SaaS OKRs: real examples, explained

I imagine this as a company-wide rallying cry for the entire organisation. This is a strategic OKR. It's extremely ambitious, and it's very, very clear for the organisation. I think this can work really well if there is not another OKR that says new sales must double as well, if this is clearly the focus of the organisation for the year. It's strong, and it attacks a strategic focus from many directions.

The quality of this OKR depends a lot on what environment it is in. If it's surrounded by three equally aggressive OKRs in completely different areas, then it's just a company that wants to do it all. If this really clearly signals focus for the organisation (maybe it's just this one and one about building for innovation or team strength), then I think it can work really well.

Overall, this is a strong OKR, but it's quite sales- or finance-oriented, leaning almost a little too much toward a budget. The only strategy here is a focus on a specific geography. What that often means is that it's directed at a specific team, maybe not a rallying cry for the entire organisation. When these work, what I usually see is the sales effort, together with marketing, needing to adapt to a new language, for example. Product needs to adapt to a new market, or maybe legal even has to start work to support the sales effort in Germany. It is possible to rally the entire organisation around something as simple as a new geography with financial metrics like this, but this example does not quite show that yet.

Overall, this kind of OKR works well. I would say all three hold up here, including shortening payback. For clarity, if this is a strategic OKR for the entire organisation, it would be nice to write out customer acquisition cost, but it's also hard to understand how that fits into the objective. Why do we have a CAC target on this one? Maybe we need to clarify the objective, then talk about how DACH can sustain the next stage of growth. For example, sales in this new market need to hit a specific level of profitability. For the right organisation in the right context, this hits the marks.

Overall strong, clear, and very ambitious, which is common with startups. Many times startups are exactly the kind of organisation that can really benefit from ambitious OKRs. With a lack of baselines, experts, and experience of what actually works, you can see results that double or triple the current level.

Number three is a fun one: reach 40% of users who would be very disappointed without the product. At the same time it needs some kind of measurability settled up front. Will this be measured at the end of the quarter with a survey to all customers, or is there a better metric for this satisfaction score?

This looks like a collaboration between product and marketing, maybe a shared OKR. It's very clear what it wants to achieve. It attacks a specific part of the customer journey, so it has focus in that sense. Looking at how broad this is and how ambitious the targets are, maybe this is a yearly OKR, and then it could work. If this is on a quarterly basis, there's very little chance that the team will move all of this in one single go, maybe not even in a year. It's targeted, but it tries a little bit too much. It attacks one issue from very many angles.

My recommendation to the team would be to focus in on one of these, for example the trial-to-paid conversion, and see if they can build out more key results around it. That would add some clarity on how they're solving it, and not only the generic outcome focus here. Overall it's very strong and shows a mature team that has actually been able to construct an OKR that targets a specific issue like this.

This looks like a team with a lot of incidents, and maybe this is their only OKR for the quarter, to really get this part of the work in order. From that perspective it is a good reminder that OKRs are just for the changes you want to achieve. Of course they will do lots of engineering work that is not about incident management, but the core change they need this quarter is how they manage incidents. It is a strong OKR.

The main gap is that the objective could be a little more inspiring, or connect stronger to strategy, to the business, or to the customer. "Turn incidents from firefights into routine" is just the what. An alternative could be something like: enhance our customers' experience of the software through best-in-class incident management. More inspiring, and it makes clear why this matters.

Ambitious, and trying to attack the first days of the customer experience from several angles. The main feedback is that it is focused on the first part of the customer journey, but that is still a very broad focus. Each of these individual key results probably has more than a quarter's work in it to really make it move, depending on resources of course. There are also a couple of built-in definitions here: first value milestone, onboarding completion, core module. In cases like this it is extremely important that the team already knows exactly what those mean, so they can work efficiently toward the OKR.

The core improvement would be to take one of the key results and make that the objective, for example get new customers to value quickly through the core module, and then break down two to four key results from that.

This is a strong, measurable, and outcome-based product OKR. The feeling here though is that the team is trying to solve all their issues in one single OKR cycle. It takes on a little too much. When a team looks at an OKR like this and sees they are basically done, that they have covered all their workstreams with one OKR, it is a little too generic, a little too broad, a little too ambitious. They are measuring the right things, but from experience following teams like this, it is very seldom that you actually achieve all of this in one run. It might look like clear, slim focus because it is all about the onboarding process, but the onboarding process is a gigantic topic. It would be more believable, and easier to actually see a change from the work, if it was to make the first week prove the product's worth for a specific niche or kind of customer, or in a specific part of the solution.

There is a good mix here: one and two are clear outcome-focused, while number three is more of an activity, a to-do list item. But it puts up a clear ambition for the change. It is clearly measurable, can drive the right activities, and it is easy to see how number three drives future outcomes. It still works really well as a key result.