OKR Writing

OKR Writing

Overview

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal-setting framework. The form is deceptively simple — one inspirational Objective, three to five measurable Key Results — but most OKRs in the wild are broken. They are project plans wearing OKR clothing.

Three disciplines:

1. The Objective is qualitative, inspirational, time-bound.
2. Each Key Result is measurable — a numerator over a denominator, by a date.
3. The KR measures an outcome (value delivered), not an output (work done) and never an input (effort spent).

Core Concepts

1. The OKR equation: “I will [Objective] as measured by [Key Results]”

2. The measurable-KR test: numerator, denominator, deadline

Every KR must answer:

• Numerator — what is being counted?

• Denominator — relative to what?

• Deadline — by when?

• Fails: “Improve onboarding.” (no numerator, no denominator, no deadline)

• Fails: “Reach 1000 users.” (no denominator, no deadline)

• Passes: “Grow week-1 activation rate from 28% to 45% by 2026-09-30.”

3. OKR vs KPI — different jobs

• KPI (Key Performance Indicator) — a steady-state health metric you watch all the time. KPIs run forever.
• OKR — a change goal for a bounded period. Says “we are choosing to push this number from X to Y this quarter.”

A KPI can become a KR if you decide to push it — but the KR must specify the from-to delta and the deadline.

4. Input → Output → Outcome hierarchy

• Input — effort, headcount, money spent. (“hired 5 engineers”) — never a KR.
• Output — work produced, artifacts shipped. (“shipped the new dashboard”) — almost never a KR.
• Outcome — change in the world, value delivered. (“dashboard adoption reached 60% of paying teams”) — this is what KRs measure.

Felipe Castro’s “so what?” test: read the KR and ask “so what?” If the answer is another metric (the outcome), the original was an output.

5. Ambitious-but-not-impossible: the 70% rule

For aspirational / stretch OKRs:

• Pick a target where your confidence of hitting 100% is about 5 out of 10 (50/50 at draft time).
• Score around 0.7 on average at the end of the quarter is healthy.
• Consistently scoring 1.0 means you sandbagged. Scoring < 0.4 means you set fantasy targets.

For committed OKRs (operational must-haves — SLAs, compliance deadlines), the target is 1.0 and anything less is a problem.

6. The rollup pattern across org levels

• Company sets 3–5 Objectives for the quarter.
• Each team picks ~3 Objectives that contribute to the company set.
• An individual contributor may have 1–2 personal Objectives that map to a team Objective.

Key insight: roughly half of OKRs should be set bottom-up. Pure top-down OKRs kill engagement.

7. Mid-quarter check-in: traffic-light language

• Green — on track, no help needed.
• Yellow — at risk, here is what would unblock me.
• Red — will not hit current target. Either re-plan or formally revise the KR.

8. End-of-cycle scoring (0.0 to 1.0)

For each KR, compute the actual / target on its native scale:

• Started at 28%, target 45%, ended at 38%. Progress = (38 − 28) / (45 − 28) = 10/17 ≈ 0.59.

9. Common bad-OKR patterns

• “Ship feature X by date Y” — that is a task, not a KR. The KR is the outcome the feature is supposed to produce.
• “Do our normal job well” — operational baselines are KPIs, not OKRs.
• Activity counts — “publish 12 blog posts” measures effort, not outcome.
• Sandbagged targets — KRs you are 95% confident in.
• Too many KRs — more than 5 per Objective is a wishlist.
• Set-and-forget — OKRs scored only at quarter end.

Templates

Template — Single OKR

## Objective
[Qualitative, inspirational, time-bound. One sentence. Why this matters.]

## Type
[ ] Committed (target = 1.0)
[ ] Aspirational / stretch (expected score ≈ 0.7)

## Key Results
1. [Move metric X from A to B by DATE]
2. [Move metric Y from A to B by DATE]
3. [Move metric Z from A to B by DATE]

## How we'll know we got it wrong
[One sentence — the leading indicator that says "stop, replan".]

Example — Bad → Good rewrites

References

• John Doerr, whatmatters.com
• Christina Wodtke, The Art of the OKR
• Felipe Castro, “An OKR should measure the outcome, not the work”