The objective of my team’s product is to make getting off-campus easier and less expensive for students. If we were going to launch our product “for real” I think our main OKR should focus on safety for drivers and passengers because I think it is an important ethical goal that many similar companies/start-ups have failed to tackle early and have faced the repercussions of later on. I think we would struggle with any metric that centers around profits because both Lyft and Uber prove that the rideshare industry is a burning pile of money, despite billions of dollars in investments. If giants like them can’t seem to turn a profit then it is unlikely that we will either. I really love what the first article aimed to point out how fruitless goal-making can be, especially when it drives people towards only valuing results and nothing in-between, but I also see value in how Christina’s blog post elaborated on how to realistically set goals with achievable time-based metrics for success. That is why I my OKR would be:
Launch an app beta that allows both drivers and riders to interact with each other in meaningful ways.
It is open-ended which allows for what “meaningful” means to pivot. The KRs of the goal would be to have the average user spend 5 minutes a day interacting with the app and have above a 4 star rating in the app store with at least 50 reviews.
As Christina said, KRs seem difficult but are not impossible— it’s a challenging goal that requires focus to achieve but also makes room for changes to occur while also implying that the process has a lot of importance. The process is what leads to results.
I think for this project, measuring user satisfaction is most important— so we should focus on the metrics that show people are enjoying our service more than just surveys where they say they like it and would use it.
