Leading OKR for Teams

[00:01] Welcome and Introductions

Andrew Murphy: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to another Tech Leaders Launchpad livestream. If this is your first, I'm Andrew Murphy. I'm a tech leader and coach with a special focus on that pivot point around when we become tech leaders. Because when I started being a tech leader, there wasn't a lot of help and support out there. I just had to kind of fumble my way through it and work it all out. So now what I do is focus on helping other people get the resources, information, skills, and mindsets to make them a successful leader.

One of the ways I do that is through this livestream. I get all the people that I learn from—my coaches, my mentors, the people that make me think—and I try and share them with you. And that's what I have today. I have Tim. Tim, say hello to everybody.

Tim Newbold: What's up, team? How is it going? Lovely to be here.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, we're both in Melbourne and today is going to be another scorching day. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, being the pale Englishman that I am…

Tim Newbold: See, this is my happy space. I love this time of year. I was talking to some clients in the US yesterday and they have active snowfall. I appreciate that if I’m snowboarding, but I don't want to be there right now. I'm happy here. So yeah, 38 degrees. If anyone is from the States, that's 110 Fahrenheit or something, I think.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, exactly.

[01:30] Icebreaker: Favourite Non-Phone/Computer Tech Gadget

Andrew Murphy: So I always ask everybody this icebreaker: what's your favorite tech gadget that isn't your computer or your smartphone?

Tim Newbold: This is going to be really bad because I'm meant to be the focus guy and choose one thing. I could only get it down to two things. Is that okay?

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, go for it.

Tim Newbold: Alright, so there's the thing we use every day but don't know is there. This is super geeky, but it's called Firewaller Purple. It's a firewall that basically keeps all the bad stuff out of our network. It's one of the best things… You give me a confused look. Yes, you need to look into these things. They're amazing. Great for security. And it allows me to easily VPN in and all these things.

But really, the thing I use absolutely every day is my Apple Watch Ultra. I use it to track my running, gym workouts, sleep—it's the absolute bomb. So I'm a bit of a data geek—shock horror, into OKRs—and I like to pull the data and see what's going on. That's one of my favorite things.

Andrew Murphy: For some reason, that data gathering thing does not surprise me at all.

[02:41] Data Hoarding and Geekiness

Andrew Murphy: We definitely should talk about that personally, you and I, over a beer or a coffee at some point because I'm a little bit of a data hoarder myself.

Tim Newbold: Absolutely. Do you have any devices that are tracking what's going on with you? Do you have your Oura Ring or your watch?

Andrew Murphy: My smartphone captures everything, but I actually record pretty much everything that goes on on my computer. I have an Elgato Stream Deck that I use to trigger various automations to do things. I'm definitely showing you my Home Assistant dashboard at some point and how I capture all of my data into my own personal data lake.

Tim Newbold: We could spend the next hour on that, but yeah, we're getting well off track here! Let's get back.

[03:26] Audience Welcome and Asking Questions

Andrew Murphy: Thank you, Matthew—Matthew just saying g'day from Colorado. Yes, very snowy there, that's quite expected. So thank you for joining us, Matthew. As you can see here, we do have the ability to show your questions. If you've got a question you want to ask Tim or I, please don't hesitate. We could talk for an hour without that, but I would prefer for you to get value from it. The best way we can help people is you let us know what you want to know about.

If you've got any questions, comments, or suggestions for us, please post them wherever you're watching—in LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitch. We can post your questions on the screen and answer them.

[04:17] Tim’s Career Story and OKR Obsession

Andrew Murphy: Tim, the first question I ask everybody after the icebreaker is: We’re here to talk about OKRs, but we also want to know about you. In your case, I think those two things are linked. Can you give me a history of Tim and also why we’re here to talk about OKRs? Why is it the thing you want to spend an hour sharing with this audience?

Tim Newbold: That's a good question, and I'll try to make it quick. Back in the early stages of my career, I was doing what's basically a placement—internship—in a variety of teams. I wanted to move out and go somewhere else for more experience, maybe a big consulting firm. Didn’t make the move, and instead got a business systems analyst role. Those don’t exist anymore, but it was basically talking to business people and tech people, creating system docs.

As I was going through the journey, I was asking questions and thinking, “Am I really qualified to write pseudocode for senior engineers?” One of the senior guys sat me down and said, “Tim, I don’t think you get how this works. Not sure this is the industry for you. Plus, I’ve been here 18 years and not one of the documents I’ve created ended up in a system that’s being built.”

That was a huge crisis moment for me—like, was that last 18 years of work pointless? I started thinking about shifting industries. Luckily, I got pulled onto one of the first agile projects and became obsessed with making an impact—what's the actual outcome we’re trying to do rather than just deliver a thing?

This was before OKRs were talked about much. They were happening at Intel, Google had adopted them, but there wasn’t much more adoption. Since then, I started searching for the right framework—came across OKRs maybe 15 years ago and have been continuously applying and improving. Early on, I made all the mistakes in the book; since then, refining, and I realized although we can find ways to work better, there’s no point if it doesn’t make an impact.

