Luke Kanies walks us through his experience of executing OKRs at his IT automation company, Puppet, which partners with organizations such as Amazon Web Services, Cisco and Microsoft Azure. Kanies is open about the mistakes the organisation made while implementing OKRs for the first time, and is thoughtful about what they could have done better.

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After Kanies first became familiar with Doerr’s planning system, he felt he was missing some key information: How do you make and update OKRs? Should the CEO develop them; or the executive team; or the frontline people? And how long should you spend developing them? How often should you update them? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but you still have to make a choice, says Kanies. 

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Kanies explains how the team at Puppet decided on their OKRs and went about implementing their strategy. Kanies imparts some of the things he wished he’d done differently -- for example, he regrets running the OKR process himself until the company hit 250 people, as this made the organisation ‘too centralised’. He also identifies some of the early mistakes Puppet made, such as not assigning each objective to an individual, and creating team goals rather than company goals, which encouraged a silo mentality.

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An invaluable case study for anyone looking to introduce OKRs to their company who wants to learn from another founder’s mistakes. A short nine-minute read.