Who Owns your Company's OKR Program

Having spent the last 10+ years in the OKR space,  I have seen a wide range of stakeholders owning their company's OKR program. I am often tasked with answering "Who is the best suited" and I always answer with everyone's favourite answer "it depends". 

A handful of factors to think about:

• What is the purpose of you doing OKR? What would be an ideal state? 
• What are the gaps that you think OKR will solve? 
• What are your short term and long term outcomes for doing OKR?
• How do you plan on measuring the success of your deployment?
• Who are you deploying to first (size)?

I would argue that in any scenarios, you have an owner of the process and an owner for the program. For example, in larger organizations, it is not uncommon to have a Chief of Staff as the owner of a process, and a project/program manager as the owner of the program. Process encompasses aspects such as ensuring we have a strategy doc, we have our top priorities, we know what metrics are important, we believe in bottom up alignment etc. whereas program includes the cadence for us to update the OKRs, how do we pull reports, prepping MBRs/QBRs, coaching others. Another example within Microsoft, for my specific team, my Principal PM drives the process of OKRs and I am a champion driving the program. 

If we are to look for similarities in the 2 examples, process owner should be a stakeholder that is involved in strategic planning of the team/dept/org. They are the driver of setting the right framework for alignment, lead by example with accountability and transparency, and encourage a growth and agile mindset from others. Program owner is often an OKR champion who is interested in supporting leaders and their own orgs in creating a seamless experience while fully reaping the benefits of OKR. 

Would be interested to learn from all of you - who own OKR within your organization.