Stretch OKRs Trigger Infrastructure Resets

"Susan: Aspirational goals can prompt a reset for the entire organization. In our case, it inspired infrastructure initiatives throughout YouTube. People started saying, “If we’re going to be that big, maybe we need to redesign our architecture. Maybe we need to redesign our storage.” It became a prod for the whole company to better prepare for the future. Everybody started thinking bigger."

"Our landmark OKR had some unanticipated consequences. Through the four-year push to reach the billion hours of daily watch time, our daily views soared in parallel. Stretch OKRs tend to set powerful forces into motion, and you can never be sure where they’ll lead. Another big lesson, for me, was the importance of support from the top—from Susan, of course, but also from Larry and Sergey."

"As a leader, you must try to challenge the team without making them feel the goal is unachievable. I thought it unlikely we would reach our target in time. (Candidly, I thought there was no way we would get there.) But I also considered it important to keep pushing to the limit of our ability and beyond. By putting the 20 million out there, I knew good things would happen. Our stretch OKR gave the team direction and a barometer to measure our progress. It made complacency impossible. And it kept us all rethinking, every day, the framework for what we were doing. All of these things were more important than reaching a somewhat arbitrary target on a designated"