3 Reasons Your OKRs Might Be Failing You

If you’re staring down 2022 planning right now, it’s super possible that you’re asking yourself “what exactly happened to our 2021 OKRs?” Here’s what might be going on.

The story is familiar for a lot of growing companies and teams: Last December (or maybe it was more like mid-January), you set intentional, thoughtful OKRs with your team for the year ahead. You communicated them to the whole team and people were aligned, excited, and fired up to achieve those goals. But now it’s October, and your OKRs have lost their hold on your team. You haven’t discussed a couple of these OKRs since Q2. You haven’t figured out how to measure one of them all year. And your teams aren’t using them to make decisions or drive the business forward.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are meant to be a simple framework for setting goals that focuses your teams on the most important work in the business, and helps align each team’s work under the company’s key priorities. But often, they feel anything but simple and organizations push them down the priority list as the year goes on.

Is it because they don’t work for small teams? Is it because they aren’t good for startups? Can they not be used by software engineers? Can they only work in more hierarchical organizations?

Nope. More than likely, your OKRs have failed you this year for one of three reasons:

1. There are too many of them.
2. They’re too complicated.
3. They’re too quiet.

Let’s get into it.

Reason #1: You Have Too Many OKRs.

This is the most likely culprit of OKR failure in an organization. OKRs are so enticing. These concise little nuggets of audacity and ambition can align your team in a single word or phrase. And when you’re setting them, you don’t want to leave one behind. At the moment of goal-setting, everything feels important, and like you can’t deprioritize one without making your teams feel like an important thing just… isn’t important.

But OKRs should cascade in an organization: the company sets a few objectives, which each have 1–3 key results. Each of those company-level key results become team objectives, which then get their own key results. Just one extra Objective at the company level can give rise to dozens of sub-goals, activities, and divided attention on teams. A small number of objectives at the top is essential to keeping OKRs manageable and reportable.

Remember the Phone Number Rule — our working memories can remember a sequence of no more than seven things. It’s why US phone numbers are (sort of) seven digits in length. Your top-most level OKRs should have something like three objectives with 1–3 key results under each, and no more than seven key results total. Otherwise, your teams won’t remember them and they’ll be more likely to fall away.

If you’re at an impasse about whether to add an OKR, consider this question as a goal-planning exercise: given the number of people on our team, is there enough time to make progress toward all of these goals, every week, given our current commitments? If the answer is no, you may be disappointed by the progress and more likely to lose sight of those well-intentioned OKRs.

Be relentless in reduction now, and you can always add in more goals later if you fly through the first set before the end of Q1.

Reason #2: Your OKRs are Too Complicated

How our organic social media efforts are impacting our revenue. Which product features are driving adoption. What actions are driving customer satisfaction. These are mission-critical goals for many companies that are notoriously tough to measure.

So what happens when we want to prioritize goals that we know are important, but that we don’t yet know how to measure?

We use three magic words: “Establish and improve.” They feel pretty smart. Don’t have a way to measure that thing yet? We’ll establish one. Then we’ll improve it! What could go wrong?

In the heady moments of OKR setting, we agree to more surveys, more software, cleaner marketing attribution, and more time spent on analysis. We build trackers and indexes, assuring ourselves that we “just have to enter these 38 data points (pretty simple, honestly), daily.”

But we know that getting customers and running the business trumps analytics projects most of the time. So our conversations about these complicated, hard-to-measure OKRs become more about the measure, and less about the work.

Resist the magnetic pull of “establish and improve.” Instead, for each and every OKR, ask this:

1. Do we agree on how we measure this?
2. Do we measure it today?
3. Can we report on it in less than 10 minutes of work per week?

If you can’t answer YES to at least two out of three questions, it’s not a great OKR. And if the work is mission critical, but you don’t have a metric for it, make a decision to assign an owner who will give it a 1–10 rating every week on the basis of what we do measure, and then accept that as the measurement method.

Reason #3: Your OKRs are Too Quiet

In your external marketing strategy, you likely think about repetition and the importance of surfacing your brand and message to your audience at least seven times. You would never stop at one or two repetitions of your message in your marketing, and you shouldn’t when you are internally marketing your OKRs to your teams, either.

Typically, OKRs are all the rage in January. We come in hot with workshops and All Hands and we get everyone excited. We start the reporting and see progress right away. But as the months go on, our OKRs sometimes feel additional to the work, rather than central to the business.

Your teams might even say: “we’re spending so much time working on the OKR reporting that we don’t have time to do the actual work!” (see also: Reason #2). And when some OKRs aren’t going well, it might feel overly negative or punitive to the teams to keep telling everyone that we are, yes, still behind on that OKR. We tend to gravitate toward fixing what’s wrong, and not on celebrating what’s working. This is where OKRs (especially really tough ones) can fall off the radar, since it’s easier to not talk about it at all than to talk about the negative.

At the company level, try for 7 repetitions per company level OKR, per quarter. Here’s a cadence that can work well for many sizes of teams:

• 1 Quarterly Update: Beginning of quarter: report on last quarter’s OKRs and talk about any changes to this quarter’s OKRs.
• 4 Weekly Highlights: Each week of the quarter, focus on an update on one OKR, either at an All Hands meeting, in a company email newsletter, or in a Slack update (or better yet, pick two of these and do both). If you have 3 top level OKRs, you’ll hit each of them four times.
• 2 Intermittent Celebrations: We get big wins from unexpected celebrations. Make it a habit to call out a team for awesome work on an OKR in Slack. Write someone a thank you note for their great effort that made an impact. Buy pizza for the crew for hitting a milestone along the way. And better yet, empower
• Bonus: Review OKRs with every single new hire.

When our OKRs are reduced to the most important ones, measurement is crystal clear, and results are repeated (and celebrated!) relentlessly, our OKRs become the common language spoken among teams to define success.