OKRs for Design Orgs

In a recent Thought Partnership session, a VP Design asked for help in thinking through their team's OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). I've been grappling with this subject since my first internal VP role, as I've worked at companies that went all-in on OKRs as a way to not just measure performance, but coordinate effort across teams.

And all that time, OKRs have proven challenging, because while most of design's value is realized through collaboration, there's something in how OKRs are commonly practiced where Design contorts itself to identify that which it can solely own. I've come to believe the structure of Design OKRs is straightforward, falling into two camps: Functional OKRs (specific to Design), and Cross-Functional OKRs (shared with collaborating functions).

Functional

These OKRs are the ones that a Design organization can 'own.' The specifics will vary, but there are common Objectives.

Organizational Health

This objective holds for literally any function in an organization. What is the morale of people in this function (measured through internal surveys)? How engaged are they? What is the rate of regrettable attrition? I'm surprised how few heads of design pay attention to this, considering it's straightforward to measure, and is very much a thing they could own.

Design Quality

A Design function's core responsibility is to improve the user experiences the organization produces. And while those improvements require the engagement of other functions (product management, engineering), ultimately, if the user experience isn't improving, Design is ineffective.

If Design Quality is the Objective, what are the Key Results?

This is where things get trickiest for Design OKRs. So let's unpack it.

Much depends on where you are in your Quality journey. We've all heard the admonishment against "process" KRs: simply shipping a feature shouldn't be a Key Result, but instead the impact which that feature drives.

The thing is, when it comes to design quality, if you haven't set up your measurements, you cannot assess your impact. In that case, your first KR will be about process:

1. Identify the most appropriate metric(s)

For this, I have seen teams use a variety of measures:

• improvements in heuristic evaluation scores (PURE)
• UX metrics such as UMUX, UMUX-Lite, and SUS
• Google's HEART framework
• Jasmine Christensen's product and usability heuristics

Your next KRs are also about process:

2. Instrument the metric(s)
3. Benchmark the metric(s)

Now, you could measure "instrument" and "benchmark" in a more standard KR fashion: "50% of flows are instrumented for UMUX" or "50% of product teams have benchmarked their HEART framework." You still haven't shown impact on quality, but at least there's accountability in terms of progress.

With instrumentation in place over time, you can now drive a truly meaningful KR.

4. Measure impact on design quality

Given that we're talking about the Design function, the Key Result should span everything that Design touches, e.g., "10% YoY improvement in PURE scores across all products." Product-by-product specifics matter, and we'll get to those in a moment. The point here is for Design to demonstrate that the overall quality tide is rising.

Special Projects (e.g., Design System)

There will be special projects for which the Design function is primarily responsible. Over the past decade, the most common was the creation of a Design System. In my work across many teams, a common objective was Design System Adoption, with KRs being either the percentage of product teams using the Design System, or the percentage of Design System components that had been taken up.

There are other kinds of special projects. When I was a design executive, I once had a quarterly Objective to "creating a compelling future vision of a product experience to be shared at a company all-hands." A Key Result for something like this would be to survey those in attendance and assess their degree of inspiration based on what was shared. (That wasn't my KR. I don't think I had an actual KR. If I were to do such a thing again, I'd make sure I knew the impact of that work!)

Organizational Influence

This can come across as self-serving, so be mindful of how you use it. I have worked with many teams that sought to evolve beyond execution, and to exert influence over what was being shipped. Here are some actual Key Results I've developed with clients that would indicate this: "By the end of the year, 3 items on the product roadmap were initiated by Design," "50% of projects will have designers collaborating with PMs on requirements."

If your senior leadership desires Design to be involved earlier and more strategically, then such OKRs can be published broadly. If the desire is specific to the Design organization, it's still worth identifying and holding yourself accountable to (as it will have an impact on Organizational Health), but it may not belong on company-wide OKR dashboards.

Cross-Functional OKRs

The bulk of Design's value will be realized through collaboration with cross-functional teams. Don't worry that you cannot isolate Design's impact—the other members of the team aren't worried about isolating their impact. If the cross-functional team succeeds, then Design shares in that success.

For designers, the cross-functional OKRs that are most relevant are product outcomes, and what's most important is simply that Design team members are involved in their creation, providing a human-centered perspective to the conversation.

In the whiteboard photo above, I also identify "team health" as a cross-functional OKR, which is similar to how organizational health was defined—team morale and engagement. A key add would be an internal pulse survey that asks (in part) about the experience of partnering with other functions. This is sometimes referred to as an internal NPS.

What has worked for you? With what are you struggling?

In my research for this piece (some Googling), I was struck by how little has been written about this. I fared a little better when asking ChatGPT about it, though I had to remind it about organizational health as something to consider.

Given how it keeps coming it, it appears to me that it's worth discussing. In the comments below, feel free to share what's worked, and where you're struggling with Design OKRs. Perhaps we can all help each other!