Explicit Alignment | Meaning and Definition

Goal Alignment in Organization

Generally there are two questions raised in the organization while measuring the performance of the organization as a whole. These questions are “How to workout with the OKRs set by my team”? and “How do I hand off OKRs to my team”?  We have to look at various aspects before setting the OKRs of the whole team such as explicit alignment, directional alignment etc.

Explicit Alignment

Explicit alignment is one of the types of OKR alignment. The Explicit alignment follows more organizational charts, as it adopts the Key Results from a high-level OKR for setting Objectives for teams or team members. These Objectives are then broken down into their own sets of Key Results. It helps in increasing the focus of teams towards one single goal. For example, a SaaS company has a top-level Key Result to “Increase Brand Awareness by 20%.” The marketing team will inherit these as Objectives and develop a set of Key Results to achieve this: “KR 1: Increase web traffic by 20% each quarter. KR 2: Increase the number of social media followers by 20%.”

Suppose for a SaaS team the top level OKR is:

  • Reach at a meaningful scale by achieving 5000 software subscriptions per month.
  • Minimum 100K traffic on site via technical and non technical SEO.
  • Make a  funnel to improve the engagement rate of total traffic to total leads in the business.
  • Scale up your product upto a level that it can handle 5000 subscriptions and then improve it eventually by time.
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