Most small-team OKRs die in a spreadsheet. Buried in tabs, forgotten by mid-quarter, reviewed once a year if you’re lucky.
They didn’t fail because OKRs don’t work. They failed because they weren’t designed to live.
OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — are supposed to focus effort, align teams, and drive outcomes. In big firms, they often become performance theatre. In startups, they die of overkill.
Here’s how to make OKRs actually work when your whole team fits in a Zoom room.
Start with fewer objectives. One or two per team. Total. Not per person. You’re not Google. You don’t need OKRs for HR, Legal, and Design Ops. You need the team moving in the same direction, not managing a dashboard.
Write the objective like a bet. “We believe X will move the needle by doing Y.” That’s the point. Not vague aspirations like “improve customer experience” but real bets like “launch onboarding that halves time-to-value.”
Now the key results. These aren’t tasks. They’re outcomes you can measure. Revenue. Churn. Conversion rates. They either happened or they didn’t. Don’t confuse outputs for results.
Then track them where work happens. Not in a separate OKR doc nobody opens. Add them to your weekly stand-up. Use them to frame sprint planning. If the OKR doesn’t affect how you prioritise, it’s dead already.
And make it visual. No more bloated Excel files. Put the OKRs in Notion, or even just a pinned Slack message. Green for progress. Red for stuck. Keep it obvious. Keep it seen.
Review them often — and brutally. If a key result’s flatlined for three weeks, kill or rewrite it. Don’t wait for quarter’s end. Adapt. That’s the point.
OKRs aren’t sacred. They’re scaffolding. When they stop helping, tear them down.
But used well, they do one thing better than any other system: they keep small teams honest about what actually matters. That’s not a spreadsheet task. That’s leadership.
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