First off… OKRs are popular for a reason. They work!
Secondly… There’s a general disdain for OKRs in the workplace for many valid reasons. The biggest one is that teams are just not doing them the right way. That’s not their fault, by the way. It’s freakin’ hard.
At Tability, we believe in making OKR software that’s simple and easy to use for everyone in the org chart, top to bottom. We know that if OKRs make sense and are engaging to the person at the very end of the organisational chart, the benefits will trickle all the way up the ladder. When people love OKRs, the benefits can be huge.
Part of building this software is understanding the biggest issues people deal with when it comes to OKRs.
So we decided to comb through Reddit, find all the most common issues people have with OKRs, and tackle some of the most prominent issues one by one.
1. Misalignment between OKRs and actual work
OKRs are supposed to help teams focus on meaningful outcomes, but in practice, many users report that they’re disconnected from the day-to-day realities of their work. Teams often set goals at the beginning of a quarter, only to find that priorities shift or the work doesn’t fit neatly into the structure of the objectives. As a result, people end up retrofitting their actual tasks to match predefined OKRs — undermining the whole purpose.
“We are forced to use it in my company, but nobody seems to use it in reality. I don’t even understand how to use it.”
— Reddit user in r/agile
Outcomes don’t happen without outputs first. While OKRs often talk only about ‘Objectives’ and ‘Key Results’, it’s critical to give as much attention to the third most important part of the framework: Tasks.
What to do:
Understand that in OKRs there is an important difference between your output vs outcome. They are two sides of the same coin.
Having set goals (desired outcome) helps you identify what you should do to get to that outcome (outputs).
Once you start putting that into practice, you’ll learn a lot about your outcome and whether it’s achievable using this method or not.
When you structure your OKRs make sure you take into account the Tasks (or initiatives).
If you layer in your tasks into your OKR planning, it’s clear to everyone what needs to be done, and your OKRs are not just theory but actionable items for your teams.
Here’s a good OKR example for marketing:
- O: Strengthen and expand our outbound marketing efforts
- KR: Increase the outbound marketing leads by 25%
- Task 1: Develop a compelling cold outreach script
- Task 2: Increase number of weekly emails by 25%
- Task 3: Implement paid social media advertising
- KR: Increase the outbound marketing leads by 25%
2. OKRs used as performance evaluation tools
While OKRs are designed to drive alignment and focus, some companies tie them directly to individual performance reviews or bonuses. This creates pressure to sandbag goals or avoid ambitious objectives. It can also punish employees for factors outside their control, especially if they don’t get to choose their work. The result is demotivation and risk-averse behaviour — the opposite of what OKRs aim to encourage.
“Goals based evaluations for ICs is bullshit. They have no control over the work they’re assigned.”
— Reddit user in r/ExperiencedDevs
What to do:
Actually, yeah. It’s bullshit, don’t do it.
Here’s why:
OKRs are meant to push the limits. They’re supposed to be a place where you can try things and experiment to get the best possible results. It should be a space of continuous improvement (for the company, not the individual).
You want your goals to feel ambitious but still realistic. Teams often set stretch goals to mark where the highest expectations might be without creating an impossible task. If you tie your OKRs to bonuses and performance, employees will likely respond by either setting easy goals or lying about results. Who could blame them?
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have performance goals. It’s still important to set clear expectations for the role someone is hired for and have some way to measure if an individual contributor is doing the job as expected.
More: Learn about the differences between OKRs vs performance management
3. Lack of proper understanding and training
OKRs have a specific structure and philosophy, but many organisations roll them out with little or no training. This leads to confusion about how to write good objectives, what a measurable key results should look like, or how to write a proper status report. People end up copying examples they don’t fully understand or simply going through the motions to tick a box.
“My first experience with OKRs was like: ‘Hey, we need to become ambitious and double the revenue in the next year. Let’s do it!’. That’s it. No training, no workshops, no dedicated OKR software. Just make more money NOW. So the whole team was confused and unsure about what to expect if (or when) we fail, since it didn’t sound realistic at all.”
— Reddit user in r/ExperiencedDevs
If you’re introducing OKRs to the org, you have some knowledge and experience on what it is, while the rest of the team may be starting from a completely blank slate. Many teams struggle with OKRs simply because they’re never properly introduced.
They may be wondering…
- What does OKR mean?
- How do I set goals?
- What should my goals look like?
- What do I do with my goals?
What to do:
To make the system work, it’s crucial to provide a clear explanation of OKRs are, how they’re structured, and why OKRs matter. Start by offering basic training or a kickoff workshop to explain the difference between objectives and key results, and provide templates or examples to help teams get started.
