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5 Mistakes Organizations Make When Writing OKRs

January 7, 2025
Michiko Quinones

From startups to enterprise companies like Netflix and Microsoft, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a proven framework for setting and achieving outcomes. When done well, OKRs provide clear direction for teams to achieve tangible results. However, when mismanaged, OKRs can confuse teams and undermine their purpose of connecting work with business strategy

This article breaks down what OKRs are and explores the most common missteps companies make when creating them. Whether you’re fine-tuning your process or starting from scratch, you’ll find actionable strategies to set your teams up for success.

What Are OKRs?

To successfully create your OKRs, it’s important to understand what they are. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, a goal-setting framework designed to help teams focus on outcomes.

An Objective is the reason behind a team’s work and represents the result you want to achieve. It should be clear and motivational and answer the question, “Why are we doing this?” For example, a common goal organizations set at the beginning of the new year is to “Decrease the hold times on the service desk.”  This, however, is not an Objective as we define it. 

The true Objective could be “Have customers who love our customer service.” Decreasing hold times might be one way to accomplish the desired outcome. Sending customers cookies every month might be another. The key is to focus on the desired impact—the “why”—rather than just the tasks or metrics.

Key Results are measurable indicators that signal you are correctly moving toward your Objective. They always have a verb (i.e. increase, decrease) and specify a baseline and target value. They should be easy for you to measure and track consistently, such as weekly or monthly. A Key Result for the Objective we laid out above might be “Increase Net Promoter Score from 4 to 10.” 

Where Companies Miss The Mark with OKRs

Here are some common missteps businesses make with writing their OKRs and how you can steer clear of them. 

1. Setting Too Many OKRs

A typical mistake is overloading teams with too many OKRS. It’s tempting to cover every possible priority, but when you do, your focus gets lost in translation and teams lose sight of the overarching goal. 

How to avoid:

Limit Objectives to no more than 5 per team and Key Results to no more than 3 per Objective.  

2. Writing Objectives That Are Too Long

In an effort to cover all their bases, organizations also end up writing overly long Objectives that are hard to understand. To make things more confusing, people also feel the need to use corporate jargon. While this stems from good intentions, it often backfires by creating complexity that overwhelms teams and lacks focus.

How to avoid:

An Objective should be concise, motivational, and use simple language. Gitlab does a great job writing Objectives. One of their Objectives states “Mature the Platform to be the leading DevSecOps platform.” It lays out the desired outcome (mature the platform) and explains the “why” behind their work (to be the leading DevSecOps platform).

3. Failing to Communicate Repeatedly

This is a classic case of “set it and forget it.” Organizations announce their OKRs for the year, but Q1 quickly sneaks up on everyone, reminding them to revisit their goals. It's not enough to set an OKR once and move on—repetition is key to reinforcing its importance. 

When communication fades, focus and alignment start to slip. Clear, consistent messaging keeps everyone on the same page, establishing a shared sense of purpose and direction. It also fuels motivation, reminding teams why the goal matters and how their contributions connect to the bigger picture.

How to avoid:

It’s easy for OKRs to get lost in the shuffle of daily tasks, so make them a visible part of your workflow. Use dashboards, team meetings, reporting, posters, and leadership updates to reiterate objectives and keep them top-of-mind. 

You should also measure your key results at least monthly and share that progress with your teams. This ensures employees understand not only what they're working toward but also why it matters, aligning everyone with the broader business goals.

4. Nesting OKRs

Organizations often fall into the trap of creating parent and child OKRs, thinking it will drive alignment by tightly cascading goals through every level. However, this approach risks over-complicating processes, creates rigid dependencies, and can stifle teams' autonomy to innovate and respond quickly. It also leads to miscommunication and frustration as teams struggle to align efforts with overly specific mandates. 

How to avoid:

Organizations should focus on setting clear, high-level company OKRs that act as guiding stars.  If the business is small, there might not even be a need for smaller teams to have OKRs. The company OKRs could be sufficient to get to the outcome you need. 

For larger organizations, it makes sense for mid-level leaders to align their work with the company's top-level Objectives. However, people often get stuck thinking that the words and the key results have to align exactly. 

Let’s take the GitLab example again. The company's Objective is to “Mature the platform to become the leading DevSecOps platform.”  This doesn't mean that every single middle manager has to start their Objective with the exact words “Mature the platform.”  

As an organizational leader, your role is to understand the company mission and translate that into clear objectives for your team. You also need to guide your team toward achieving outcomes with measurable impact, which in turn supports higher-level Objectives. This means using metrics and language tailored to your team’s level, which may look different than top-level OKRs.

5. Setting Overly Ambitious OKRs

There’s nothing wrong with shooting for the stars, but if OKRs are entirely out of reach, they can demotivate teams and erode trust in the process. Teams may feel overwhelmed or believe their efforts will never measure up.

How to avoid:

Set OKRs that are challenging yet achievable. OKRs should push your teams but not so much that they feel impossible. Discuss feasibility when drafting OKRs with your teams, regularly review progress, and adjust as needed.

OKR vs. KPI

Another concept that tends to confuse people is OKRs vs. Key Performance Indicators. OKRs focus on setting clarity and measurement to create something new. Key Performance Indicators, by comparison, measure whether your existing system is operating as expected. To make things more confusing, a Key Result can evolve into a KPI once you establish a system. 

Let’s say your Objective is for your kids to have a healthy snack when they get home from school, and you decide to make nutritious bread for them. While developing the new recipe, you experiment with oven temperature. A Key Result might be adjusting from an unidentified oven temperature to the correct one, going from zero known temperature (baseline) to one known temperature (target). 

Once you’ve finalized the new recipe and established the correct oven temperature, that measurement evolves into a KPI. The oven temperature–now a KPI–ensures that you are on the right track to making the recipe correctly and that your system is running as intended.

Master Implementing OKRs in Your Organization

Writing effective OKRs is both an art and a science. They take practice to master, but over time, you will get to where you can write your OKRs in under an hour

Whether you are refining your OKRs or writing them from the ground up, sign up for our webinar. You’ll learn the structure of an OKR, how to write one, and how you can use Atlassian tools like Jira and Jira Align to track and organize OKRs throughout your planning cycle. 

When it comes to connecting your business initiatives to work execution, Praecipio is here to help. Contact our team to learn how we can guide you through the goal-setting process. 

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