What are OKRs? Definition, examples, and how they work (2026 edition)

What does OKR stand for?

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. It's a goal-setting framework that helps teams set ambitious goals and measure success with clear, quantifiable outcomes. The Objective is what you want to achieve. The Key Results are how you'll measure progress. Most teams set OKRs every quarter and check in on them weekly.

The methodology traces back to Andy Grove at Intel in the 70s. It took another ~30 years for the framework to take off, when John Doerr brought it to Google in 1999. Today OKRs are no longer reserved for Enterprise teams — startups and scale-ups use them to set ambitious goals, align teams, and accelerate their path to success. For the full backstory, see our complete OKR history.

What is the purpose of the OKR framework?

The main purpose of the OKR framework is to be a compass for your org.

Teams can be seen as vectors that are pointing their effort in certain directions. A Marketing team can choose to explore content marketing opportunities, or it can focus on conference sponsorships. Those are two different directions. Your Sales team can go after the SMB or the Enterprise market. Again, two different directions.

The challenge for most organisations isn't to get teams to work on things. The biggest challenge is to make sure that all team vectors are constantly pointing in a similar direction. Without OKRs, teams can drift in different directions.

This is where OKRs come in. The #1 job of the OKR framework isn't to put pressure on your teams. It is to act as a North Star for all teams. Beyond the stretch goals, OKR cycles, and check-ins, OKRs offer a single language for focus, as well as a clear structure to align team goals to company objectives.

Without OKRs, you might have 5 teams using 7 different approaches to talk about their strategy. With OKRs, it becomes effortless to go from one strategy to the next, as they're all using the same terms and rules. The result: you get a clearer picture of alignment. Or, more accurately, you get a clearer picture of all the misalignments. Only then can you start to work on re-aligning the teams.

Understanding (and explaining) the true purpose of OKRs will make it 10x easier to roll out the framework. It will help teams avoid wasting time on endless debates around the Key Results, and instead focus more of their attention on whether or not their quarterly goals align with their peers'.

The 3 components of the OKR process

While OKRs only have 2 components in the name (Objectives and Key Results), I find it useful to keep projects (or initiatives) as part of the picture. It helps explain the difference between Key Results and traditional projects, which is the #1 source of confusion for new teams.

Ask around your company what an objective or key result is, and there's a good chance people tie it back to the projects they're working on:

• “My objective is to build the new onboarding workflow”
• “My key result? Update all the marketing copy”

It should be expected to see people gravitating to an activity-centric meaning of OKRs – projects is what we do most of the day. But, those are deliverables and don't really match the definition of measurable goals.

Here's a simple way to understand how the roles of Objectives, Key Results and initiatives (or projects) differ:

• Objectives: where do we want to be at the end of the quarter? (direction)
• Key Results: how will we measure progress? (outcomes)
• Projects / Initiatives: what are our best bets to get there? (work)

Again, a common mistake is to list projects as Key Results. But a project is a deliverable (output), not a goal (outcome). Your KRs measure the impact of your projects, not whether they shipped.

Writing good Objectives

A good Objective should be inspiring and easy to understand by anyone in your org. It's a short, qualitative statement that sets the direction for the quarter. If you read it out loud, someone in another team should be able to understand what you're going for, without needing to look at the numbers.

Writing good Key Results

Good Key Results will help you measure progress toward your company or team Objectives. A simple way to write good Key Results is to embrace the SMART framework for your goals. This methodology will help you make sure that you cover all required aspects of a good Key Result, including making it attainable and time-bound.

A few practical rules I use with teams:

• Key Results should have an owner. Their job is to track progress and share feedback with the org.
• Key Results should not be binary. It will be difficult to get a sense of progress if you can't measure it over time.
• Use leading indicators of success for long-term projects. Don't wait for a project to be released to start building your confidence in the results.

And here's the test I keep coming back to: if a Key Result goes off-track, would you change your plans? If the answer is no, it's not a Key Result, it's a vanity metric.

A simple OKR example

Objective: Make our onboarding experience something users actually enjoy
↪ Key Result 1: Increase activation rate from 32% to 50%
↪ Key Result 2: Reduce time-to-first-value from 8 days to under 3
↪ Key Result 3: Lift week-1 retention from 41% to 60%

Notice what's there and what isn't. The Objective doesn't mention metrics. The Key Results are all measurable. None of them are projects or tasks. Those come later as initiatives.

For more examples, check out the full OKR examples library.

Good vs. bad OKRs

The difference between OKRs that drive a team forward and OKRs that gather dust isn't subtle. It usually shows up in the first read.

You can spot a weak OKR before the quarter even starts. The signs are pretty consistent.

You'll find a couple of examples below to illustrate the difference.

