Cansel Sörgens has been a professional in Digital Product Management for more than 13 years. She has worked with/for e-commerce/e-business companies in different roles in Product, Project, Portfolio Management and Agile Organizational Development. Since 2016, she practices Objectives and Key Results (OKR) and, as an OKR Coach & Trainer, helps organizations to implement and/or re-start their OKR adaptations. She’s passionate about OKRs because she believes it is the gateway to Business Agility, as it starts the conversation about value-driven alignment, focusing on measurable outcomes for more customer centricity and multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Title of presentation: OKRs Misunderstood

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) promise focus, alignment, accountability, and commitment. These promises might fill the hearts of many managers with joy. They hear the idealized stories of how OKRs helped organizations to become successful and want to have a piece of this cake, too. “When Google works with OKRs, we must too!” Some believe a framework alone would fix everything like it’s magic. Most of the time they're not aware of what it takes to enable an environment for OKRs to work well. If you want to apply an OKR to become more focused but keep changing your playfield every 2 months, the OKR is not the remedy you’re looking for. For OKRs to work well, organizations need to be prepared to undergo some serious changes. In this talk, I'll uncover some of the misconceptions such as Vertical vs. Horizontal Alignment, Score vs. Conversation, and Outcome vs. Output. I’ll also offer some practical advice on how to avoid or fix these common mistakes.