If you introduce OKRs to the organisation, it is your job as the OKR Champion to educate the teams on the process.
An OKR Champion is a designated person within a team or department who takes ownership of making OKRs successful, not by setting the goals for everyone, but by helping the team use the framework effectively.
Think of them as the internal guide or coach for OKRs. Their responsibilities typically include:
- Educating the team on what OKRs are and how they should be written
- Hire an OKR coach and enroll in proper training/courses/certifications
- Choosing the best OKR software to use with the team
- Facilitating planning sessions to help the team craft clear, meaningful objectives and measurable key results
- Coordinating check-ins to ensure progress is tracked regularly
- Clarifying confusion around structure, terminology, or expectations
- Aligning team OKRs and broader company goals
They don’t have to be managers or strategy leads—often the best OKR Champions are team members who are organised, good communicators, and care about alignment and outcomes. Their job isn’t to enforce OKRs but to make them useful — get everyone educated and set up to succeed with the process.
Go deep on how to roll out OKRs to your team properly:
- Watch our OKR Implementation Masterclass video
- Check out our OKR Implementation Planning guide
4. Overemphasis on quantitative metrics
OKRs are often misunderstood as being purely metric-driven. Teams struggle to capture goals that are qualitative in nature — like improving team trust, brand reputation, or product usability. In some cases, the obsession with hard metrics distorts behaviour, leading teams to chase easy-to-measure wins rather than truly impactful work.
“Did you miss all your OKRs but revenue is up 12%? Guess who cares? No one. Did you hit all your OKRs, but revenue is down 10%? Now everyone ignores the OKRs and asks about how awful things have gotten.”
— Reddit user in r/ProductManagement
What to do:
You don’t need a number for everything. While quantitative key results are helpful for tracking progress objectively, trying to force every outcome into a single metric can actually obscure the bigger picture. Some goals—like improving team trust, refining messaging, or increasing design quality—don’t translate cleanly into numbers. In these cases, it’s perfectly valid to track progress using qualitative signals. One method we often use is a “gut-check” status update: we assign a red/yellow/green status and write a short note on how we feel progress is going. It may sound fuzzy, but humans are surprisingly good at intuitively processing multiple data points and complex, moving targets.
It’s also important to remember that not every OKR will tie directly to your biggest business metric. Yes, when something like revenue or churn is trending the wrong way, it can feel like nothing else matters. But ideally, those other goals—like improving onboarding, fixing performance issues, or running customer interviews—are the levers that will help get the core metric back on track. It’s completely normal to deprioritise some OKRs if the business context changes. What matters is that you’re tracking them in the first place. OKRs give you visibility, and that visibility allows you to make smart trade-offs, stay nimble, and adapt with confidence.
5. OKRs becoming bureaucratic exercises
Instead of being energising, OKRs can devolve into bureaucratic admin. People feel like they’re writing OKRs because they have to, not because they’re actually useful. Updating OKRs becomes a chore, often disconnected from actual strategy or execution. This perception weakens buy-in and turns OKRs into a compliance task.
“OKRs are …Total bullsh*t. I hate writing them and have yet to work at a company that doesn’t a) move the goal post when they don’t meet them or b) completely forget about them until the next quarter.”
—Reddit user in r/womenintech
This is understandable from the Individual Contributor’s point of view. People often complain, “Why do I need to do my manager’s job for them?”
What to do:
When it comes to OKRs, the benefits for the IC and the manager are very different, so sell them on those benefits. Without a clear understanding, it can quickly look like a bureaucratic exercise no one asked for.
Remind them, as a manager, “I’m not just trying to make your job harder!”
Here are the OKR benefits for the manager and IC:
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Secondly, let them know that this is to help build better processes.
Another user in the thread, RandomRandomPenguin, kindly reminds the OP that it could be worse.
Try working at a company without any semblance of OKRs. It’s way, way worse. It ends up being either a cluster fuck of random ideas and whiplash, or doing a bunch of stuff that doesn’t meaningfully matters.
OKRs aren’t necessarily meant to be “met” - they are meant to move everyone toward a common goal that is at least directionally tied to some measurable outcome that isn’t “ship this thing and who gives a fuck how useful it is”
— Reddit user in r/womenintech
While it may not be perfect and sometimes the goals you set are “total bullshit”, it’s helping a whole bunch of people move in the same direction with the same purpose. Sometimes you don’t get it right, but at least we’re moving, learning and making improvements with a proper process in place.
