Why does OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) matter?
It is a way to keep a growing team pointed at the same priorities without the founder personally approving every decision. Below a certain size, a founder can just tell everyone what matters this week; past it, that stops scaling, and teams either drift toward whatever is locally urgent or wait for direction that is now a bottleneck. OKRs solve this by making the priority and its definition of success explicit and shared, so a team can decide for itself whether a given piece of work moves a key result. The alternative to OKRs is not no framework, it is an unstated and inconsistently understood one.
What does OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) look like in practice?
Suppose a company sets the objective "make onboarding self-serve" with key results including a target reduction in the number of onboarding calls per new customer and a target share of new customers who reach first value without any human help, both measured over the quarter. A team can now decide on its own whether a proposed feature (say, an in-app setup wizard) plausibly moves either key result, without needing the founder to weigh in on that specific feature.
What are the common mistakes with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)?
- Writing key results that are tasks completed rather than outcomes achieved, "ship the onboarding wizard" is not a key result, a reduction in support calls caused by it is.
- Setting so many objectives that none of them functions as a real priority.
- Sandbagging targets to guarantee they are hit, which defeats the purpose of using them to drive real change.
- Setting OKRs each quarter and never revisiting them until the next cycle, so they stop influencing day-to-day decisions.
Where the term comes from
The system is Andy Grove's, developed at Intel on top of Peter Drucker's management by objectives from the 1950s. What made it Grove's own was overturning the top-down version: execution and measured results outrank hierarchy. John Doerr introduced the philosophy to Google's founders in 1999, which is how a 1970s semiconductor management practice became the default goal format of the software industry.
What Matters (John Doerr), "The origin story" ↗Related concepts
- North Star MetricThe one metric that best captures the value your product delivers to customers, chosen so that moving it reliably means the business is getting healthier.
- Product Roadmap vs. BacklogA roadmap communicates the sequenced themes and outcomes you intend to pursue and why; a backlog is the working inventory of every discrete piece of work that could feed into it, prioritized but not promised.
- First Ten HiresThe small set of employees hired before the company has real process, whose individual judgment substitutes for the systems a larger company would use to catch their mistakes.