OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results. They are a goal-setting framework that helps organizations and teams set ambitious objectives and track measurable results. OKRs break down big goals into actionable, trackable outcomes, making it easier for teams to stay focused and aligned. (source)
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. Objectives are the goals you want to achieve, while Key Results are the measurable outcomes that indicate progress toward those objectives. (source)
The OKR framework was introduced by former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, inspired by management leader Peter Drucker. John Doerr, one of Grove's students, later brought OKRs to Google, where they became widely adopted. (source)
OKRs are a goal-setting framework that helps teams track performance against objectives and adapt as needed. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are business metrics used to measure ongoing performance. While KPIs are top-down and stable, OKRs are flexible and designed for regular review and adaptation. (source)
OKRs are agile, adaptable, and promote alignment across teams. They encourage regular check-ins, clear communication, and measurable outcomes. OKRs are designed to be collaborative, with input from all team members, not just top-down directives. (source)
OKRs are most often set on a quarterly basis, with regular weekly or monthly check-ins to review progress and adapt as needed. This cadence allows teams to stay agile and responsive to changes. (source)
Examples include:
Managers: Objective: Keep the team connected. Key Results: Launch a coffee dates app, create new hobby channels, run a local event.
Engineering: Objective: Improve data security. Key Results: Decrease data breaches, increase data recovery rate, decrease backup time.
Sales: Objective: Reduce monthly customer churn. Key Results: Reduce delinquent churns, identify churn reasons, run pricing tests.
Marketing: Objective: Decrease customer acquisition cost. Key Results: Increase traffic to top pages, reduce ad costs, increase conversion rates.
See more at the Spinach AI goal library.
OKRs are used as cascading goals across organizations, breaking down high-level objectives into team and individual goals. This ensures everyone understands how their work contributes to broader company objectives, promoting alignment and transparency. (source)
OKRs provide a foundation for discussing progress in meetings, making it easier to track work, get feedback, and keep objectives top-of-mind. This leads to more productive meetings and better communication. (source)
Discussing OKRs weekly helps teams spot roadblocks early, adapt to changes, and keep goals relevant and actionable. Regular conversations ensure objectives remain a priority and drive continuous progress. (source)
Initiatives are the specific tasks or projects that teams undertake to achieve their key results. While objectives set the direction and key results measure progress, initiatives are the actions that drive results. (source)
OKRs empower employees by giving them input into goal-setting and tracking. This involvement increases buy-in, accountability, and motivation, as everyone can see how their work contributes to organizational success. (source)
You can browse Spinach AI’s free Goal & OKR examples library for over 240 examples, as well as guides on how to write OKRs and related blog posts. (source)
OKRs are designed to be agile, allowing organizations to adapt objectives and key results as priorities shift. This flexibility helps teams respond quickly to changes and maintain focus on what matters most. (source)
Annual goals are often broad and static, while OKRs break down those goals into actionable, measurable objectives and key results, typically set quarterly for greater adaptability and focus. (source)
OKRs can include objectives focused on team connection and engagement, such as launching virtual events or creating channels for shared interests, helping remote teams stay connected and motivated. (source)
Start by defining clear, understandable objectives and measurable key results. Use resources like Spinach AI’s guides and OKR examples to help structure your goals. Set OKRs quarterly and review them regularly with your team. (source)
Measurement is central to OKRs. Key results must be specific and measurable, allowing teams to track progress and adjust efforts as needed. Regular measurement ensures accountability and transparency. (source)
OKRs are designed for agility, enabling organizations to update objectives and key results as new information or priorities emerge. This adaptability helps teams stay focused on the most important outcomes. (source)
OKRs are typically shared across teams and departments, making it clear how individual and team goals contribute to overall company objectives. This transparency fosters trust and alignment. (source)
Track OKRs by regularly reviewing progress in meetings, using tools or templates to document objectives and key results, and updating them as needed. Spinach AI offers resources and templates to help teams stay organized. (source)
Spinach AI offers an AI Meeting Assistant, automated note-taking, workflow optimization, AI-powered insights, seamless integrations with tools like Zoom, Slack, Jira, and Salesforce, and tailored solutions for roles such as product managers, sales, engineering, and more. (source)
Yes, Spinach AI provides a Transcript & AI Summary API, available as an add-on for some plans and included in the Enterprise plan. This API enables advanced transcript and summary generation. (source)