Example 1: bad OKR focused on an initiative👇

A Product team has been running their beta for the past 6 months. Their users are happy, the product has reached maturity, and the product team has decided that they can start billing their customers. They identified Stripe as the best solution to handle the subscriptions.

They start the draft of their OKRs plan, but they're struggling a bit to finish it. The team has listed the Stripe integration as their Objective, but they can't find the corresponding key results and projects.

• Objective: Build a Stripe integration to start billing our customers
• Key Results:?
• Projects:?

The issue here is that building a Stripe integration is more of an output than an outcome. It's one of the tasks to complete if you want to get paid customers, but having a billing system doesn't guarantee conversions—it just makes it possible for people to subscribe to your service if they want to.

But, we can get to the  Objective by asking why  we’re working on an output:

• Q: Why do we want to integrate with Stripe?
• A: So that users can subscribe online.
• Q: Why do we want users to subscribe online?
• A: To have paying customers!

Having paying customers sounds much more like the outcome that we're after. Now, we can rewrite our OKR like in the example 2 below.

Example 2: good OKR focused on impact👇‍

• Objective: Have happy paying customers
• Key Results: revenue, trials, retention, number of customers
• Projects: build a Stripe integration, launch a marketing campaign, build a referral program, etc.

There are notable differences with our new OKRs plan:

• It's not engineering-centric anymore. Having happy paying customers is something that many teams can contribute to. Marketing, Sales, and Support can also start thinking about ways to help the business be successful.
• Stripe is just a bet now. Imagine if, for some reason, Stripe is not the right tool for the job. In our first example, our team would have been unable to think about alternatives because we set Stripe as the Objective. But in this example, what matters is to convert users to paid, and we could simply email them an invoice.

The simple formula to write great OKRs

John Doerr came up with a simple formula to write your OKRs.

I will ___________ as measured by _____________."

The first blank represents the Objective, and the second blank is about the corresponding Key Results. This is a great way to separate the qualitative aspect of an Objective from the quantitative function of the Key Results.

OKRs vs KPIs: what's the actual difference?

This question comes up constantly, so let's clear it up. Both frameworks use metrics, and you'll often find KPIs inside your OKRs. But they serve different purposes:

• KPIs are a set of metrics used for monitoring the performance of an entire system. They're like the dashboard of a car: speed, fuel, engine temperature. You watch them continuously, and they stay relevant for years.
• OKRs are used to improve the performance of a specific part of a system over a fixed period. They're the destination you're driving toward this quarter.

You can track 'customer churn rate' as a KPI every month. You'd turn it into an OKR the quarter you decide to actively push it from 5% to 3%.

KPIs answer 'how are we doing?'. OKRs answer 'what are we changing?'.

For a deeper comparison with side-by-side examples, see OKR vs KPI: key differences, examples, and how to use both.

What are the benefits of OKRs?

OKRs improve focus by limiting the set of competing priorities — which means identifying the most important things to change each quarter, and what goes on the sideline. Saying no to good ideas is often where the real value sits.

Coupled with weekly goal tracking, the framework also acts as a periodic reminder of what matters, so every project discussion happens with the right context. A few other benefits worth calling out:

• Accountability: putting individuals in charge of updating progress on Key Results fosters ownership. Achieving goals is collective, but progress updates need a name attached.
• Adaptability: weekly check-ins give teams the chance to adapt tactics as circumstances change. The check-in answers one question: do we need to do things differently?
• Risk reduction: regular check-ins surface problems early, so you can act before it's too late.
• Better meetings: when everyone is aligned on Objectives, conversations between leadership and the team shift from outputs to outcomes. Expectations get clearer; teams get more freedom on the how.

See more on why OKRs are effective and the benefits for individual contributors.

How to write your first OKRs

The shortest version of the process I can give you:

1. Pick a theme. What's the one thing your team needs to change this quarter? Growth, retention, quality, speed? Don't try to do all of them.
2. Write the Objective. One sentence. Inspiring. No metrics.
3. Add 2–4 Key Results. Each one is a number with a starting point, a target, and an owner. Mix leading and lagging indicators where you can.
4. Sanity-check with the off-track test. For each Key Result: 'if this goes off-track, would we change our plans?'. If no, replace it.
5. Set up your check-in rhythm. Weekly works best. Decide who's responsible for each Key Result.

Start with a 3x3 matrix: a maximum of 3 Objectives per team per quarter, no more than 3 Key Results per Objective. And don't spend three weeks workshopping — get a draft out, run a cycle, iterate. Momentum beats accuracy.

Need a head start? The OKR Starter Kit gives you pre-built OKRs you can import today, or Tability's AI can draft OKRs in seconds.

