OKRs for Growth-stage Startups

Growth-stage companies have figured out how to solve a problem for their users. Of course, they'll keep investing in the product, but the main focus is to grow the business. This is why they should mostly focus on the Acquisition and Referral stages of the AARRR funnel.
‍
There are 2 ways for you to grow: find channels that can generate a steady number of leads, and turn existing users into advocates that will refer your product to their friends and colleagues.

Example of Growth-stage Startup OKRs

You'll find below an example built around a fictitious company. Your OKRs should move from quarter to quarter and map to your company's reality – that's why we thought it's best to illustrate things as a case study that you can take inspiration from.

Scenario

Askawoof is a startup building a platform to help companies run customer satisfaction surveys. They successfully launched their product and got great initial feedback. Now they're looking for ways to accelerate their growth.

General advice

It's often useful to pair Key Results that can check one another for a specific Objective. You might push your team to adopt extreme tactics to grow the business if you only mention new leads and signups (spend too much, reduce leads quality...).
‍
A good practice is to add control Key Results to make sure keep that your business stays healthy. In this example, the goals around growth are balanced with some other KRs related to costs and retention.

Their OKRs

Explore all OKRs templates

Best practices for tracking OKRs

#1 Make it part of the team rituals

OKRs won't be of much help if you're not keeping an eye on them. Staying focused and aligned starts by adopting a simple routine with the team.

• Monday: review progress on OKRs as a team, then look at your roadmap.
  
• Monday-Friday: work on projects.
  
• Friday: demos.
  

Start your Monday by looking at outcomes first (OKRs) and then outputs (roadmap). This will make sure that roadmaps discussions are centered around the most pressing issues.

#2 Make sure everyone can see trends

A common mistake for tracking OKRs is to use a table where you replace values in cells with the most recent update.

Not seeing trends can give you a false sense of security. You may be above the target line today, but the overall trend might be going the wrong way. So make sure that you have a simple way to understand if you're getting off track.

A simple progress chart can do wonders to help you understand if you're getting off track.
‍

#3 Automate your OKRs process

OKRs will most likely cause friction as you expand their use within your organization:

• Team leads have to send reminders every week.
  
• People have to scramble through spreadsheets to find their goals.
  
• Reports need to be handcrafted for leadership.
  
• There's a general lack of consistency in implementation.
  

You can greatly simplify things by adopting a platform like Tability that will automate most of the OKRs tracking and make progress easy to see.

Turning OKRs into a collaboration process with Tability