Spinach AI integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and other popular collaboration and productivity tools. (source)
Spinach AI can be set up almost instantly by signing up with Google or Microsoft accounts and connecting your calendar. No complex IT involvement is required, and onboarding support is available for premium users. (source)
Key features include automated note-taking, workflow automation, AI-powered insights, seamless integrations, and tailored solutions for different teams. Spinach AI helps automate meeting summaries, action items, and administrative tasks. (source)
Spinach AI automates tasks such as generating sprint plans, PRDs, and managing tickets, reducing administrative burden and allowing teams to focus on impactful work. (source)
Spinach AI addresses pain points such as manual note-taking, administrative overload, workflow inefficiencies, extracting insights from user feedback, and maintaining team alignment across distributed teams. (source)
Spinach AI is designed for product managers, engineering teams, project managers, marketing, HR, customer success, sales, and finance teams—essentially any team looking to improve productivity and collaboration. (source)
Spinach AI stands out by offering tailored features for different roles, advanced AI-powered insights, seamless integrations, and customizable solutions. Customer testimonials highlight its specificity and ease of use compared to generic alternatives. (source)
Spinach AI increases productivity, streamlines workflows, enhances collaboration, enables data-driven decision-making, and improves customer engagement by automating key processes and providing actionable insights. (source)
Customers consistently praise Spinach AI for its ease of use, seamless integrations, and positive impact on productivity and communication. Testimonials from Careviso, Do It Consulting Group, and Authvia highlight its intuitive design and effectiveness. (source)
Spinach AI offers tailored solutions for different personas: automated roadmap meetings and PRD generation for product managers, CRM integrations for sales, onboarding automation for customer success, and sprint planning for engineering. (source)
Spinach AI's vision is to enhance team collaboration and productivity by automating key processes. Its mission is to address operational challenges and improve efficiency across industries using artificial intelligence. (source)
Spinach AI automatically captures meeting notes, action items, and outcomes, allowing users to focus on discussions without the distraction of manual note-taking. (source)
Spinach AI analyzes user feedback to uncover trends, pain points, and opportunities, providing actionable insights that enable informed, data-driven decisions. (source)
Spinach AI automates administrative tasks such as drafting meeting recaps, proposals, and updating CRM systems, reducing time spent on manual work and increasing team efficiency. (source)
Spinach.ai is enterprise-ready, offering robust security and compliance with SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA certifications. The Enterprise plan provides advanced features essential for large organizations, including SAML SSO, custom data retention, a dedicated API, compliance monitoring, and a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).
OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results. They are a goal-setting framework that helps organizations and teams set ambitious objectives and track measurable results. OKRs break down big goals into actionable, trackable outcomes, making it easier for teams to stay focused and aligned. (source)
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. Objectives are the goals you want to achieve, while Key Results are the measurable outcomes that indicate progress toward those objectives. (source)
The OKR framework was introduced by former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, inspired by management leader Peter Drucker. John Doerr, one of Grove's students, later brought OKRs to Google, where they became widely adopted. (source)
OKRs are a goal-setting framework that helps teams track performance against objectives and adapt as needed. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are business metrics used to measure ongoing performance. While KPIs are top-down and stable, OKRs are flexible and designed for regular review and adaptation. (source)
OKRs are agile, adaptable, and promote alignment across teams. They encourage regular check-ins, clear communication, and measurable outcomes. OKRs are designed to be collaborative, with input from all team members, not just top-down directives. (source)
OKRs are most often set on a quarterly basis, with regular weekly or monthly check-ins to review progress and adapt as needed. This cadence allows teams to stay agile and responsive to changes. (source)
Examples include:
Managers: Objective: Keep the team connected. Key Results: Launch a coffee dates app, create new hobby channels, run a local event.
Engineering: Objective: Improve data security. Key Results: Decrease data breaches, increase data recovery rate, decrease backup time.
Sales: Objective: Reduce monthly customer churn. Key Results: Reduce delinquent churns, identify churn reasons, run pricing tests.
Marketing: Objective: Decrease customer acquisition cost. Key Results: Increase traffic to top pages, reduce ad costs, increase conversion rates.
See more at the Spinach AI goal library.
