If you’re like me, you have a number of ambitious ideas about where you want to be in life. It’s one thing to be directionally correct, but a lack of clarity and wasted effort can be prevented with a framework known as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

OKRs are a widely-used goal-setting system that can be used both personally and professionally. By setting and tracking OKRs, organizations and individuals can ensure they are working on the right things and quickly identify areas for improvement.

The OKR system involves:

Key proponents of OKRs include leaders at Intel, Google, and ONE, an organization founded by U2’s Bono to end poverty and preventable disease. I propose that OKRs are also actionable on a personal level to make new years’ resolutions measurable and achievable.

In this article, we’ll explore the specifics, benefits, and examples of OKRs. We’ll use a free Notion template to create our own OKRs, and we’ll discuss when and how to review them to maximize results.

OKRs were developed by Andy Grove at Intel and evangelized by his mentee John Doerr in Measure What Matters. The framework is widely used by tech companies today, and adoption is expanding to other industries.

The ideas behind OKRs are to set ambitious goals that are aligned with the overall mission and vision of the organization and to measure progress through a set of specific and measurable key results.

OKRs consist of two parts:

Thousands of organizations have adopted OKRs because they enable visibility and accountability. OKRs should be reviewed in recurring meetings and displayed on metrics dashboards. By broadcasting progress in a public setting, teams can hold each other accountable for hitting their targets.

For managers, OKRs enable four types of leverage:

Of course, the true test of OKRs lies in whether outcomes are successful. Here are just a few examples of the power of OKRs:

In addition to the limited examples here, you can find many more on whatmatters.com.

In this section, you’ll create your own OKRs.

For personal goals, this exercise is fine to do individually, although you can display your completed OKRs publicly for accountability.

For organizations, it’s best to do this as a group exercise. OKRs shouldn’t just be handed down from management—get the frontline team involved in brainstorming, as they’ll be more bought in when it comes to execution. Be sure to get buy-in or align your OKRs with goals set by the company leadership and any cross-functional teams.

Ideally, OKR creation should happen in the weeks leading up to a new cycle. However, if the cycle has already started, it’s not too late to apply the OKR framework to get more specific about your goals. Just be sure to establish a more consistent review cadence going forward.

Most OKR guides skip a crucial step: defining your main values or north star. It’s too easy to dive into specific financial or user acquisition goals without starting with why. Understanding and communicating your purpose first leads to team alignment, achievement of key results, and ultimately success in meeting your objectives.

Worse, you can hit your OKRs but ultimately fail as a business if you are focused on the wrong strategy, such as misunderstanding your target market. When you are entering a new market or launching a new product, setting OKRs purely positioned around output is a recipe for disaster. Instead, you should be realistic about where you are as a company, focusing your efforts on proving or disproving critical hypotheses before scaling.

Consider a few of the following prompts, and brainstorm some ideas for Why you do what you do:

To give you some examples, here is a personal Why along with two Whys for my company, Restful:

Once you’ve defined your Why, it’s time to think about What you want to accomplish. Whether it’s personal or professional, most people decide to go forward with 2 to 4 objectives.

Strong objectives are:

Some examples:

You can find more examples at whatmatters.com.

Again, if you are part of an organization, you should brainstorm with your direct team and align with leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.

Objectives may last more than one cycle. For example, you might have an objective that will take a whole year (or even longer) to accomplish. But for each objective you should define key results that you expect to meet in one cycle.

Now that you’ve formalized your objectives, it’s time to get specific about your How. Typically, key results are numerical expressions of success or progress. Most people define 2-4 key results per objective.

Strong key results are:

You should set the key results so that they are ambitious but achievable within the cycle (such as quarterly). This is a good time to decide which key results are committed and which are aspirational:

A litmus test for a good key result is the question, “Did I achieve that?” The answer should be a simple yes or no.

Examples of key results include:

If you include an output key result, such as “launch [x feature],” be sure to add additional outcome key results to quantify success, such as sales or engagement metrics.

Now that you’ve defined your OKRs, you’ll want to understand best practices around measurement. Success in achieving objectives is often qualitative, while measuring key results is quantitative.

Traditionally, key results are graded on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0:

As an example, let’s say we have a key result to increase MAUs from 10,000 users (baseline) to 20,000 users (target). During a review, if we are currently at 15,000 users, the key result score should be 0.5.

There are two time intervals relevant to OKR reviews: mid-cycle (usually weekly) and end-of-cycle (usually quarterly). During weekly reviews, key result metrics are updated so everyone can feel progress or lack thereof. During quarterly reviews, the success of each OKR is evaluated and new or updated OKRs are planned for the next quarter.

A key component of ensuring success is making OKRs highly visible. At minimum, teams should display and update key results during weekly review meetings. Many companies choose to keep OKR dashboards visible at all times, review OKRs during biweekly sprint post-mortems, and discuss OKR progress in 1:1 check-ins with managers.

Key result metrics can either be updated manually or via automated means, such as with an analytics tool. All key results for the team should be centralized into a single dashboard, and time should be allotted to discuss progress toward each key result at each meeting.

If new information emerges during the quarter that did not exist during the drafting progress, it’s acceptable to reprioritize and modify the key results. OKRs should be revised and socialized in a similar manner to the original planning process.

At the end of each cycle, teams should conduct a full review of the OKRs. This can be broken down into three major parts: post-mortem, existing OKR update, and next quarter planning.

During the post-mortem meeting, the scores for each key result are evaluated. Some companies use a traffic light system, with different scores for committed and aspirational key results:

For each initiative, teams evaluate what worked and what didn’t. Lessons from the quarter are identified and recorded.

Based on the insights gained from the post-mortem meeting, the team reviews objectives that are ongoing and key results that have not been fully achieved. New and updated key results are established in a similar manner to the original planning process.

Because it’s hard to plan for the next quarter before you’ve run a post-mortem from the previous quarter, companies may elect to run the post-mortem process in the weeks leading up to the quarter end, effectively making the deadline a bit before the quarter end. Perhaps more commonly, the full post-mortem and planning process may occur at the beginning of a new quarter, especially at the start of a new year.

Throughout this article, I’ve attempted to demonstrate the power of OKRs to get clear and specific about your goals then constantly review them. I use OKRs personally and professionally, and I believe other ambitious people and companies should consider adopting them.

In follow-up posts, I hope to dive deeper into a few related areas, including OKR best practices for early-stage ventures.

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