6. Inflexibility in dynamic environments
The fixed cadence of quarterly OKRs can become a liability in fast-moving teams. What felt like the right objective at the start of the quarter may become obsolete a few weeks in. But because OKRs are locked in, teams either stick to outdated goals or are penalised for adjusting them. This rigidity reduces responsiveness and often creates friction between strategic planning and agile execution.
“We have to use them, but we create them as project/program milestones and don’t really quantify much.”
— Reddit user in r/agile
When you’re seeing that you’re doing the work and it’s not turning into the results you want, something is wrong.
What to do:
Number one: You must understand that the perfect plan does not exist.
This is true for all things in life. You likely have an idea of the direction you want to take, but obstacles may appear, and circumstances may change.
With OKRs, we often make the mistake of thinking that we can’t change them but you should consider them to be more flexible. While it’s ideal to set a goal and work to achieve it, sometimes you start doing the work and realise that the goal needs to be revised.
Your OKRs inform what tasks you should do, and your tasks inform whether that KR was the right one.
Ask yourself: did this task get us closer to the goal?
If yes, keep going. The plan is working as we thought it would.
If no, let’s think about it:
- We did good work, feel successful but it didn’t really move the needle for this particular KR or metric. Maybe we need to rethink how we measure ‘success’.
- We did the task, but the results weren’t what we expected. Let’s try something else to see if we get better results.
So, a few things you should do:
- Work collaboratively on goal setting. Both management/leaders and the team should collaborate to figure out what needs to be done. Have a back-and-forth about how the individual contributor thinks they can contribute.
- Frequent check-ins! Frequent check-ins! Frequent check-ins! Don’t let a goal sit there for a month or a whole quarter without looking at it (#setandforget). If you constantly rebalance your work against the results, you’ll end up in a better place with your OKRs.
- Win or fail, understand that it’s a learning process. A big win should tell you that you can dream bigger; a big fail means we need to adjust and rethink the strategy. Make sure to have a retrospective to adjust.
- Don’t wait until the end of the month/quarter. Make changes, stay flexible, iterate quickly!
7. Top-down implementation without team input
When OKRs are dictated by leadership without involvement from the teams doing the work, they risk being unrealistic, irrelevant, or ignored. Teams may feel like they’re being told what to do without context or buy-in. Good OKRs often emerge from a mix of top-down strategy and bottom-up insights — but many organisations fail to strike that balance.
“Lol yeah right!
Leadership team sets unrealistic KRs with limited consultation to teams that will do the work.
Implementation teams push back and get ignored.
External stakeholders don’t buy into the KRs and just do their own thing, and ultimately cause the KRs to miss.
Leadership team refactor all the KRs mid-quarter so they don’t look bad for having to record 0.3 scores.
Then downgrade the performance ratings for the implementation PMs who flogged themselves to deliver a non-viable result
"GoOd LeAdErShIp"
— Reddit user in r/ProductManagement
While it’s understandable for leadership and management to set the bar for many cases, it’s also crucial that the individual contributors are at least involved in the conversation. It’s not necessary to adopt a completely bottom-up approach to OKRs, where your teams set their own goals completely, but getting some feedback and an understanding of what the teams think is reasonable is key too.
Not to mention, having some input also gives buy-in, increasing their engagement with the process as a whole.
Another Reddit user, DingBat99999, said that he completely ignored their OKRs because they weren’t aligned with what they believed to be the right thing to work on.
While bringing DingBat99999 into the planning process may change the direction of some of the goals leadership had in mind, they would likely be more willing to engage with them in the first place.
At its core, OKRs is a framework that should foster conversation (not delegation) across all levels of the org.
8. Targets are never met
Some teams set OKRs so aspirational that they become unreachable—and eventually, meaningless. When quarter after quarter ends with every key result left unmet, it creates frustration and burnout. Teams lose motivation, question the point of goal-setting, and may even start sandbagging future goals just to “hit the numbers.” This creates a cycle where OKRs are either ignored or gamed—neither of which supports real progress.
“We never hit them.”
— Reddit user in r/ProductManagement
There may also be the instinct to think that you’ve failed. This could be the case, but if you still have a job and your company is still in business, well, there’s still work to be done. It’s often more likely that you aren’t setting the right goals or you’re not learning from benchmarks and past results.
What to do:
Have you ever played a video game where one difficulty is too easy and the next one is too hard? It’s hard to balance your expectations in the right way. Make your OKRs too easy to meet, and that defeats the purpose, too. Remember that goals are an iterative process just like anything else at your company.
Make sure that you run retrospectives after every cycle and do frequent check-ins. If you fail an OKR, you should not be surprised by it, and you should have tons of data points to help you calibrate what success really should look like next cycle.
