With the right strategy you can be the next Google — but only if you measure the right things
With the right strategy you can be the next Google — but only if you measure the right things
Choosing the right goal is important. But a goal is meaningless if we aren’t intentional about measuring our success.
I want to tell you a story about two startups. One is a small California startup trying to make a splash in the social media space in the early 2000’s. Right about this time, there’s a lot of negative sentiment associated with “traditional” social media. Social algorithms are being recognized for what they are: Tools that manipulate people into screen addiction, judgment, superficiality, social isolation, often leading to depression and worse. There’s a general sentiment — at least in some quarters — that there could be something better.
Enter this startup. The founder is visionary. He sees a future platform that is socially conscious. A social media application that has all the good, and none of the bad. It would enrich lives by sending and receiving positive sentiments on a personal level, showing appreciation for others while not showing off about it, and eschewing all the “likes” and subscription counters of mainstream media.
It’s a pretty great idea really, and executed correctly, could be a huge success.
But how do you get there? How do you get from a great idea, to a successful social media app that threatens to supplant the big players?
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To answer this question, let’s first look at another bright, successful idea that was also making a splash just about the same time. When Google Chrome entered the market, the browser space was dominated by Microsoft Explorer and Netscape. Sundar Pichai led the Chrome project, and he was very thoughtful about how he was going to measure success. How, precisely, he would know if he was actually building the best browser.
Think about that for a moment — how would you measure success? Maybe the number of ad buys or revenue generated from the browser? Perhaps the number of searches performed? Number of downloads? Engagement statistics? I’m sure there was a lot of debate about exactly this.
But Sundar believed the only way to measure success was one thing: The number of users. Period. Nothing else. This is the one thing he believed mattered, and he focused on it, year after year, for three years without shifting focus. By 2011, he passed the 100M user milestone.
And today, Google Chrome is the most successful browser out there with 65% market share, worldwide. It’s followed by Safari at 18% and, in distant third, Edge at 5%.1
Sundar chose the right objective and stuck to it.
So, where is that bright California social media startup today? They’re still around, still trying to launch — but have yet to finish a solid product or make even a tiny dent in the social media landscape.
They never established their yardstick, their one clear measure of progress.
While the CEO has incredible vision, that vision is also expansive! It imagines replacing today’s social media behemoths. Fundamentally changing our online culture, socially.
Year after year, different goals and objectives have been the target. The company kept shifting focus. One year, it’s to make a big splash with some celebrity. Another year it’s to engage a particular market. Build some cool new features, or a user interface that’s really fun to use. But there’s a problem with every single one of these: None offer a clear, effective way to measure long-term success. Worse, the company never set about determining how to measure progress — they never figured out their “one golden metric” and never established guardrails around that metric for their journey to the future.
A test to avoid distraction
Your roadmap will likely encompass different goals, features, and a timeline to deliver both. It might change as you discover more about your mission or your customer. But through all this it aligns on your core strategy and outcome. It defines how you are going to deliver your vision, and it wraps around your strategic objective.
For Google Chrome the objective was clear, concise, and uncluttered: To become the world’s best web browser.
Think of your roadmap as your thesis. It’s the what, and the how.
Once you know your strategic objective, the challenge becomes figuring out how to measure success. If your strategy is expressed in your objective, then your success is measured in your key results.
Every thesis needs to be tested. That’s where your key results come in.
Figuring out the best possible way to measure success can be challenging. So can relentlessly measuring your progress against that yardstick, but it’s the difference between achieving your goal and never getting there. The difference is clear comparing the success of Google Chrome versus the social media startup.
Your roadmap needs to tie all this together. You can’t just have an objective. You need a strategy to get there, and an intrinsic part of that strategy is your key results — your yardstick and your guardrails. The test you’ll use to make sure you are still on course.
Relentlessly measuring success
“Can’t see the forest for the trees” is a phrase dating back to 1546, as near as we can tell. Originally it was a criticism of the Pope during the reign of King Charles II of England, when financial matters took precedence over religious affairs. Language has changed since then (the original Old English used “wood” instead of “forest”) but it seems to have survived a few centuries pretty well.
It means that all the parts are distracting us from comprehending the whole. In other words, we put our attention on some inconsequential detail and miss what’s actually important. Literally, the phrase signifies the trees are obscuring the fact that we’re standing in a forest.
