How to Write Great OKRs: A Practical Guide

Writing OKRs is one of those things that looks simple on the surface. An objective describes what you want to achieve, and two to four key results describe how you measure whether you got there. The structure is easy to grasp. The hard part is writing OKRs that actually change how your team works.

Too often, teams sit down, write a set of goals that look perfectly reasonable, and then struggle to work with them. The OKRs looked great in the planning session, but when the first check-in comes around, the team realises the goals are hard to update, hard to discuss, and hard to act on. They did not see that when they wrote them, because on paper everything looked fine.

That is the core challenge: there is a difference between writing OKRs and working with OKRs. A well-written OKR is not just one that reads well in a document. It is one that holds up under the pressure of weekly check-ins, priority shifts, and honest conversations about progress. Writing great OKRs is a craft, and like any craft, it improves with practice, feedback, and an understanding of the principles behind it.

This guide covers the practical side of writing OKRs, from what makes a strong objective to how you ensure your key results are measurable, how to calibrate ambition, and how to avoid the most common pitfalls. Whether you are writing OKRs for the first time or refining your approach after a few cycles, the goal is the same: OKRs that your team actually uses, discusses, and benefits from.

Note that this is not an introduction to OKRs. This guide dives into the finer details of actually writing great OKRs, and assumes you are already familiar with the basic principles of the framework. To get the most out of what follows, you should know what objectives and key results are, how they relate to each other, and how a typical OKR cycle works.

What makes a great objective

A great objective is not just a label you put on top of your metrics. It is something that inspires every time you come back to it during a check-in. It adds context and meaning to the key results beneath it, giving the team a sense of direction that goes beyond the numbers.

One of the clearest signs of a weak objective is that it was written after the key results, as a way to find a common denominator for a set of metrics that were already decided. Strong objectives work the other way around. They tell you something about the strategy and direction of the team or organisation. They add something on top of the key results without promising more than what the key results actually cover.

Length matters as well. An objective should be long enough to be memorable and interesting, but not so long that it becomes a paragraph. Two or three words like “great growth” say almost nothing. A good objective expands enough on the topic to cover the scope of the key results while remaining concise.

Consider this progression:

• Weak: “Create long-term growth.” This is vague, provides no strategic direction, and could apply to any company.
• Stronger: “Build sustainable growth by deepening relationships with our current customers.” Now there is a strategic choice embedded in the objective: growth through existing customers, not new acquisition.
• Even stronger: “Become the go-to partner for our customers by turning them into advocates for our product.” This adds emotional direction and a clearer picture of what success looks like, while still being grounded in the key results that will follow.

The role of the objective is different from the role of key results. It will not determine the details of your check-ins or the specifics of your reporting. Its role is inspiration and direction. It is something the team can lean back towards and say, “this is in line with what we are trying to achieve,” even when a specific situation is not fully captured in one of the key results.

How to write measurable key results

The most reliable test for whether a key result is measurable is surprisingly simple: imagine that you are the person who has to fill in an update during a check-in. You are sitting there, and you need to enter a value. Where do you get the data?

This does not mean you need every detail figured out when you write the key result. There can be open questions about the exact data source or method. But you do need a plausible theory. If the key result is about measuring customer satisfaction, you should have a reasonable plan: “We will run a survey, and we need to get that survey project up and running within this cycle.” It needs to be trustworthy, meaning you can genuinely see a path to getting the data, even if the path still has a few unknowns.

What you cannot do is write a key result that says “increase happy customers” and leave it at that, hoping that someone will figure out how to measure happiness later. That is a recipe for a key result that is part of your OKRs but nobody knows how to update it.

A practical checklist for measurability:

• Can you name the data source? A dashboard, a survey, a CRM report, a manual count.
• Does the data source exist today? If not, is it realistic to create it within the cycle?
• Can you put a number on the starting point? You need a baseline to know if you are making progress.
• Will the person responsible know how to update it? If the update process is unclear, it will not happen consistently.

Key results vs tasks: where teams get confused

Converting everyday work into results-focused goals is one of the hardest parts of writing OKRs. This is where most teams and individuals struggle, because our daily habits are built around tasks. We go to work, we do tasks, we check them off. OKRs ask us to think differently: not about what we do, but about the results of what we do.

