What are OKRs? Objectives and key results explained

I have helped more than 200 founder-CEOs implement OKRs over the last 10 years, and the pattern is pretty predictable. The teams that quit usually make OKRs harder than they need to be. They confuse action with progress, load the quarter with too many priorities, then declare the framework a failure when the real problem was their own lack of discipline. Twelve months in, the teams that stick with it usually say the same thing. Bloody hell, we made that much harder than it needed to be.

Most businesses do not need more goals. They need fewer.

That is the first thing to understand about OKRs. They are not clever. They are not mystical. And they are certainly not an excuse to turn quarterly planning into a paperwork festival. If you want the orthodox version, Atlassian, Asana and Google re:Work all describe the same basic shape. A small set of priorities, made measurable, reviewed properly.

Most scale-ups do not have a goal-setting problem. They have a priority problem. Too many initiatives. Too many exceptions. Too many leaders pretending everything matters, which is just another way of saying nothing really does.

Used properly, OKRs force a leadership team to do the uncomfortable bit. Choose what matters now. Decide how progress will be measured. Ignore the rest for long enough to finish something important.

What are OKRs?

OKRs stands for objectives and key results. The objective is the thing you want to achieve. The key results are the measurable signs that tell you whether you are getting there.

Simple right?

Well, yes and no.

The structure is simple. The discipline is not. The trap I see all the time is what I call activity fraud. Teams fill their key results with things they plan to do rather than outcomes they intend to create.

An OKR system only works if people understand the difference between an outcome and a task. “Launch the new pricing page” is not a key result. It is work. “Increase qualified demo requests from the pricing page from 18 a month to 30 a month” is closer, because now you are measuring whether the work actually changed anything.

Why OKRs matter in a scale-up

OKRs are useful when a business is growing fast enough that teams can no longer rely on hallway conversations and founder intuition alone. The moment focus starts leaking out of the leadership team, the business needs a tighter way to decide what matters now and what can wait.

That is the real value of OKRs. Not sophistication. Focus.

At a certain size, most businesses suffer from strategic indigestion. They swallow too many priorities and digest none of them. A decent OKR discipline gives the leadership team permission to say no without feeling guilty about it. It clarifies what the quarter is actually about, not what happens to be fashionable this week.

In practice, that means:

• the leadership team agrees the handful of outcomes that matter most
• each team can see how its work contributes
• progress is reviewed weekly, not discovered too late in month three
• weak priorities are exposed quickly

If you are not prepared to do that, do not bother with OKRs. You will simply create better-documented confusion.

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What is the difference between an objective and a key result?

The objective should be qualitative, directional and motivating. The key results should be numeric, time-bound and outcome-based.

Here is the cleanest way to think about it:

• objective = what we want to achieve
• key result = how we will know we achieved it

Weak example:

• Objective: Improve customer retention
• Key result 1: Run a customer success workshop
• Key result 2: Create a churn dashboard
• Key result 3: Meet with the product team weekly

Those are not key results. They are a to-do list wearing a tie.

Stronger example:

• Objective: Improve customer retention
• Key result 1: Increase net revenue retention from 96% to 102%
• Key result 2: Reduce logo churn from 3.8% to 2.5%
• Key result 3: Raise onboarding completion from 61% to 80%

Now we are measuring impact.

How many OKRs should you set?

Most companies need fewer OKRs than they think. Much fewer.

If you are a founder-CEO, start with one brutal question: what absolutely has to improve this quarter?

Not everything.

Not your entire strategy.

Just the few outcomes that would make the biggest commercial difference if you actually achieved them.

For most scale-ups, that means company-level OKRs should stay tight:

• 1 to 3 company objectives for the quarter
• 3 to 5 key results per objective
• team OKRs only where they clearly ladder up

Once you go beyond that, the framework becomes wallpaper. People nod at it in the quarterly meeting, stick it in a slide deck, then ignore it by week three.

How do you write a good OKR?

A good OKR is hard to misunderstand and even harder to wriggle out of.

Use this test:

1. Can someone outside the team understand it in under a minute?
2. Does the objective describe a meaningful outcome rather than a project?
3. Do the key results measure business impact rather than effort?
4. Would hitting all the key results mean the objective was genuinely achieved?

If the answer to any of those is no, rewrite it. Do not defend it. Rewrite it.

Here is a practical founder-CEO example.

Objective:

Build a more predictable sales engine.

Key results:

• Increase qualified pipeline coverage from 2.1x to 3.0x next-quarter target
• Raise win rate from 18% to 24%
• Cut average sales cycle from 74 days to 58 days

Notice what is missing. No mention of “run training”, “buy software”, or “hire SDRs”. Those things may matter. They may even be essential. But they are not the result. They are the bet you are making to get the result.

