The legend: John Doerr

I imagine people instinctively standing to attention when John Doerr walks into a room. He’s a case study in the perfect career arc: engineer → operator → legendary VC who helped build giants.

In his book Measure What Matters, you’ll read about how he mentored Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they transformed Google from a scrappy search engine into a planetary force. If you’re a product manager, this is mandatory reading. Haven’t bought it yet? Go grab it (and fun fact: Doerr led one of Amazon’s earliest VC rounds and sat on their board).

Doerr’s book is full of vivid case studies across Intuit, MyFitnessPal, Adobe, and more. You’ll gain a far deeper understanding of OKRs than any single blog post—including this one—could deliver.

Why you should care about OKRs

OKRs are one of the most effective tools for aligning teams around outcomes rather than output.

They are less about communicating some sophisticated, nuanced understanding of a product and more about giving your teams a rallying cry to shout in unison as they go to war.

Doerr's story about Intel illustrates this perfectly, wherein their goal was literally:

We have to crush the fucking bastards [Motorola]

Truly timeless corporate poetry.

The professional version of that OKR looked like this:

Objective: Demonstrate the 8080's superior performance as compared to the Motorola 6800.
Key Result 1: Deliver five benchmarks.
Key Result 2: Develop a demo.
Key Result 3: Develop sales training materials for the field force.
Key Result 4: Call on three customers to prove the material works

It’s beautifully actionable. You can instantly imagine how teams coordinated around this. That’s the point. OKRs turn ambition into clarity, and clarity into execution.

With OKRs, Doerr led meetings with hundreds of people, aligned thousands across orgs, pivoted marketing strategy in two weeks, and did in fact crush Motorola.

My own experience with OKRs

While I was at Mythical, we built a platform that allowed game studios to tokenize player assets on a blockchain so they could be traded in the "Mythical Marketplace".

At the time, we were shifting from 0 → 1 to 1 → n. We were going to be supporting not just a handful of internal titles but a growing list of external ones. That came with a big question:

Could our platform scale?

We analyzed usage patterns from our live titles, especially during peak in-game events like item drops, tournaments, limited-time releases. We found that on-chain transactions (like minting new assets) could spike 50x above baseline. One title alone wasn’t alarming. But multiple titles in parallel? We were at risk of blowing past our platform’s capacity, leading to outages and damaging our reputation.

It became clear this was an urgent matter. Improving our infrastructure could take months, and that was all we had. In these scenarios, OKRs are great for rallying teams around a cause.

I presented this OKR to our internal teams and our blockchain partner:

Objective: Ensure the smooth release of x upcoming titles
Key Result 1: Platform can support y TPS
Key Result 2: No degradation in SLOs (Service Level Objectives)

What happened next was honestly one of the best cross-functional efforts I’ve ever seen:

• TechOps expanded and refined SLOs to tightly monitor degradation
• Teams built richer alerting, prioritized issues better, and performed stronger RCAs (Root Cause Analysis)
• Our platform team overhauled our load testing system so we could run repeatable, reliable benchmarks
• Our blockchain partner collaborated with us on improving chain-level performance
• Engineering chipped away bottleneck after bottleneck until we hit our TPS goal

Every week, we reported progress. Leadership paid close attention. And then one week, we hit the target. We celebrated! Not because OKRs magically solved everything, but because they created alignment, urgency, and clarity about what mattered right now.

Takeaways

#1: OKRs create clarity
OKRs force you to define success before chasing it.

#2: Alignment is multiplicative.
When everyone rows in the same direction, output compounds.

#3: Focus is the real value.
OKRs tell you what not to do as much as they tell you what to do.