What Is an OKR?
What is an OKR? An OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal-setting method that connects what a team wants to achieve with the exact way it will measure whether it got there. Every OKR has two parts: a qualitative objective that describes where you're headed, and two to five quantitative key results that define how you'll know you arrived. The system started at Intel under Andy Grove and became widely known after John Doerr brought it to Google in the late 1990s, later documenting the practice in his book Measuring What Matters.
Unlike a to-do list or an annual budget, an OKR doesn't describe tasks — it describes a measurable change. That's why sales, product, marketing, and operations teams use it to align the whole business around two or three priorities per quarter, instead of chasing twenty initiatives at once.
Objective and Key Results: The Two Parts of an OKR
The objective is the inspiring part: a short, ambitious, memorable statement that answers "what do we want to achieve?" It carries no numbers. Example: "Become the preferred vendor for our current customers."
The key results are the quantitative part: two to five metrics that answer "how will we know we got there?" Each key result needs a starting point, a target, and a deadline, and it must be gradeable on a scale (say, 0 to 1.0) without any ambiguity. Following the example above, a key result could be "raise the contract renewal rate from 70% to 85%" or "cut support ticket response time from 24 to 8 hours."
An objective with no key results is just an intention. Key results with no objective are just numbers with no story. The method works because it forces you to define both together.
How to Write an OKR (Structure and Example)
The most common structure for writing an OKR follows this pattern: "We will objective, as measured by key result 1, key result 2, and key result 3."
A full example for an e-commerce team in one quarter:
- Objective: Improve the shopping experience on the website.
- Key result 1: Lower cart abandonment from 68% to 55%.
- Key result 2: Cut checkout load time from 5 to 2 seconds.
- Key result 3: Raise the average post-purchase satisfaction score from 3.8 to 4.4.
Each key result is verifiable with data, not opinions. If you can't tell with a number at the end of the quarter whether it was met, it wasn't a key result — it was a task in disguise.
Cadence: How Often Teams Review Their OKRs
Most companies work OKRs at two time horizons:
- Annual OKRs, which set the company's overall direction for the next twelve months and change rarely.
- Quarterly OKRs, which flow from the annual ones and do change every quarter based on what the business needs at that moment.
Beyond that planning cadence, the teams that get the most out of OKRs run short weekly check-ins — ten or fifteen minutes — where each key result gets updated with a progress score (0%, 50%, 100%) and a brief note on what's blocking it. That single habit prevents the method's most common failure mode: writing OKRs at the start of the quarter, filing them away, and not looking at them again until it's too late to course-correct.
OKR Examples by Business Area
OKRs adapt to any team, not just product or engineering:
- Sales: Objective: Speed up the new-customer closing cycle. Key results: cut the average sales cycle from 45 to 30 days; raise the proposal-to-contract conversion rate from 20% to 30%.
- Marketing: Objective: Generate qualified demand predictably. Key results: raise qualified leads per month from 150 to 250; cut cost per qualified lead by 20%.
- Operations: Objective: Reduce order fulfillment errors. Key results: lower the shipping-error return rate from 4% to 1.5%; raise on-time delivery from 88% to 97%.
- HR: Objective: Improve team retention. Key results: cut voluntary turnover from 18% to 10% annually; raise the employee engagement score from 7.2 to 8.5.
In every case, the objective reads like a business goal, and the key results read like numbers anyone on the team can check without relying on someone's opinion.
How to Do OKRs Step by Step (OKR Methodology)
To roll out the OKR methodology for a team or across a whole company:
- Set two to four objectives per quarter, not ten. More objectives means less real focus.
- Write two to five key results per objective, each measurable with a number, not a yes/no.
- Assign an owner to each key result — the person responsible for moving that number.
- Publish the whole team's OKRs somewhere everyone can see them, not just leadership.
- Update progress every week in short check-ins, not only at the end of the quarter.
- Grade and close out the quarter with a score per key result, and use that review to set next quarter's OKRs.
Many teams start this process in a shared spreadsheet, and as the number of people and OKRs grows, they move to an internal dashboard — similar to what we cover in our guide to what a dashboard is — where each key result's progress updates in real time and the whole team can check it without emailing a file back and forth. That same dashboard often connects to automated reports that flag a lagging key result early, instead of surfacing it only at quarter close.
OKR vs KPI: What's the Difference?
It's common to mix up an OKR with a KPI, but they answer different questions. A KPI measures the ongoing performance of a process that already exists — monthly sales, response time, conversion rate — and usually has no "end" date. An OKR, on the other hand, describes a change with a deadline: where you want to push that number within a specific period.
In practice, KPIs often become the key results of an OKR once a team decides that indicator needs to move deliberately. If your conversion rate is already a KPI you track every month, and this quarter you decide to push it from 20% to 30% as part of a specific objective, that KPI just became a key result. The difference isn't in the number itself — it's whether you're simply watching it (KPI) or you've committed to moving it within a defined timeframe (OKR).
Frequently Asked Questions
How many OKRs should a team have?
Two to four objectives per quarter, with two to five key results each. More than that dilutes focus and makes it impossible to genuinely track every number every week.
Should OKRs be easy or hard to achieve?
Google's original practice recommends ambitious OKRs, with a target completion rate around 70% by the end of the period. A team that hits 100% of its OKRs quarter after quarter is usually a sign the goals are set too conservatively.
Are OKRs used to evaluate individual performance?
That's not the recommended practice. OKRs are meant to align team priorities, not serve as the direct basis for bonuses or individual performance reviews; mixing the two encourages people to set easy targets instead of ambitious ones.
What's the difference between an objective and a key result?
The objective is qualitative and describes a direction ("improve the customer experience"); the key result is quantitative and describes how that progress is measured ("raise the satisfaction score from 3.8 to 4.4").
How often are OKRs reviewed?
They're planned quarterly (or annually for top-level direction OKRs) and reviewed in short weekly check-ins, plus a formal grading session at the close of each period.
If your team already sets OKRs but progress lives scattered across spreadsheets, chats, and loose documents, at AISDC we build custom dashboards that centralize each key result's progress in real time, with access for the whole team and no dependence on manual updates.