How to score OKRs – and why you shouldn't copy Google

Google came up with a grading system that recommends aiming for a 60-70% completion of your OKRs at the end of the quarter. The idea is to push your team to set ambitious goals, which means that it should be hard for them to achieve 100% of their target. This sounds great in theory, but it hardly works in practice because most organisations expect goals to fall in the 80-100% range.

Say that your Marketing team reports mid-quarter that they have reached 35% of their leads target. Google would consider that to be great, but many people would have a hard time casting the same judgement. We'd expect the team to be closer to 50%.

Tips to grade your OKRs:

• Stick to the same grading scale that you use for other KPIs. If you celebrate achievements around 80-100%, then apply the same expectations to your OKRs.
• Keep track of progress every week. Grading your OKRs weekly will help you identify issues early on.
• Apply a confidence level to your OKRs. Scoring OKRs is about more than reporting your current metric. You should indicate your confidence level, and add any notes that can help others understand what's going on.

If you want to go further, you can read our complete OKR scoring guide.

What OKRs are not — and the mistakes that follow

Most failed OKR rollouts trace back to a handful of misunderstandings about what the framework is for.

OKRs are not a to-do list. If your Key Results read like 'launch X, ship Y, hire Z', you've written a project plan dressed up as a goal. The mistakes that follow: turning the roadmap into OKRs, and tracking business-as-usual with the framework. BAU still needs to happen — split your effort roughly 70% OKRs, 30% BAU, and keep the roadmap underneath the goals.

OKRs are not a performance management tool. Tying OKRs to bonuses or reviews kills the framework — teams stop setting ambitious goals because the cost of missing one is too high. If you want stretch goals, make it safe to miss them.

OKRs are not a top-down directive. Teams contribute to setting them; dictated OKRs get compliance, not commitment. The related mistake is cascading: most companies want a tidy org chart of goals, and in practice it creates rigidity and dependencies that slow everyone down. Here's how we align OKRs at Tability, because cascading sucks.

OKRs are not a solo sport. When one person owns every Key Result, the team has no skin in the game. Spread ownership — no one should have more than 7 items to update each week.

OKRs are not set-and-forget. OKRs without weekly check-ins are just annual goals. See our simple weekly ritual to track OKRs. Two calibration mistakes to dodge while you're at it: don't panic when a goal goes red for a week (wait to see if it's a blip or a trend), and don't make every goal so ambitious that no one ever wins — early victories build the momentum the framework runs on.

What OKRs look like in 2026

Two things have genuinely changed since the Measure What Matters era.

First, the blank page problem is gone. Drafting OKRs used to be the biggest barrier for first-timers. Now AI can turn a paragraph describing your strategy into a fully editable draft in seconds — you spend your energy debating the goals, not formatting them.

Second, tracking is becoming agent-driven. Instead of a manager chasing eight people for updates every Friday, AI agents pull progress from the tools where work actually happens, flag Key Results that are quietly drifting, and prep the review before the meeting starts. The weekly rhythm stays; the admin overhead goes.

The framework hasn't changed. The cost of running it well has collapsed.

Frequently asked questions about OKRs

What does OKR stand for?

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. The Objective is the goal you want to achieve, and the Key Results are the measurable outcomes that show you're making progress.

Who invented OKRs?

OKRs were created by Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s and popularised by John Doerr, who introduced them to Google in 1999. They've since been adopted by organisations of every size around the world.

How are OKRs different from KPIs?

KPIs are metrics you monitor continuously to track business health. OKRs are time-bound goals you set to change something specific over a quarter or year. KPIs answer 'how are we doing?'. OKRs answer 'what are we changing?'.

How many OKRs should a team have?

Three Objectives per team per quarter is the sweet spot. Five is the absolute ceiling. Each Objective should have 2-4 Key Results. More than that and your team will lose focus.

Are OKRs and SMART goals the same thing?

No, but they overlap. SMART is a framework for writing a single goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). OKR is a framework for structuring goals across an organisation. Good Key Results are usually SMART, but OKRs add the qualitative Objective on top.

Should OKRs be tied to performance reviews or bonuses?

No. Tying OKRs to compensation makes teams sandbag their goals to ensure they hit them. The framework only works when it's safe to set ambitious goals and miss some of them. Keep OKRs and performance management separate.

How often should you check in on OKRs?

Weekly. Anything less frequent and OKRs become annual goals that fade into the background. A 10-15 minute weekly check-in is enough to update progress, surface risks, and keep the team aligned.

What is a good OKR software?

Good OKR software makes weekly check-ins effortless, surfaces progress trends, and keeps your goals visible without forcing the team into a heavy reporting process. The right tool depends on your size and how outcome-driven your culture is. See our guide to the best OKR software for a full comparison.

Can OKRs work for small teams?

Yes. OKRs aren't just for enterprises. Two-person startups can run OKRs effectively, often more easily than large organisations because there are fewer dependencies. Start with one or two Objectives and build from there.