If your OKRs are just a list of tasks, they have become a project management tool. That is not what OKRs are for. OKRs exist to capture the focus and direction, the why behind the tasks.

That said, this distinction can get confusing, because there is a pragmatic middle ground. A “quantified task” like “book 10 customer meetings this quarter” is technically a task, but it has a clear number attached and a clear link to an outcome. Teams often end up with quantified tasks as key results, and in many cases that is perfectly fine. It drives direction, it is measurable, and it checks most of the OKR boxes, even if it is not a pure outcome.

The deeper challenge is that many teams are far from the actual business outcomes. A team handling a small part of a larger process may feel they cannot influence revenue, customer happiness, or product quality directly. Linking their work to a result that is actually a long-term, lagging indicator is genuinely difficult.

The exercise of differentiating between a task and a result is not easy for an untrained team. It is something that comes from practice with OKRs over an extended period of time.

Niklas Olsson, OKRnest

This is worth treating as a learning journey. Teams will not get it right from the start, and that is expected. What matters is that they get coaching and support to gradually shift from task-based key results towards outcome-based ones. For someone experienced with OKRs, the difference is immediately obvious. For someone new, it takes a few cycles of practice.

It can help to understand the difference between leading and lagging indicators in more detail. A lagging indicator measures the final outcome (revenue, customer retention, product adoption) but only shows results after the fact. A leading indicator measures an activity or early signal that you believe will drive the lagging outcome (number of demos booked, feature adoption rate in the first week, support ticket response time). When teams are far from the lagging outcomes, focusing on strong leading indicators is often the most practical approach to writing meaningful key results.

How many OKRs should a team have

The first rule here is that most teams have too many OKRs. It is very rare to see a team with too few.

A solid rule of thumb is one to three OKRs per team, with two to four key results on each objective. The fewer the better, but there is an important nuance: if the OKRs do not cover a meaningful portion of the team’s work, they risk becoming a separate process that only some people in the team engage with. When OKRs feel like a side project rather than a reflection of the team’s real priorities, they do not get into the rhythm of regular check-ins.

The balance to aim for is enough OKRs to cover the team’s core focus areas without being so broad that everything is included. For a team of three to ten people, an ideal setup is one where each team member can own at least one key result. That creates personal engagement with the process and gives everyone a stake in the goals. In practice, this might mean around ten key results spread across three objectives, which is a really solid setup but genuinely hard to achieve.

Calibrating ambition

Setting the right level of ambition is one of the trickier aspects of writing OKRs. It is tied to culture, team dynamics, and organisational norms. How aggressive should the targets be? Is it acceptable to miss a goal? What happens to motivation if the team consistently sets targets they never reach?

There is no universal answer. This is something each team and organisation needs to find their own position on. But it is important that the organisation signals a clear expectation for what the level of ambition should be, so that all teams are calibrated roughly the same way. You do not want a situation where one team sets wildly ambitious goals and another sets very safe ones, because the imbalance will create problems when you look at OKR achievement across the organisation.

A common approach is to set the expectation that achieving around 80% of your OKRs over time is a strong result. Some quarters you will hit 100% on some key results, and other quarters you might land at 60%. The point is not precision on any single cycle, but that over time the team’s ambition level settles into a range that is challenging without being demoralising.

The cultural dimension matters here. If the organisation has a strong “failure is not an option” culture, teams will set easy targets to protect themselves. If the culture genuinely supports learning from missed goals, teams can be more ambitious. The ambition calibration conversation is as much about organisational culture as it is about the numbers themselves.

Writing OKRs as a team

The process of writing OKRs as a team matters as much as the final result. When the team is involved in creating the goals, they develop attachment and commitment. When OKRs are handed down from management, they feel like top-down performance metrics, regardless of how well they are written.

Here is an overview of a team workshop process that works well in practice. Note that the process looks different when done at a leadership level, where the inputs and dynamics are different.

Start with the strategic OKRs. The core input to any team OKR process is the organisation’s strategic OKRs. The team needs to discuss: how do we contribute to these? Which strategic key results can we actually impact? The manager or whoever is leading the workshop plays an important role here, keeping the discussion from going too broad (“we could impact everything”) or too narrow (“we do not see ourselves in the strategy at all”). If the team genuinely cannot find a connection to the strategic OKRs, that is a signal to step back and do a team mission exercise first.

