updates for initiatives or epics, transforming the Confluence page into a tracked dashboard.
Step 4: Assisting Audiences in Understanding Design OKRs: After coding, I provided guidelines on how to use design OKRs to target audiences.
- For Leaders & Partners: Understanding the design vision and ownership is key. Leaders and partners can explore the unique context of the product design team, ensuring each designer’s contribution aligns with higher-level goals. They also need to align that investing in the future vision and foundational work contributes to design deliverables, ultimately contributing to the business.
- For Managers & Leads: The OKR document serves as a tool for resource allocation and risk identification. With clear goals, it streamlines design estimation and enhances overall planning strategies. Managers and leads can address potential gaps, fostering transparency to optimize our team’s capacity for tangible results.
- For Designers: Design OKRs serve as a guide for aligning work and developmental goals with higher-level objectives. For example, designers interested in user research can contribute to the design team’s research related-OKR, actively participating in research goals and sharing their successes. The success they create here can be used as their performance evaluation, and ultimately their growth track.
Step 5: Balancing Plan Guidance with Flexibility: Despite thorough planning, unexpected events may unfold. Business Unit plans might be updated, strategic decisions might be made, or new customer insights could unveil unanticipated challenges. My philosophy is that the plan, like OKRs, serves as a navigation tool through these complexities. If unexpected requests arise, we can refer back to the OKRs, and evaluate if they align with current priorities. There’s also room to reinterpret goals and adjust action plans while ensuring the overarching objectives are achieved.
Going back to the questions I heard from my day one, now I am more equipped to answer questions.
- We don’t know what designers do: A: Product design OKR shows each designer’s ownership and assignments.
- Product designers’ work seems to be combined with PM’s work: Design opportunities and plans are further articulated on each KR.
- How do we know designers are spending time on the most important priorities? Product Design OKRs inherited the Business Unit’s OKRs. Designers primarily focus on business case-backed-up problems. When they spend time on prioritized design foundations such as a design system or research practices, we ensure that the outcomes are beneficial for the customers.
To wrap up, I am thinking of the next steps.
Firstly, it’s important to align a North Star Metric to each KR. A North Star metric is the success measure for a product or business. The North Star metric is the one that connects the user needs you aim to meet with the business needs the product must support. Although the concept of KRs implies that it’s measurable, it takes time and process to set the most important metric for each goal and I recognize I need to refine them further.
Furthermore, I am thinking of ways to recognize foundational design work since, in my team’s case, the majority of product design team OKRs are based on the BU-level OKRs. There are important design foundations to tackle and it’s hard to capture them in the context of business.
As Einstein famously mentioned, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”. The fact that certain ideas and topics are not framed as measurable goals does not mean that they do not matter. I’d like to think of ways to provide a slightly unstructured space to tackle customers’ root problems with empathy and establish sharable design foundations for designers.
Lastly, I’d like to learn more about how other design leaders shape their OKRs or any goals, enabling design to more actively participate in the strategic planning phase. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions or comments about the topics discussed.
References
Julie Lee's Projects 