Every business has goals. Sometimes those are internal ones, like building a great culture. Other times they’re external goals such as delivering a fantastic experience for your customers. But achieving those goals takes more than putting your intentions out into the universe. You need a plan.

You need to understand how to write OKRs.

What are OKRs? They’re objectives (where you’re going) and key results (how we track our progress getting there) that make your goals actionable and measurable. They’re clear, transparent, and collaborative.

TLDR:

• OKRs pair an ambitious objective with 3-5 measurable key results that track progress toward it.
• Good OKRs are measurable, challenging, clear, and reviewed consistently. Hitting 70% of a stretch goal counts as a win.
• Write objectives first, then build key results around them; add initiatives to define how your team will act on each OKR.
• OKRs work best when the whole team has input. Ownership is shared, not handed down from leadership.
• Spinach AI is an AI meeting assistant that captures decisions, action items, and follow-ups from your OKR check-ins in real time, keeping progress visible to the whole team. 

How is an OKR structured?

As far as goal-setting frameworks go, OKRs are one of the most straightforward tools for almost every type of business.

Writing an OKR that works starts with an objective statement that’s actionable, time-bound, and ambitious. For example:

• Deliver a customer service experience that earns a CSAT score above 90
• Be a top 10 app in the App Store by the end of the year
• Create an inclusive culture that’s welcoming for everyone

From there, use key results to measure your progress as you work toward the objective.

Writing great key results means keeping them clear, quantifiable, and actionable. There’s no concrete rule for how many key results an objective needs, but 3 to 5 is a good rule of thumb to use. Here’s an example of 3 key results for the last objective listed above:

• Create an inclusive culture that’s welcoming for everyone
  • Achieve an eNPS (employee net promoter score) of 30 by the end of Q2
  • Get 15 internal referrals for posted positions
  • Reduce turnover by 10% by the end of Q2

Adding more key results doesn’t mean you’re tracking better. Less is more with key results. 3 to 5 will keep your team focused and moving forward together.

What makes a good OKR?

Now that you know how OKRs are structured, let’s go into the details of what separates good OKRs from bad ones. In our example culture OKR, you might have noticed that each key result is measurable, clear and time-bound.

These are a few key characteristics that make up good OKRs:

Measurable

The core of a good OKR is that it’s measurable. If your OKRs aren’t clearly measurable, it’s going to be difficult to know if you’ve been successful. And if you don’t know if you’ve been successful, how will you know if your OKRs were effective? Or where to go next?

You need to track your progress towards the objective. Whether that’s a score like eNPS, the count of support tickets for a product, or the number of customer interviews done, make sure there’s a quantifiable way to measure success.

Challenging

Writing good OKRs is not the time or place for lowered expectations. OKRs should be a challenge. No risk, no reward. 

For many teams, writing OKRs that work involves stretch goals. These are goals that are slightly beyond what you and your team think you’re capable of accomplishing. Don’t worry about hitting that 100% mark, though. We’ll talk about what success looks like for OKRs later in the post.

Clear

This isn’t the time to get fancy. Every OKR you set needs to be easily understood by your team. OKRs need to be clear, concise, and digestible. The objective needs to be straightforward, and the key results should show what you’re tracking and how you’re tracking it without the need for an explanation.

Consistently reviewed

If no one remembers your OKRs, it’s going to be pretty difficult to hit them.

The most critical part of writing OKRs isn’t how you write them. It’s how you use them. You should revisit OKRs often so they stay preeminent and your team knows how they’re progressing. Our recommendation: make reviewing OKRs part of weekly stand-up meetings or 1:1s. 

Pro tip: Spinach AI is an AI meeting assistant that keeps OKR progress at the top of your recurring meeting agendas, so reviews happen in the flow of work, not as a separate task.

How to write OKRs: A step-by-step guide

One of the key reasons we love OKRs is that they’re not written in a boardroom. Everyone has input into what the objectives should be, and everyone has ownership of success. 