At Seek, we got deployments down to two weeks, as fast as it can get, but again: no point if it’s not making an impact. That’s where I became obsessed with OKRs, getting teams behind hitting outcomes.

[08:54] The Importance of Outcomes Over Output

Andrew Murphy: I love that. I’m a big fan of Lean and theory of constraints, but one thing that stuff often forgets is you can optimize the process as much as you want, but if that process is producing things of no value to anybody, it’s kind of irrelevant. You’re just producing more things people don’t want.

Tim Newbold: Still, most businesses value things like velocity, story points delivered, number of features, but to what end? Pendo, the analytics platform, looked at feature usage and found 80% of features are rarely or never used. That’s not only potentially a waste; it complicates your product, making it harder to use and more expensive. That’s the “why” behind OKRs and why I’m so passionate about them.

[10:52] What Are OKRs? (Objectives and Key Results)

Andrew Murphy: We’ve used this three-letter acronym, OKR, quite a few times—what is it? Not the why, but the what.

Tim Newbold: OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. It’s a goal-setting framework created at Intel, from the 60s, developed over time, and popularized by people who moved from Intel to places like Google. Google is probably the most famous for using them; John Doerr introduced them to Larry and Sergey in a garage, and it spread from there. It's about driving focus: getting crystal clear on your biggest problem to solve right now and getting the whole business behind it.

What does an OKR look like? It's essentially:

• Objective: what you want to achieve (headline, punchy, inspiring)
• Key Results: measures of progress (metrics you want to see move)

For a team: ideally, one objective and 2–3 (max 5) key results per cycle. Too many is overwhelming and counterproductive.

But that's not the whole picture: we often add a statement on why it’s important and why now, and we separate out initiatives (actual actions taken) from key results (measures of success).

The aim is focus. For example, when working with Domino’s (Australia/Rest-of-World business, 40,000 people), at the top they had 7 OKRs per quarter—overwhelming and no progress. We reduced that number down to one, and suddenly they experienced 30% sales growth in that quarter. That’s the power of focus with OKRs.

[16:03] Aligning Team OKRs with Company OKRs

Andrew Murphy: We’ve got a question from Uzma: How do you come up with your team OKRs and build a relationship between those and organizational OKRs, so they are aligned? Also, what’s the relationship between team OKRs and org OKRs?

Tim Newbold: Great question. A lot of companies try to have an OKR for every single team, which leads to too many OKRs. In reality, OKRs should always be aligned, but that’s not always the case.

Typically, you have company-level OKRs, set quarterly or annually, and each team asks, “How do we align to that as a team?” Ideally, teams support the company-level OKR, but in enterprise businesses there’ll always be exceptions.

The role of leadership is to help connect teams with what’s most important. It’s not about command and control, but providing context: "Here’s where you can help move the metric." Then, teams come up with an OKR focused on what they can achieve in support.

It’s dangerous to just cascade key results down as objectives for teams—sometimes it works, often it doesn’t. Instead, focus on how each team supports the company objective, with the leader providing context and guidance.

[20:24] Who Sets OKRs: Top-Down, Bottom-Up, or Both?

Andrew Murphy: Is it best for the team to come up with their OKRs themselves, in consultation? Have you seen negative situations where OKRs are imposed? What’s your experience with that dynamic?

Tim Newbold: Of course, I’ve seen it go wrong—but is that a bad thing? This isn’t about getting it perfect. As long as we’re directionally aligned, we’re good. Perfection leads to frameworks like the Balanced Scorecard, which are complicated and rarely work perfectly.

Marty Cagan says teams should get an objective and set their own key results. I say, for maximum buy-in, teams need to understand the problem and then come up with the OKRs—including initiative, outcome, and measures. Teams should be able to push back if the problem doesn’t make sense.

OKR is a top-down/bottom-up collaborative process. Junior people can and should surface insights; I’ve seen it result in org-wide changes. That conversation is super important, and should be lightweight.

[23:01] Product Discovery and OKRs: How Do You Decide What to Solve?

Andrew Murphy: Let’s jump into product discovery. Often, you’re not sure what to build. Should you plan 12 months out? How do you use discovery and OKRs together to decide what to focus on for the next period?

Tim Newbold: Product discovery is about reducing risk by learning more about what the product should be. It’s about buying information and reducing assumptions. OKR is about focusing a team on solving a problem and making progress.

You shouldn’t set an OKR until you’re reasonably confident about what problem to focus on—that’s where continuous discovery helps. It’s not a linear process; it’s ongoing.

A cheeky example: Redbubble wanted to know whether to add Amazon Pay. Rather than build the integration, they just added a “Pay via Amazon” button that spun and then gave an error. The click data showed that many users tried it—and these were new (not moving from credit card/PayPal). That was a clear ROI signal before building the feature.

You use tricks like that to validate whether an OKR is worth pursuing.

[28:38] Leading and Lagging Indicators; Are Development Metrics Real OKRs?

Andrew Murphy: Leading/lagging indicators—DORA Metrics and SPACE frameworks (deployment frequency, change failure rate, etc)—are these good key results or should they be separate? Do they tie to OKRs?