What goes wrong when companies use OKRs badly?

The framework usually fails for boring reasons, not clever ones.

The usual failure modes are:

• too many OKRs
• vague objectives
• activity masquerading as key results
• no weekly review rhythm
• no visible ownership
• no consequences when priorities change

I have seen leadership teams proudly unveil a lovely quarterly plan, then spend the next ten weeks abandoning it because somebody shouted loudly enough about a side issue.

That is not an OKR problem. That is a leadership problem.

When I took over as Managing Director at IT Lab, we had about three months of cash left and were losing roughly £65,000 a month. We did not have the luxury of vague priorities. Everybody needed to know what mattered, what progress looked like, and where the blockages were. That kind of pressure sharpens your thinking very quickly.

You do not need to be in a cash crisis to learn the same lesson. But it certainly helps clear the mind.

How often should OKRs be reviewed?

OKRs only work when progress is visible often enough to correct course. The published guidance is clear enough on this point: Atlassian and Google re:Work both assume a regular review rhythm rather than a set-and-forget annual wish list.

For a scale-up, the practical rhythm usually looks like this:

• annual direction sets the bigger goals
• quarterly OKRs define the current priorities
• weekly check-ins expose blockers and drift
• monthly reviews force honest scoring

This is why I bang on about operating rhythm so often. Daily huddles, weekly leadership meetings and quarterly planning sessions stop OKRs becoming a static spreadsheet that everybody salutes and nobody uses.

No rhythm, no OKR system.

Just a deck.

If your team is already struggling to keep weekly priorities aligned, read what a daily huddle is and why it matters next. The cadence matters every bit as much as the wording.

OKRs vs KPIs: what is the difference?

OKRs and KPIs are not enemies. They just answer different questions.

Table takeawayUse KPIs to watch the dashboard. Use OKRs to decide what the team must change next.

A healthy business needs both. KPIs tell you whether the machine is healthy. OKRs tell you what the leadership team is trying to improve next.

When should you not use OKRs?

OKRs are not mandatory. They are useful when a company needs focus, alignment and measurable quarterly priorities. They are much less useful when leadership is unwilling to choose, when the numbers are unreliable, or when every priority changes every fortnight. Even the best framework fails if the operating discipline underneath it is weak.

So do not introduce OKRs because Google used them, or because somebody on LinkedIn made the template look tidy.

Use them if you are prepared to do the hard bit:

• pick fewer priorities
• define real outcomes
• review progress every week
• kill distractions quickly

If you cannot do that, start by fixing the meeting rhythm and the quality of decision-making first. Otherwise you are just putting smart labels on messy leadership.

Four ways to make OKRs work in a real business

1. Start with the company bottleneck, not a brainstorming session.
2. Keep the number of objectives painfully small.
3. Make one named owner accountable for each key result.
4. Review progress in the same meeting, every week, with the same scoreboard.

That last point matters more than most people realise, because consistency beats enthusiasm in this game.

I have never walked into an organisation and heard staff complain that management communicates too much. What I hear instead is confusion. Mixed messages. Projects started and abandoned. Praise that never arrives. Priorities shifting without explanation. In other words, the usual mess.

A decent OKR discipline does not fix all of that on its own, but it does expose it. And sometimes that is exactly what leadership has been avoiding.

FAQ: common OKR questions

What are OKRs in simple terms?

OKRs are a goal-setting framework made up of a qualitative objective and a small number of measurable key results. They are designed to align teams around a few shared priorities and make progress visible through numbers, milestones or clear outcome measures. The short version is this: decide what matters, decide how you will know, then stop pretending everything else is equally urgent.

How many OKRs should a team have?

Fewer than most teams want. If your team has a page full of OKRs, you do not have an alignment system. You have clutter.

What is a good example of a key result?

A good key result is measurable and outcome-based. “Increase qualified pipeline coverage from 2.1x to 3.0x” is a stronger key result than “launch a sales dashboard” because it measures the business result, not the task. One changes behaviour. The other just produces artefacts.

How often should OKRs be reviewed?

At minimum, monthly scoring is common in published OKR guidance, but scale-ups usually need weekly progress reviews as well so blockers are surfaced early and ownership stays visible. Leave it longer than that and drift gets a head start.

Are OKRs only for big companies?

No. In fact, SMEs often benefit more because lack of focus hurts them faster. The point is not scale. The point is clarity. If your leadership team keeps overloading the quarter, OKRs can help, though only if the leadership team is prepared to make hard trade-offs instead of admiring the template.

Ready to make OKRs stick?

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Your move. If your leadership team cannot name the same three priorities for the quarter, do not ask for better execution. Fix the alignment first. That is where OKRs either become useful, or become wallpaper.