Itamar Gilad

Product Manager, Coach, Author

Itamar is a coach, author and speaker specializing in product management, strategy, and growth. For over two decades he held senior product management and engineering roles at Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. At Google Itamar led parts of Gmail and was the head of Gmail’s growth team (resulting in 1Bn MAUs).

Itamar publishes a popular product management newsletter and is the creator of a number of product management methodologies including GIST Framework and The confidence meter.

Itamar is based in Barcelona, Spain.

Talk - Harnessing Management by Intent using OKRs

Since their invention at Intel in the early 1970s, Objectives and Key Results have amassed a huge following. It certainly helps that Google, Amazon, Dropbox and other tech super-companies attribute so much of their success to them. But it’s not all positive unfortunately. Of all the management tools, OKRs are the easiest to misuse, overuse and abuse—many companies fall into this trap. This is a major problem because bad use of OKR can amplify the issues the org is troubled with rather than fix them.

In this talk I’ll try to explain what differentiates successful implementations of OKRs from unsuccessful ones. Surprisingly it has little to do with OKR technique. OKRs are only as good as the goals we put into them, so we will focus on what constitutes good goals and especially on the principle of management by intent. We will see examples, both positive and negative, and finally discuss how to use OKRs to propagate intent and to empower teams to create their own goals.

Key Learnings
• What’s management by intent
• The three parts of good goals
• Top 5 common issues with OKR implementation
• How to use OKRs and the principle of intent to align goals down, up and across