How to Write OKRs – All You Need to Know About Objectives and Key Results

OKR: Definition and OKR Examples

Objectives and Key Results, as mentioned above, is a methodology and framework for goal setting and critical thinking. It is designed to help businesses, teams, and individuals set and align overarching Objectives and connect them to a number of measurable Key Results. The former focuses your organization’s efforts towards a single common goal, and the latter help to measure progress. 

Basic OKR example: 

• OKR objective:
  • Implement the weekly newsletter
• OKR key results:
  • Increase CTR to 5%
  • Grow subscriber base 20%
  • Define the content strategy, topic structure, and key messages for the next quarter

You will find more OKR examples at the end of this article.

Benefits of OKR methodology

• Visibility
  Informs you what’s happening in your business or team right now, including current activities and progress. 

• Focus
  With properly written OKRs, all employees and stakeholders know what needs to be accomplished to reach the company’s major goals.

• Inspiration and engagement
  Clear priorities help raise productivity, with everyone more engaged and able to see that their work really matters.

• Awareness
  Objectives and Key Results framework allows you to assess your progress and make more informed, data-driven decisions.

• Alignment
  Helps you stay organized and drive the company forward by focusing on high-level goals and basing initiatives on them.

How to Write OKRs

One of the best things about the OKR framework is that it’s a low-effort, high-reward methodology. Here’s how easy it is to write Objectives and Key Results:

1. Set a major Objective
   Quite self-explanatory, an Objective should be something you want your business to achieve in a given time period. They should be ambitious and actionable, but also time-bound and qualitative.
   
   
2. Write OKR Key Results
   Define about 4 Key Results connected to the Objective or more. They should zoom facilitate your business goals, cover the things you need to accomplish to reach the Objective. Key Results are usually based on revenue, performance, growth, or engagement. Find the list of good OKR examples at the end of this article. 
   
   
3. Implement your OKRs
   It’s not enough to just write OKRs, set them in stone, and merrily roll along. You have to incorporate the written Objectives and Key Results into your activities and action plans and keep repeating this on a weekly basis.
   
   
4. Keep your OKRs updated
   Review your OKRs weekly or at least monthly. This shall help you keep them up-to-date and relevant, and provide feedback to your team on their progress.

More on Writing OKRs

Simple, right? Well, OKR is one of those “easy to learn, hard to master” things. If you’re willing to dig deeper into this, writing Objectives and Key Results has its nuances. For one, you can evaluate your Objectives by answering a number of simple questions. If you can’t answer them for sure, or if your answers are negative, it might be worthwhile to rethink your Objectives. 

• Does the Objective support your business goals?

• Do you get ideas on how to reach the Objective just from its name?

• Will this Objective help push your business forward? 

• Is the Objective bound to a specific time period?

Also, always make sure you keep your OKRs SMART:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Relevant

• Time-bound

What’s most important, when writing OKRs, remember a simple formula: Objectives are intents, goals, while Key Results represent measurable and time-bound milestones for these intents and goals, as you’ll see in the numerous OKR examples at the end of this piece. 

Furthermore, try to avoid some common OKR mistakes to write efficient Objectives and Key Results, that can lead to the necessary outcomes.

How to Choose OKR Tool to Write and Implement OKRs

The best OKR tool can be surprisingly tricky to find. We could dive into describing all the possible issues that can ruin an otherwise great solution, but this would make a good topic for another article. Instead, let’s go over a list of requirements to choose the best OKR tool: 

1. It should NOT be solely OKR-focused
   This might come across as counterintuitive. But if you think about it, writing OKRs is but a step in the big, business-management, strategy-building, goal-setting chain. Your OKR tool should reflect that.
   
   It must allow you to write Objectives and Key Results, obviously; but it also should let you monitor them, facilitate team collaboration, offer convenient workload tracking and reports, etc. You don’t want a dozen highly specialized solutions, but a single, one-size-fits-all OKR tool.
   
   
2. It should be comprehensible and offer simple onboarding
   Despite how easy it is to write OKRs, they might not seem that intuitive to employees. This makes it a top priority for OKR software developers to create a proactive, streamlined onboarding process. It should introduce you to OKRs, help you get started, and avoid common mistakes.
   
   
3. It should promote team communication and collaboration
   It’s hard to overstate the importance of having a convenient and easy way to communicate, share ideas, and work as a team on your OKRs. Consequently, your OKR tool should be designed with this feature in mind.

OKR Software KeepSolid Goals

All in all, we suggest KeepSolid Goals as the best OKR management tool. Not only does it meet the requirements we’ve described, but it also offers a bunch of extra features as the icing on the cake. For example, it’s a web-based application, meaning it will work on any internet-capable device. 

Also, it provides automatic reports, so you always know the current state of your project, and can make necessary adjustments if necessary.

Best OKR examples

Here are a few more examples of Objectives and Key Results from different business departments that will hopefully inspire you and spur your imagination. However, we would advise against blindly copying these examples. Every company is unique, and so you should find OKRs that are relevant for your particular case.