It is also possible to run this process without strategic OKRs in place. In that case, the team should align towards whatever strategic input is available: the company vision, mission, a strategy document, or the team’s own mission. The important thing is that there is something to anchor the discussion so the OKRs do not become disconnected from the broader direction.

Workshop: gather priorities. With the strategic context established, run a workshop where every team member writes down what they see as the team’s priorities for the upcoming period. Post-its on a board works well. Go around the table to make sure every person’s voice is heard. Cluster the post-its into themes, perhaps two or three clusters that represent distinct focus areas. These clusters become the foundation for your objectives.

Define measurements. In smaller groups, look at each theme and discuss: how would we measure success here? What metrics do we have? Do we need to create new measurements? This step is purely about what to measure and how, not about action or initiatives. Discuss the level of ambition for each measurement.

Combine and refine. Bring the groups back together. Review the proposed measurements, eliminate overlaps, and narrow down to two to four measurements per objective. Either finalise the wording in the session or assign individuals to take ownership of specific key results and propose ambition levels.

Close the loop. The team should come back together to review and agree on the final OKRs, including the ambition levels, meaning the targets set for each key result. This is not a step to skip. The more the team is involved in this final agreement, the stronger the commitment to the goals throughout the cycle.

Connecting OKRs to strategy

OKRs serve as what you might call a strategic compressor. An organisation may have a detailed strategy laid out in a long document, but OKRs force that strategy into a format that can fit on a single slide, be communicated clearly, and be understood and remembered by everyone in the organisation.

This compression is not just a communication exercise. It forces clarity of thought. You can no longer keep vague ambitions about everything being excellent in three years. The first year’s OKRs require you to specify: what part of this strategy do we tackle first? What do we focus on, and what do we deliberately leave for later? You cannot double everything at once. You need to say, “First we focus on growth,” or “First we focus on profitability,” or “First we focus on customer satisfaction.”

At the leadership level, strategic OKRs are created by looking at the vision, mission, and the medium-term strategy (often a three-year horizon) and breaking it down into objectives and key results for the upcoming year. These strategic OKRs then become the north star for the rest of the organisation.

At the team level, the link works in the other direction. Teams look at the strategic OKRs and align their own goals to them, as described in the workshop process above. The ideal outcome is that any individual in the organisation can trace a clear line from their weekly work to a team objective, and from that objective to a strategic key result that is driving the organisational agenda for the year.

The “so what” test

A useful check to apply to any OKR is what might be called the “so what” test. The question is simple: will this OKR actually change how the team works, compared to not having OKRs at all?

If the team has simply taken their existing KPIs, grouped them under labels, and called them OKRs, the answer is no. Nobody’s behaviour changes. Nobody’s priorities shift. The OKRs are just a wrapper around business-as-usual reporting.

The best outcome of a good OKR process is one of two things: either the team discovers something they have not been measuring before and realises it is important, or they realise that a metric they have been tracking is not actually driving the right kind of results.

Consider a marketing team that has a goal to send a certain number of newsletters per quarter. That is an activity metric. When they shift to an outcome focus and start measuring opens, click-throughs, or sign-ups, something changes. The team starts thinking about why they are sending newsletters and what they are trying to achieve with each one. Every decision that goes into creating a newsletter, from subject lines to content to audience segments, becomes more intentional because there is a clear outcome to optimise for.

Here is a before-and-after example at the strategic level:

This looks reasonable on paper. But apply the “so what” test: does this tell anyone in the organisation anything they did not already know? It is just common performance metrics. There is no strategic direction here.

After working through the process and asking “where is the strategy?”, the same organisation might arrive at:

Now the OKR tells a story. It communicates a strategic choice (international expansion), it is specific about how success will be measured, and it gives every team in the organisation a clear signal about where the focus lies. That is an OKR worth checking in on.

Before finalising any OKR, use the OKR writing checklist to verify that it passes the essential quality checks.

The role of scoring

Scoring is a secondary concern in the OKR process. Its primary value is not in grading team performance, but in helping the organisation calibrate ambition over time.

The core idea is that the aggregate result of a team’s OKRs should, over multiple cycles, land in the expected range. If the organisation has set an expectation that 80% achievement is a strong result, then scoring helps the team see whether they are consistently landing in that range. A quarter at 100% might mean the targets were too easy. A quarter at 50% might mean external factors intervened, or the ambition level needs adjusting.

