OKR Development and Strategic Planning

Translating product vision to okr goals

Architecting an OKR Plan for Product Design

In 2020-21, product design grew 2.5x in one year, the team was new, remote, and we needed an ambitious plan to ensure our teams would be setup for success to achieve this year’s ambitious goals. Our challenges were ones common to any team that is growing. We needed to set an operations practice to enable designers to create consistently beautiful high quality work. However, we had the added pressures of the ongoing COVID pandemic, an unstable political landscape that made employees feel unsafe in the world, and the mental health challenges everyone faced.

 

OKR FRAMEWORK:

(1) Quality (2) Scale (3) Engagement

My role was to translate the product vision into OKRs for Product Design Operations, create scopes of work that defined the needed outcomes, activities and deliverables for each key result. Then work with design management to identify ICs that could drive some of these key results autonomously. I owned many of the KRs that are under Employee Engagement and Scale in particular.

  • Quality

    Elevate and standardize the quality and practice of product design work.

    —

    UX quality framework

    Health measurement

    Inclusivity competitive audit (stretch)

  • Employee - Engagement

    Become a sought after employer known for developing the best impact driven product design talent.

    —

    Professional Development

    Engagement Survey

    Etsy by Design & Conference

    VTO Program

  • Quality

    Elevate and standardize the quality and practice of product design work.

    —

    UX quality framework

    Health measurement

    Inclusivity competitive audit (stretch)

  • Scale

    Develop team infrastructure, tooling, and staffing model for product design to expand and pivot with Etsy's market and its product- engineering growth strategy.

    —

    16% headcount growth

    New organizational model

    Practices Playbook

    Demand Tracking

 

results.

Since many of these projects were foundational and essentially creating a baseline for future performance, many of this years OKRs were measured by project completion and Employee Engagement Surveys.

 
 

  • 11 out of 12 OKRs in 2021 hit their completion goals within the timeframe planned.

  • In Product Design, designers consistently scored the department above the company and tech industry benchmarks. The feeling of belonging is tied to the multiple employee engagement and developing a career ladder that empowered designers to grow and take on more responsibility.

 
 
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Professional Development