Team OKRs: real examples, explained

This is a strong OKR overall, well crafted. We could wish for the objective to have a little more inspiration, or to more clearly give a why: why this is important, connected to strategy or business goals. It is often hard for engineering teams to identify real core outcomes and key results, but all of these are examples of just that.

What you see with engineering OKRs is that key results are often very hard to make understandable for the rest of the organisation. That makes it even more important to have an objective that clearly connects to business outcomes, or to how this actually helps the team, and is not framed as an internal matter like in this example. Overall, very strong.

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.

This is a very strong OKR. Clear focus on a clear outcome, a clear change the team wants to achieve. The minor issue is key result two: raising organic visitors reaching a signup surface. I don't think anyone outside the team would really understand what that means. It is a little technical, but not complex enough to be a problem with the OKR. And on high-intent organic landing pages, hopefully the team already has a clear definition of which pages count. That is not something to invent as you start measuring. It is just for clarity, so you know what you set out to achieve and what actually matters.

Looking at the numbers, this is very ambitious for a team OKR, especially if it sits on a quarter. To move the needle this far you would need quite a few people on it, or a lot of SEO resources. You will also not make this kind of shift every quarter. This is a one-time real bump, so it sits a little on the too-ambitious side.

This is a great OKR, and it really shows how a team that does not always have it easy to connect their work to strategy can still drive their own agenda and perform in a supporting role. That strength also points at the one issue: the objective is a little unclear on the why. Closing the books while the month is still warm spells out the what, but not why that matters.

There may also be some overambition in key result three for a quarter, or even a year. There might be good reasons for it though, a new tool or new software to lean on.

This is a strong HR OKR, with maybe a little bit of the feeling of trying to take on everything at once in the recruitment process. It is very ambitious: not only shorten time to hire, but at the same time improve the quality of hires through new-hire retention. All in all it is a little packed, but it is a great example of finding measurability in HR metrics so you can build key results from them.

Look at the third key result: that is the quality insurance on one and two. You can easily see that one and two alone could make HR a little sloppy, or lower the bar, just to hit the metrics. Number three then ensures that quality is not worse off because of the quicker process. An alternative might be something like recruiting-manager evaluation of the process or the final candidate, to make sure that metric does not budge. It would be okay to just hold it steady. It is a little too ambitious to try to bump retention up at the same time as you speed up the process.

This is an example of a problematic OKR, but also of what an OKR can look like for many teams starting out with the framework. In many cases it can be worthwhile to run a quarter with something like this, to learn and understand what the issues really are with this kind of OKR. Overall we are lacking on most parameters here. There is no why or inspiration in the objective, and the key results are not outcomes or results. These are pure tasks to complete, or ambitions without measurability, like grow social media followers.

An improved OKR would have an objective more like: penetrate our core market with increased brand awareness. Then a key result that actually measures brand awareness, maybe one that measures direct traffic to the website, and another that sets a target for how many large publications or search PRs should generate, for example.

A good OKR that tries to tackle a big scope. The objective is really strong: inspiring, relevant, and it bears real meaning for the team, which is great.

They may run into issues with key result two after a couple of weeks. Even if they have identified the top five recurring workflows, what does it mean to automate end to end, and when are you done? Going from zero is a real challenge here, because it looks like a new kind of work the team has not done before. An improvement would be to say: save X hours through automations by the end of the quarter. Note that is different from key result one, which can also be hit by changing how things are done or making them more efficient. Key result two would still be focused on introducing automations for the team.

Overall a strong OKR, but the objective could be much more clearly tied to strategy, or to something more inspiring. This is a really good example of how a legal team can connect their work to business revenue, or to a strategy to gain more customer accounts, for example. It is trying to tackle a lot of different issues with one OKR. It looks like this may be the solo OKR for the team for the year.

Even though we say it is focused on improving the speed of the process, it attacks that from so many angles that it becomes a little unfocused. Number two, for example, looks like sales training to work with the template contracts, while number one looks like pure process improvement inside the team, and so on.

This example of an OKR could be very clear to a UX team, but from an outsider's perspective it is harder to understand what the team is actually trying to achieve. To create a link with an OKR so other teams understand what you are trying to achieve, you need wording that is clearer and more general, and that connects clearly to the business. This objective is an example: it is a little vague when we talk about the top tasks. What is a top task? It probably has meaning for this team, but probably not outside the team.

The same issue runs through each of the key results as well. It is a little unclear what the team is actually trying to achieve here.

This is a bit of a vague objective: "Make our delivery dates mean something." Maybe it is meant to be catchy, but it kind of misses the mark on explaining why this is important, or what issue this team is trying to solve with this OKR. The same issue flows a little into the key results, like raising milestones hit within a week of commitment from X to Y. Sometimes wording like this makes sense to the team, but from an outsider's perspective it is a bit tricky to navigate what they are actually trying to achieve.

The takeaway is that it is easy to use smart phrasing or fun wording in the key results, but you get bigger impact and more clarity if you keep them very straightforward. Beyond that, of course, these are clear on what they look like: quite outcome-based and focused, and definitely all of the key results are measurable.

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.

The major challenge with sales OKRs is that they are often a little too generic, all about selling more. This might be an example of that: improving metrics in the sales funnel without any specific strategy. You can see a hint of strategy in key result two, cutting losses to no-decision, which would imply being more persistent on deals that are not moving. But that key result is also too easy to optimise the wrong way. I am not sure it will drive the right behaviour. Instead of pushing the right activity, the team can just mark losses for other reasons to hit the goal. Having fewer of one closed-lost reason is not a real business outcome, and the risk of driving the wrong behaviour here is high.

Key result three is just too complex, too internal. It may mean a lot inside the team, but from an outsider's perspective it is very hard to understand what they are trying to achieve. Overall there is clear measurability and a clear idea of driving an outcome that is selling more, but it carries a couple of quite large issues.