If your team does score OKRs, keep it simple. A percentage-based approach works well: each key result gets a completion percentage, those are averaged up to the objective level, and you can see the overall result.

Scoring works best as part of a retrospective conversation that focuses on process: did the OKRs help the team? Were the ambition levels right? What should change next cycle? It is less useful as a performance evaluation tool, because that tends to push teams towards safe targets rather than meaningful ones.

Common patterns that look good but fail

After working with many teams, a few patterns stand out as especially common. These OKRs look fine when they are written, but they cause problems when the team tries to work with them.

Over-ambition. Teams, especially leadership teams, love to be ambitious. The resulting OKRs look inspiring and capture the full breadth of what the team wants to achieve. The problem comes during follow-up. Lofty, wide-ranging goals are hard to focus on, hard to make progress against, and hard to check in on meaningfully. What looked like a bold vision in the planning session becomes a source of frustration in the check-ins.

Unmeasurable key results. It is possible to write a set of key results that look specific and outcome-oriented but that nobody has ever actually measured. If three out of five key results require creating a new survey, building a new dashboard, or establishing a new data pipeline, the team will spend the cycle trying to create measurements rather than improving them. Make sure at least the majority of your key results are based on data you can access today, or that the measurement project is realistic within the first few weeks of the cycle.

The “perfect but disconnected” OKR. This is perhaps the most important pattern to watch for, and it has become more common with the rise of AI-generated OKRs. It is easy to create an OKR that checks every box: the objective is inspiring, the key results are outcome-based and measurable, the ambition level seems right. On paper, it is a textbook example. But it is not this team’s OKR. It does not reflect the specific context, constraints, and priorities that the team lives with every day.

A team should take a team-made OKR with all its human imperfections over a polished OKR that was generated without deep context. The whole point of writing OKRs is the thinking that goes into the process: the strategic discussions, the priority debates, the trade-offs. When that thinking is skipped, the OKR may be technically correct but practically useless, because the team has no ownership of it and no understanding of the choices behind it.

Where to go from here

Writing great OKRs is a skill that develops over time. The first set of OKRs a team writes will not be perfect, and that is fine. What matters is that the team engages with the process, learns from each cycle, and gradually gets better at expressing their goals in a way that drives real focus and clarity.

The most important thing to take away is that OKRs are not a reporting format. They are a thinking tool. The value comes from the conversations they spark, the strategic choices they force, and the alignment they create across the organisation. If your OKRs are doing that, you are on the right track, even if the wording is not perfect yet.

FAQ

How long should an objective be?

Long enough to be memorable and give strategic direction, but short enough to stay concise. Two or three words like "great growth" say too little, while a full paragraph says too much. A good objective is typically one sentence that captures both what you want to achieve and the strategic direction behind it, for example "Build a loyal customer base by turning first-time buyers into repeat customers."

Is it okay to use a task as a key result?

In many cases, yes. A "quantified task" like "conduct 15 customer interviews this quarter" is technically a task, but it has a clear number and a believable link to an outcome. These are common in practice and check most of the OKR boxes. The important thing is that the team is aware of the distinction and gradually moves towards more outcome-based key results as they gain experience with the framework.

How do we write OKRs if our team cannot directly influence business outcomes?

Focus on leading indicators rather than lagging ones. If your team is far from the final business outcome, identify the early signals or activities that you believe drive that outcome. For example, a support team may not control churn directly, but they can measure first-response time or resolution satisfaction, both of which are leading indicators that contribute to retention.

What should we do if the team cannot connect their work to the strategic OKRs?

This is a signal to step back and run a team mission exercise before writing OKRs. The team needs to articulate how they contribute to the organisation. Once that connection is clear, even if it is indirect, the team can write OKRs that align with the broader strategy. Skipping this step usually leads to OKRs that feel disconnected from the rest of the organisation.

How do we know if our OKRs are too ambitious or not ambitious enough?

Track your OKR achievement over multiple cycles. If the organisation has set an expectation of around 80% completion as a strong result, the team should see their scores settle in that range over time. Consistently hitting 100% suggests the targets are too easy, while consistently landing below 60% may indicate the ambition level needs adjusting or that external factors are getting in the way.