Shape Up and OKRs, a great couple or a disaster?

Shape Up is a fantastic framework for expressing opportunities and deciding what bets you want to place. Over the last few years, I have used multiple variants of Shape Up and helped a handful of companies implement the parts of Shape Up that fit their organisation.

One thing that have ben common in all places have been OKRs.

OKRs are often shamed these days as the root of all evil in a creative product department, and I am sure that if you asked DHH or Ryan Singer, OKRs would trigger a forceful reaction of hate speech, but the fact is that most organisations that are going to implement Shape Up in their product and engineering teams already have OKRs rolled out in the entire company. We either have to go down the painful path of changing the goal-setting framework in the entire company, or we need to try and adapt Shape Up to fit with OKRs and get some value out of the pairing.

When OKRs fail product teams

We often laugh at shitty products and how bad goalsetting and overly growth-focused leadership is fucking up great products (looking at you, Zoom), and the truth is that many companies and teams are misusing OKRs to a point where they are destroying their products, unempowering their employees and shooting them self in the foot.

But it’s also true that OKRs can be great. We have to stop using them to describe solutions (in the same way we have to stop using roadmaps to define future solutions) and start to use them to describe short-term strategies.

The objective is our one-liner 3-6 month strategy.

The key results illustrate how success looks when we succeed with that strategy.

What I like about a good OKR is that it’s basically all the strategy you need, and that is also why I am starting to like longer OKRs (six to twelve months), better than new OKRs every three months.

OKR ❤️ Shape Up

So how does a good quality short-term strategy expressed in an OKR fit with Shape Up?

You should have thousands of ideas for improving your product and business when you run a product. The hard part is to decide where to focus and align around. This is a strong superpower of OKRs. As a team, you get into a rhythm of setting, aligning and communicating OKRs.

In Shape Up, the Betting Table have some of the same qualities, but the Betting Table can also easily lack a direction, especially over multiple cycles of work, and this is where OKRs come in. OKRs are simply the direction guiding the betting table, helping to keep a fairly tight focus that is already aligned, agreed and communicated throughout the company. This will also allow you to cut down the number of people attending the Betting Table meetings because distant stakeholders already know the focus and short-term strategy; this will leave the hardcore betting to the product people.

Are there drawbacks to using OKRs and Shape Up together?

Oh yes, it’s not all just pure sailing. You have to have an even tight OKR process so you have your OKRs ready in time to have a Betting Table with each team before a new quarter starts; that requires that your OKRs are done ~four weeks before the betting table to allow ample time to write and adjust pitches. When did you last experience OKRs done four weeks before the quarter started?

It also pulls out some creativity and flexibility if you are in an organisation where changing OKRs is a huge process, but then you are also doing OKRs wrong.

Fitting Shape Up into the existing rhythm of your OKR process can be annoying. In AutoUncle, we are running quarterly OKRs, which means that we will run two cycles, one of five weeks and one with six weeks plus two times one week of cooldown. I would love to be able to stay with 6-week cycles and a 2-week cooldown, but it just doesn’t fit the company’s planning and communication cycles.

Another brutal fact is that most companies are shit (sorry for my language) at defining strategy, but with a great OKR process and longer OKR cycles, they can actually get by only with a great vision and a few strong OKRs. Then, when you add Shape Up on top, you have a pretty good operational setup that should take you a long way.

There clearly is a utopia where all you need is Shape Up, but for the rest of us, OKRs and Shape Up are not the worst fit in the world.

I would love to hear how you run your Shape Up process and how you fit it into your company. Ping me on X or shoot me an email.