Secondly, try to set different types of goals for your KRs. Rather than setting a single number, you can define a range of outcomes using three levels: threshold goals, target goals, and stretch goals.
By setting this range of goals, you can at least give some context to your progress. Even if you don’t hit your target, at least we’re hitting our threshold.
9. OKRs misused as roadmaps
Some teams confuse OKRs with tactical plans or product roadmaps. Instead of focusing on outcomes, their OKRs become a checklist of features or tasks. This defeats the purpose of the framework, which is meant to guide results, not prescribe activity. It also blurs the line between strategy and execution, making it hard to prioritise effectively.
“Trying to use OKRs in place of a roadmap… Not understanding how the OKR will be measured.”
— Reddit user in r/agile
What to do:
One of the most common mistakes teams make with OKRs is confusing them with roadmaps. Instead of defining outcomes, they list features or tasks, turning their OKRs into glorified to-do lists. This undermines the purpose of OKRs, which is to describe what success looks like, not how to get there. When OKRs become a roadmap in disguise, they lock teams into predefined work and make it harder to adapt if better ideas emerge mid-cycle.
To avoid this, understand tactical vs. strategic ideas and separate the “what” from the “how.” OKRs should define the desired impact—for example, “Increase user activation by 20%”—while roadmaps or backlogs describe the initiatives that might get you there. This encourages flexibility and creativity in execution while keeping everyone focused on the outcome that matters. A well-structured OKR provides direction, not a list of deliverables.
This also comes in handy when you are spreading OKRs across multiple teams or differing roles. Like the example above, if the objective is to “integrate with Stripe,” it’s going to be much easier for a developer or technical member of the team to have an impact on it. Whereas a goal like “reach 1,000 MRR,” will be accessible to any type of role—marketing, developer, designer, content writer, you name it.
10. Lack of cross-functional alignment
OKRs that are created in silos often fail to reflect the dependencies between teams. For example, a product team might have an OKR that requires support from engineering or marketing, but if those teams aren’t aligned, progress stalls. Without shared or overlapping goals, OKRs can reinforce silos instead of breaking them down.
“OKRs which are driven by just one discipline… don’t really inform the rest of the team.”
— Reddit user in r/userexperience
What to do:
Cross-functional misalignment often happens when teams set work goals in isolation, without understanding how their objectives connect to broader business outcomes. One of the best ways to address this is through cascading OKRs—ensuring that each team’s goals ladder up to higher-level company objectives. For leadership, this means taking the time to set clear themes or priorities that give teams room to approach challenges from different angles, while still staying aligned with the organisation’s direction. When done well, this creates focus without micromanaging execution.
A good OKR software can also help break these silos by having all your goals in one place. Tability customer, Blys, experienced an increased transparency that brought cross-team collaboration and celebration, simply because they were exposed to other team’s OKRs: “The other day a Customer Service team member congratulated someone on the Product team and gave them credit for improving a feature. You can see that [Tability] opened up this new space for collaboration and people are excited. From my perspective, it is very lovely to see a little tool like Tability contributing to our company culture and success.”
It’s also important to remember that OKRs aren’t meant to capture everything you do. They represent the few things you’re intentionally trying to move this quarter—not every task, meeting, or support request.
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A good rule of thumb is that about 70% of your work should contribute to your OKRs, while the rest will naturally go toward operational responsibilities or cross-functional work. You’ll still need to jump in and help other teams, solve unexpected issues, or support daily operations—that’s just the nature of working together. OKRs help guide focus, but they shouldn’t become a straitjacket. Use them to align, not to over-control.
Lastly, to prevent OKR failures, revisit foundational statements. Remember that OKRs should be a reflection of your company's vision and where you are all trying to get to together–learn the difference between vision and mission statements to ensure your OKRs tie back to lasting purpose. This ensures that your OKRs reflect the right priorities.
OKRs that don’t suck: the OKR software built to solve these issues
Most teams don’t fail at OKRs because they’re lazy—they fail because the system around them is broken. Goals are set and forgotten. Metrics get over-engineered. Teams are misaligned. And no one knows if the work they’re doing is actually moving the needle.
Tability was built to fix all of that.
An OKR software designed not just to help you set goals, but to actually follow through. With simple check-ins, visual confidence tracking, and built-in accountability, Tability makes it easy to keep your goals front and centre—without turning OKRs into another spreadsheet nightmare. It supports cascading alignment so everyone can see how their work ties into the bigger picture, and it encourages regular reflection rather than end-of-quarter surprises.
Whether your team struggles with setting realistic goals, tracking progress, or just making OKRs feel less like homework, Tability gives you the structure to stay focused—and the flexibility to adapt. It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing what matters.
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