Hi Vidhya,

Thanks for reading! Glad you found it helpful.

For your first question, are you referring to the Is it possible to achieve the objective without hitting the key results? point? If so, maybe this will help clarify.

Key results should be both necessary and sufficient. You shouldn’t be able to achieve the objective without achieving the key results. And you shouldn’t be able to achieve the key results without achieving the objective too.

OKRs like…

• Objective: Eat more vegetables
• Key Result: Plant a vegetable garden

…don’t pass that test. There are many ways to eat more veggies that don’t involve gardening. And just because you grow a few carrots doesn’t mean you’ll eat them.

For your second question, prioritization is different for every team but I find it helpful to split the process into two parts.

First, decide what you’re optimizing for. Before you start talking about projects at all, list out the different dimensions that you mentioned (trends, company bets, mission alignment, customer requests, etc.) and decide as a group what outranks what. Once you agree on that ranking, sort your list of projects by those dimensions. It’s a lot easier to prioritize when everyone agrees on what you’re prioritizing for!

If you have more questions I’m happy to talk, there’s a link to my email in the sidebar of my website, mvwi.co.