John Doerr as your OKR coach, built as a Claude skill

tl;dr - get the doerr-bot skill

In 1999, John Doerr walked into a small office in Silicon Valley and pitched a system called OKRs to thirty people gathered around a ping-pong table. One of them was Larry Page. Another was Sergey Brin. The company was Google.

Doerr had learned the system from Andy Grove at Intel, where it turned a company facing an existential threat from Motorola into the most dominant chipmaker on earth. He'd watched it work at Sun Microsystems. He'd seen it fail at companies that treated it like a bureaucratic checkbox. He knew the difference.

Sergey's response that day was casual: "We need some organizing principle. This might as well be it." Twenty-five years and seventy-five consecutive quarters of OKR reviews later, Google hasn't stopped. Seven products with a billion or more users. OKRs are the scaffolding underneath all of them.

Doerr went on to bring the system to the Gates Foundation, where it helped wage war on malaria and polio. To Bono's ONE Campaign, where it brought structure to the fight against poverty and corruption in Africa. To YouTube, where a single audacious OKR - one billion hours of daily watch time - drove a 10x transformation over four years. To hundreds of companies of every size and stage, from five-person startups to Fortune 500 departments.

Along the way, he watched the same mistakes happen over and over. Objectives that were actually activities. Key results without numbers. Companies with fifteen priorities, which meant they had zero. CEOs who said "all my goals are team goals" and wondered why nobody took the process seriously. Teams that wrote business-as-usual OKRs describing what they'd do anyway and called it goal-setting. Quantity targets with no quality counterpart - the pattern that killed people in the Ford Pinto and destroyed Wells Fargo's reputation.

He wrote all of it down in Measure What Matters. The four superpowers: Focus, Align, Track, Stretch. The six classic traps. The litmus tests. The scoring system. The committed versus aspirational distinction that most people skip and that changes everything. The CFR framework - Conversations, Feedback, Recognition - that keeps the system alive between quarterly cycles.

I turned all of it into a Claude skill (mostly because I was tired of doing it for people).

Not a summary. Not a chatbot that read the book jacket. I extracted the complete methodology, distilled Doerr's actual voice from how he writes and coaches, curated ten specific stories from his career that he uses to teach - YouTube's billion-hour bet, Sundar Pichai stretching Chrome to 111 million users, Brett Kopf at Remind killing a beloved feature because it didn't serve the top objective, Bill Gates learning to make philanthropic goals concrete instead of directional, Andy Grove launching Operation Crush with one metric that united all of Intel. I built before-and-after OKR rewrites across six company types so the skill can show you what good looks like, not just tell you what's wrong. I mapped the predictable traps by company stage - because a pre-revenue startup writes different bad OKRs than a scaling Series B, and an enterprise department falls into different traps than a nonprofit.

When you use it, it coaches you the way Doerr actually coaches. It asks the questions that force clarity: What is most important for the next three months? If you could only accomplish three things this quarter, what would they be? What's the thing that, if it doesn't happen, nothing else matters? It pushes back when you have too many priorities. It catches the moment you write an activity and calls it what it is. It walks you through whether each objective is a committed goal where you'll rearrange everything to deliver a 1.0, or an aspirational goal where you're reaching and 0.7 is a win. It stress-tests the finished set against every litmus test in the book.

It reviews OKRs you've already written and tells you exactly what's wrong - not with hedge words, but the way Doerr would: "That's not an objective, that's an activity. What changes for your customer when this is done?"

It grades your OKRs at the end of the quarter with honest scoring and the reflection that Doerr considers the most important part of the whole cycle. At Google, after seventy-five consecutive quarters, the executive team still grades the prior year's OKRs with failures unblinkingly dissected before setting new ones. The grading isn't a formality. It's where the learning happens.

It coaches CFRs - the weekly check-ins, the manager-as-coach conversations, the feedback loops and recognition practices that keep goals alive instead of letting them rot in a spreadsheet after week two.

It handles cascading when you're setting OKRs across an entire organization - company level down to teams and individual contributors, with cross-functional dependencies made explicit and roughly half the goals coming from the bottom up, the way Google does it.

And every session ends with documents, not just advice. Formatted OKRs. A tracking spreadsheet with a dashboard, weekly check-in logs for thirteen weeks, and end-of-quarter grading sections. North Star metrics docs when the conversation surfaces long-term targets that matter but don't belong in quarterly OKRs. Multi-quarter roadmaps when a vision needs to be broken into phases. Cascade maps when the goals span multiple teams. You walk out with everything you need to actually run the system, not just understand it.

It's open source, MIT licensed, and free.

Download it here
Get the source here

Like it?

Buy Measure What Matters - the book behind everything this skill does (and the bible I'd put my right hand on).

WhatMatters.com - Doerr's platform with resources, stories, and tools to bring OKRs to your organization.