Top down vs. Bottom up OKRs

Addressing the myth of pure bottom up goals

Bottom up OKRs is a half-understood concept that was meant to be a way to give teams more ownership of their OKRs, but ended up causing more chaos.

In the earlier days of OKRs, some organizations would perfectly cascade their goals through their organizations. The top-level key results became the objectives for the next level down, each layer linking perfectly to the one before it.

But this cascade caused problems-- it was too slow to implement, needing to write all of the OKRs before a quarter could kick off, and left executives settings goals for teams that wouldn't fit in with the work they did or weren't realistic for those teams. Worse, teams felt like they had no ownership of those goals, which hurt their motivation to own them.

Enter bottom-up

Bottom up was seen as the solution for the time and lack of engagement from cascaded goals. A north star would be set (the company's mission, for instance), and teams could set their goals however they wanted to, as long as they based them off of that north star.

But this was a swing too far in the opposite direction.

Teams weren't given enough guidance for the types of goals they should set, which means that they would set goals that pulled each team in a different direction. Sometimes, OKRs wouldn't end up as useful goals, since they weren't focused on the most meaningful targets for the organization and were instead primarily focused on process improvements or maintaining the status quo.

How bottom-up should work

Teams need a north star. This means publishing the top-level company goals first. This shouldn't be the start of the grand cascade, however. This should just be the beginning of the OKR process-- a clear layout of what is most important and what we would ideally like teams to be focused on.

Once the company goals have been published, teams should write their own goals to align with that goal. This means picking one of the objectives that has been set, and asking themselves "How could we help with this objective?"

Exercise for writing bottom-up goals

Teams interested in doing bottom-up goals well can use this exercise to figure out how to write good team goals that are aligned with the company goal:

• Start by copying verbatim a company objective that is related to your team's function (If there's a revenue objective, that would be a good one for Sales and Customer Success, but might not be great for Engineering)

• Have teams list the KPIs that they track that are related to that objective

• Pick 3-5 of those KPIs that could be improved and set realistic targets for improving them this quarter

• Refine the Objective so that it's more relevant to those metrics.

Using our AI goal generator can help accelerate this process as well!