Here are 8 steps to help set and achieve OKRs that work at a company, team and individual level.

1. Understand your company goals 

Writing effective OKRs starts with understanding your organizational goals. Once you’re clear on the vision, you can break down those higher-level goals into actionable team OKRs to drive your business forward.

Remember that OKRs shouldn’t be set in isolation. Everything should ladder up into each other.

Starting with well-defined goals informs your team OKRs, which lead to individual OKRs. This will help everyone stay aligned and moving in the same direction.

2. Choose the right tools

Like any project, having the right tool for the job is critical. From brainstorming sessions on goals and objectives to tracking your progress, excellent tools are available to help support and stay aligned on your OKRs, especially when you’re working in a remote or hybrid workplace.

• Miro: We love whiteboards for brainstorming, but if you’re a remote team or working from home, Miro is the next best thing (although there are usually muffins when you brainstorm in person). 

• Spinach AI’s Goal Examples: Looking for a bit of inspiration for setting your goals and OKRs? We’ve got you covered with over 360 free examples in our Goal Examples collection.

• Google Sheets- When you want to track the nitty gritty details of your goals, Google Sheets is a simple but effective tool to do so. It’s why so many people use it. Plus, it allows you to collaborate with your team.

• Spinach AI: Spinach is an AI meeting assistant that joins your calls, captures decisions, action items, and follow-ups in real time, and routes them into the tools your team already uses (from Slack and Notion to Jira and HubSpot). For OKR tracking, that means progress discussed in weekly standups, 1:1s, or team reviews gets captured and surfaced automatically. See how Spinach AI handles goal tracking.

3. Involve your whole team

OKRs are bi-directional, not top-down. Each team member should have input into OKRs, leading to a shared sense of ownership and accountability on your team.

So once you’ve gotten clear on your company goals, and put in place the right tools, call a team meeting to start brainstorming and finessing your OKRs for the quarter. Then, don’t forget to schedule individual check-ins with team members to discuss how their individual OKRs fit into the bigger picture.

Then, as the quarter goes on, don’t forget to continuously keep the team in the loop on progress, so everyone can see the impact of their work and that of their peers.

4. Write an OKR objective statement

Your objectives are the destination you’re heading toward, so they should be set before your key results and initiatives. Sometimes it can be tempting to start with results, but it’s the objective that guides the key results. Your objective should consist of one sentence, along with a short description.

Your objectives need to be ambitious, so it’s normal to feel a bit uncomfortable when setting them. If not, take a step back and review your targets. You may be setting the bar too low.

5. Develop key results

Key results are how progress is measured towards the objective. If the objective is the destination, then your key results are the map to getting there.

It’s with key results where you get to define how you’re going to measure your progress. Remember, they should be relevant to your objective and easy to measure with a number.

6. Plan your initiatives

Now, put all of this together with one more ingredient: initiatives. Initiatives are how you’re going to put the OKRs into action. Here are two examples of what the full combination of objective, key result, and initiative could look like:

7. Track them consistently

Too many organizations start with the best of intentions with their OKRs. They do the work of brainstorming across their teams. They put their OKRs into great-looking templates. Then, sadly, they put them on a shared drive and forget about them. 

OKRs work when you track and review them. Find ways to make OKR reviews part of your process. That could be reviewing individual OKRs at 1:1s, team OKRs at weekly team meetings, or organizational OKRs during quarterly town hall meetings. 

8. Celebrate 70%

When we talked about what makes a good OKR, we discussed the need to make it challenging.

The best OKRs are just out of reach. They’re meant to inspire your team, but not demotivate them by being completely unachievable. There’s a fine line between the two. That’s why it’s important to celebrate your successes, even if you don’t hit 100% of the key results. 

What to do now

Next, here are some things you can do now that you've read this article:

1. Our Goal & OKR examples are split by role, so you can find the perfect one for your team.
2. Check out Spinach to see how it can help you run a high performing org.
3. If you found this article helpful, please share it with others on Linkedin or X (Twitter)