In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Murtaza Chowdhury (Amazon Web Services) to discuss Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) - a goal-setting framework for outlining and planning product objectives up to the targeted results. OKR helps product managers plan and create frameworks which are shared within the team to set clear goals to align all efforts. 
 
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What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro
00:42 Objective and Key Results (OKRs) and the need for alignment for outcomes and defining them
05:24 The benefits of the OKR approach
08:32 Have an objective that speaks for the company vision
11:53 Set a vision but don’t be too tactical in your approach 
15:25 A sense of priority among the OKRs 
19:22 Setting the objectives and key results
24:56 Everyone in the team is involved in the product team
26:44 OKR should be broken down into organizational level, team level, and then micro-teams level
28:34 Everyone working on the team has a say on the product development
31:04 User stories are what ties everything together
35:23 Solving team problems through prioritization and alignment
40:16 Everyone in the team is involved in creating the OKR
44:06 Should PMs stay in the background and let micro-teams solve the problem?
48:45 The 3 elements of an effective OKR
51:08 Set objectives that are futuristic, inspirational, and highly ambitious
52:47 Use OKRs with purpose