I think that California startup got lost in the trees. All those exciting little features, celebrity engagements, and market splashes — they were all distractions. Those distractions meant the goal, and “success,” was a moving goalpost. Was it about engaging more celebrities? Shipping more features? Securing new partnerships?
Those ever-shifting objectives had no clear, unequivocal focus on the one thing that would measure success. With no consistent measure, there was no way of knowing if the company was moving in the right direction. They never found their roadmap to a successful future. At least not yet.
Instead, craft all your actions around the centerpiece of your roadmap.
Finding your roadmap
In 1975, Andy Grove was becoming known as the legendary CEO of Intel and a remarkable leader.
One of the things he’s famous for is the idea of objectives and key results:
The objective is the direction. The key results have to be measured, but at the end you can look and without any argument say, "Did I do that, or did I not do that?" Yes. No. Simple. — Andy Grove, CEO, Intel
It is pretty simple, really — but it’s probably “simple” because we’ve grown up with it. You’ve probably heard about “OKRs” and even been asked to establish your own objectives and key results, whether for a project or your career progression, or something else.
My Delivery Playbook has an entire chapter dedicated to OKRs. It’s a fundamental step in building your product, and a critical activity in the playbook because it defends your customer’s value stream — the part of a roadmap that makes sure you are always delivering value.
Remember Sundar, from Google? He benefited from Andy Grove’s management advice. It turns out John Doerr worked for Grove back when they were both at Intel. That’s when Doerr learned about objectives and key results. Doerr went on to become an incredibly successful venture capitalist, being listed on Forbes magazine’s coveted “Midas List” among other kudos.
Doerr was sitting in the garage with Google founders Larry and Sergey — and he introduced them to, you guessed it, objectives and key results. That was 1999, and ever since then every single Googler writes down their objectives and key results, every quarter. It’s the guiding principle behind Google’s success. Doerr did a TED Talk on exactly why objectives and key results are so transformative. It’s a good talk, one I recommend:2
Setting up for success
Since my playbook chapter on OKRs went out, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help people focus on success. I’ve been thinking about how difficult it is to think strategically, which can often feel intangible when you have some tangible problems to solve sitting right in front of you. The little details that keep distracting us from seeing the big picture.
It’s tempting to think: Isn’t it better to just solve these problems? Get some work done and accomplish something? Checking off all those tasks feels good, like you’ve gotten stuff done.
And that’s where we go wrong. Forsaking the forest for the trees.
Instead — we need to step back and see the whole forest. Stop trimming individual trees.
We need to think very intentionally about what our long-term objectives are.
Then, we need to think even more critically about how we are going to measure progress toward that objective. This becomes our key result. Our metric of success. Taken together, our strategic objectives and our key results give us a clear roadmap. A goal to aim for, and a way to measure our progress toward the goal.
And in the course of measuring our progress, we may realize we’re off track. We might notice that the number of users that we care about is going in the wrong direction. That means it’s time to rethink. Reimagine. Course correct. Make the changes we believe will put us back on track — to our ultimate, successful outcome.
Stepping back, taking in the big picture, and reframing your thoughts can seem like the opposite to being productive. Especially when reframing can often end up with a course correction. A change to all those carefully laid out tasks that you need to get done. And so sometimes, we just focus on those details because we’re afraid of realizing we’re going in the wrong direction — and we have to undo our work. But in sticking to the wrong path lies failure.
On the other hand, having a sound strategy means you’re willing to be introspective. Willing to measure your success — and failure. And then course correct quickly. Focus on the objective, measure the key results, and when they don’t line up, do what it takes to get back on track.
The Chrome project wasn’t an overnight success. The first few years, it missed its target numbers. There were setbacks, challenges, course corrections — but the team held true to their objective and their key results. Measured progress. Changed course to get back on track. In other words, they followed the Google way, they were strategic and relentlessly focused on their objective and key results.
Think about our two startups: Google, and the visionary social media startup. They’re both still around, twenty plus years on. They both came from the same place, a hotbed of technical innovation. They both started in a garage, and both had funding. But only one of them built a culture around relentlessly measuring progress toward a goal.
If that little California social media startup had been so strategic, we might be using their platform today — instead of Meta, or X, or whatever.
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Feel free to check out the Delivery Playbook’s preview chapter on OKRs, too!
statcounter GlobalStats, Browser Market Share Worldwide, gs.statcounter.com, Aug. 17, 2024.
John Doerr, Why the secret to success is setting the right goals, TED Talk, TED2018.