tl;dr: Getting DAOs-or any large organization- to execute effectively as a team is about integration. That only comes with a clear strategy. Learn from my mistakes.

One of the many mistakes I’ve made as CMO at Gtmhub is in an over-reliance on OKRs as a method for strategy execution to make up for the lack of strategy deployment.

It sounds simple when you say it, but if you don’t have a clear strategy in the first place, OKRs aren’t going to help you.

When I first developed a marketing strategy for the company, I had been in the role for about 3-4 months. The team was about 3 people and we started to execute.

Over time, as the company grew from Series A to Series B financing six months after I began, we started to bring on more people to the orgnanization.

By July, we had grown to nearly 20 people and while the marketing strategy hadn’t changed that much (and was generally working), it had gotten bigger and more complex.

I’ve learned that there are 4 stages to consider:

• strategy planning/development
• strategy deployment
• strategy execution
• strategy adaptation

I neglected the 2nd one because, well, as the CMO of an OKR company that makes strategy execution that much more effective, I was overly focused on that part…to my own (and my team’s) peril.

Fortunately, there’s a wrapper around these 3 pillars of strategy that I feel like I had gotten right…culture. I’ve worked hard to make the marketing team one in which we have a culture of transparency and openness. It’s not perfect, but I am very grateful for the fact that so many members of the team feel comfortable telling me when I have missed something.

And, in a variety of words, they’ve told me that I failed on the strategy development (at least an updated version) and strategy deployment, because of my incorrect belief that “OKRs solve everything.”

No wonder 72% of first-time OKR implementations fail…and I work at the leading provider of OKR software in the world!

All of this came to mind, not only because I was told this to my face by many people on my team (I’m a slow learner) but also because I took the time to digest the excellent article by one of our 100s of partners around the world, Chris Butler.

It’s called OKRs are networks, not hierarchies: They don’t cascade, they integrate and it offers a great deal of practical insight and advice for HOW to implement OKRs as a methodology once you are committed to them (which is not a given).

However, the part that resonated with me had to do more with the foundational elements necessary for effective OKRs, more than OKRs themselves.

As Chris writes:

Don’t make OKRs be everything to everyone!

Each team will have something like a charter and a scorecard which is meant to be comprehensive.

First, the charter is a document (or often a slide in an organizational slidedeck) that outlines the teams that are part of a group, how they work with other groups, and what they ‘own’ inside the org.

Second, the scorecard is a document (or dashboard somewhere) that shows all of the different metrics, KPIs, and business impacts that the team cares about.

If we have these two artifacts we take pressure off the team from making sure that everyone’s work is spoken for in the OKRs.

In short, I think this is the mistake I have made by not spending enough time clearly articulating the charter and the scorecard. In my head, it was clear (well, sort of), but I definitely jumped ahead too much and it’s hurt my team (and probably the organization as well).

However, this is all part and parcel of a “learning organization” and building a culture of accountability, transparency, and collaboration.

I’m not perfect and I don’t expect my team to be. What’s different in a “knowledge economy” company is that perfection-unlike in building a car- isn’t the main thing that matters. Outcomes, fueled by learning and growth are.

We’re coming up against the end of Q4 and, despite some of these things, the marketing team is doing some amazing work.

Hopefully, I can give them more clarity going into 2022 than they had previously and, when combined with the OKR framework, set them, Gtmhub, and, most importantly, our thousands of customers like Adobe, CNN, Societe Generale, Experian, and Red Hat, up for success.

Take Chris’ guidance to heart.

The reason why it is so hard to build great OKRs is because they require a real strategy to be implemented. Without a knowledge of strategy across the organization a network of those OKRs can’t be properly built either.