Tim Newbold: Any metric reflects reality only for what it measures; doesn’t guarantee business outcomes. Lines of code is a bad metric. Productivity/process metrics (DORA, SPACE) can be useful for team introspection, but rarely as targets with bonuses or job performance hinging on them. Deming: “When a metric becomes a target, people game it, and it destroys the organization.”

Targets are fine if used maturely, but be wary of unintended consequences. Leading indicators predict the future (like conversion rate for revenue), lagging indicators reflect the past (like profit). The closer your metric is to the real outcome, the better—but context matters.

Impressions/views can be “vanity metrics,” but may matter for marketing teams. It’s about solving the right problem, and understanding the predictive power of your metric.

[34:41] How Engineering Metrics and OKRs Work Together

Andrew Murphy: I think they have a place—they’re indicators of dysfunction or optimization opportunity, but shouldn’t become the end in themselves. You can ship a hundred times a day, but if that doesn’t create user or business value, it’s irrelevant.

Tim Newbold: For me, a minimum bar for engineering teams is deploy every two weeks. But we didn’t set an OKR for that; it was just something the team agreed they needed. Not everything needs an OKR. If you’re blocked from producing value, like deploying fast, address that first; then focus your OKR on actual business/customer outcomes delivered.

[37:05] Story: Wasted Six-Month Project & Team Demoralization

Andrew Murphy: Story time—I joined a company where a team spent six months building a feature. When it finally shipped, it didn’t move any metrics and was shelved in two weeks. Huge waste, completely demoralized the team. They built it well, but nobody wanted it. Getting them to dedicate themselves again was a real challenge.

That’s the dark side of lengthy projects without discovery, and why OKRs and delivery cadence matter.

[43:00] Leadership Mindset and OKRs: What Helps and What Hurts?

Andrew Murphy: What are the ways those layers of leadership and executives can negatively and positively impact how OKRs get implemented? What should they do, and what shouldn’t they do?

Tim Newbold: This is a big topic. The most progressive organizations don’t just look at leaders’ experience, but their coaching ability. You see a lot in tech: people who are technically great, get promoted to lead, but are bad leaders and coaches.

OKRs work in organizations where leaders are connectors and coaches, not command-and-control managers. If your org is all “just get it done, here’s your to-do list,” OKRs will cause pain. If you’re genuinely outcome-oriented, leaders connect teams to strategy, help them create the plan, and support them along the way.

Strong OKR practice means weekly (or at least biweekly) tracking and conversations—leaders should coach, not dictate. Make reflection, evolution, and adjustment part of the process. Change the framework if it’s not working—don’t just “walk with a stone in your shoe.”

[46:46] Resources and Further Learning for Leaders

Andrew Murphy: Are there resources or places you recommend for people to get into that coaching/OKR mindset?

Tim Newbold: Well, Tech Leaders Launchpad! And yes, I’m keen to put the course up on your site too. Beyond that, check out monthly executive workouts (even for non-execs), and workshops on leadership and OKRs.

Some great books:

• “Trillion Dollar Coach” (by Bill Campbell—coached Steve Jobs, etc)
• Online articles and meetups—check out local product or tech leadership meetups on Meetup.com.
• Free resources at okrquickstart.com/resources —you can download guides and training, get email help.

I post regularly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and run a podcast.

Andrew Murphy: And that’s okrquickstart.com, right?

Tim Newbold: That’s it, and okrquickstart.com/podcast.

[49:13] Example: Visualizing How Team OKRs Link to Org OKRs

Andrew Murphy: Last question from Uzma: Are there standard ways—e.g., diagrams—to show the impact of our team’s OKRs on the org’s OKRs?

Tim Newbold: Yes! Search for “impact maps” or “strategy maps”—they let you show objectives and visual links to supporting team goals/OKRs. Another is “opportunity/solution trees” (product discovery). You can map metrics—e.g., company strategy: enter new market; metrics: customer signups; team: marketing leads on customer acquisition.

Good OKR tools let you visualize connection/alignment; in big orgs, you can drill down from top-level goals to team-level.

If you want to chat about specifics, drop me a note on LinkedIn—always happy to discuss.

[52:09] Where to Find Tim & How to Connect

Andrew Murphy: Where do people find you, Tim?

Tim Newbold: okrquickstart.com—tons of resources and free training. LinkedIn for regular posts/DMs, YouTube for practical videos and templates (e.g., how to set OKRs in 8 minutes), podcast for conversations. I also have a great team in the US, Europe, Australia, and am happy to connect with anyone.

Andrew Murphy: Great. And for folks following me, I do these livestreams monthly, post a regular newsletter full of leadership resources, and you can follow me on LinkedIn.

[54:36] Wrap-Up and Final Thoughts

Andrew Murphy: That’s it, we’re at the end. Thank you, Tim—this hour has absolutely flown by! Any final words?

Tim Newbold: If you hung out for the full hour, you’re amazing. Thank you so much! Always happy for future conversations, and if anyone reaches out, look forward to saying hi.

Andrew Murphy: Thanks again, Tim, and thanks everybody. See you all next time on Tech Leaders Launchpad Live!