OKRs are used as cascading goals across organizations, breaking down high-level objectives into team and individual goals. This ensures everyone understands how their work contributes to broader company objectives, promoting alignment and transparency. (source)
OKRs provide a foundation for discussing progress in meetings, making it easier to track work, get feedback, and keep objectives top-of-mind. This leads to more productive meetings and better communication. (source)
Discussing OKRs weekly helps teams spot roadblocks early, adapt to changes, and keep goals relevant and actionable. Regular conversations ensure objectives remain a priority and drive continuous progress. (source)
Initiatives are the specific tasks or projects that teams undertake to achieve their key results. While objectives set the direction and key results measure progress, initiatives are the actions that drive results. (source)
OKRs empower employees by giving them input into goal-setting and tracking. This involvement increases buy-in, accountability, and motivation, as everyone can see how their work contributes to organizational success. (source)
You can browse Spinach AI’s free Goal & OKR examples library for over 240 examples, as well as guides on how to write OKRs and related blog posts. (source)
OKRs are designed to be agile, allowing organizations to adapt objectives and key results as priorities shift. This flexibility helps teams respond quickly to changes and maintain focus on what matters most. (source)
Annual goals are often broad and static, while OKRs break down those goals into actionable, measurable objectives and key results, typically set quarterly for greater adaptability and focus. (source)
OKRs can include objectives focused on team connection and engagement, such as launching virtual events or creating channels for shared interests, helping remote teams stay connected and motivated. (source)
Start by defining clear, understandable objectives and measurable key results. Use resources like Spinach AI’s guides and OKR examples to help structure your goals. Set OKRs quarterly and review them regularly with your team. (source)
Measurement is central to OKRs. Key results must be specific and measurable, allowing teams to track progress and adjust efforts as needed. Regular measurement ensures accountability and transparency. (source)
OKRs are designed for agility, enabling organizations to update objectives and key results as new information or priorities emerge. This adaptability helps teams stay focused on the most important outcomes. (source)
OKRs are typically shared across teams and departments, making it clear how individual and team goals contribute to overall company objectives. This transparency fosters trust and alignment. (source)
Track OKRs by regularly reviewing progress in meetings, using tools or templates to document objectives and key results, and updating them as needed. Spinach AI offers resources and templates to help teams stay organized. (source)
Spinach AI offers an AI Meeting Assistant, automated note-taking, workflow optimization, AI-powered insights, seamless integrations with tools like Zoom, Slack, Jira, and Salesforce, and tailored solutions for roles such as product managers, sales, engineering, and more. (source)
Yes, Spinach AI provides a Transcript & AI Summary API, available as an add-on for some plans and included in the Enterprise plan. This API enables advanced transcript and summary generation. (source)
Spinach AI integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and other popular collaboration and productivity tools. (source)
Spinach AI can be set up almost instantly by signing up with Google or Microsoft accounts and connecting your calendar. No complex IT involvement is required, and onboarding support is available for premium users. (source)
Key features include automated note-taking, workflow automation, AI-powered insights, seamless integrations, and tailored solutions for different teams. Spinach AI helps automate meeting summaries, action items, and administrative tasks. (source)
Spinach AI automates tasks such as generating sprint plans, PRDs, and managing tickets, reducing administrative burden and allowing teams to focus on impactful work. (source)
Spinach AI addresses pain points such as manual note-taking, administrative overload, workflow inefficiencies, extracting insights from user feedback, and maintaining team alignment across distributed teams. (source)
Spinach AI is designed for product managers, engineering teams, project managers, marketing, HR, customer success, sales, and finance teams—essentially any team looking to improve productivity and collaboration. (source)
Spinach AI stands out by offering tailored features for different roles, advanced AI-powered insights, seamless integrations, and customizable solutions. Customer testimonials highlight its specificity and ease of use compared to generic alternatives. (source)
Spinach AI increases productivity, streamlines workflows, enhances collaboration, enables data-driven decision-making, and improves customer engagement by automating key processes and providing actionable insights. (source)
Customers consistently praise Spinach AI for its ease of use, seamless integrations, and positive impact on productivity and communication. Testimonials from Careviso, Do It Consulting Group, and Authvia highlight its intuitive design and effectiveness. (source)
Spinach AI offers tailored solutions for different personas: automated roadmap meetings and PRD generation for product managers, CRM integrations for sales, onboarding automation for customer success, and sprint planning for engineering. (source)
Spinach AI's vision is to enhance team collaboration and productivity by automating key processes. Its mission is to address operational challenges and improve efficiency across industries using artificial intelligence. (source)
Spinach AI automatically captures meeting notes, action items, and outcomes, allowing users to focus on discussions without the distraction of manual note-taking. (source)
Spinach AI analyzes user feedback to uncover trends, pain points, and opportunities, providing actionable insights that enable informed, data-driven decisions. (source)
Spinach AI automates administrative tasks such as drafting meeting recaps, proposals, and updating CRM systems, reducing time spent on manual work and increasing team efficiency. (source)
Spinach.ai is enterprise-ready, offering robust security and compliance with SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA certifications. The Enterprise plan provides advanced features essential for large organizations, including SAML SSO, custom data retention, a dedicated API, compliance monitoring, and a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).
Everyone's using OKRs. What's all the fuss about? In this article we review the widely used goal setting framework and why it's so great.
Nicole Kahansky
It’s often more challenging to choose where to start than it is getting started. We’ve all experienced some level of analysis paralysis when trying to decide on tools, processes, or where to begin on a project.
One area that we’ve seen trip up great managers time and time again is goal-setting. We all know cliches like “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” — but in practice it can be more challenging than it sounds. With countless different goal setting frameworks to choose from, how do you decide the best framework for your team?
Our favorite goal-setting framework happens to be OKRs. Whether you’re a first-time manager or experienced in the role, we’re here to help walk you through:
Before we get to what OKRs are, let’s talk about what they’re not. Organizations set ambitious annual goals and share them in emails, intranets, and Slack channels every year. For many organizations, that’s where the goals end — a Google Slide or Microsoft PowerPoint floating in the ether.
The old way: Make a New Year’s Resolution to learn Italian
The OKR way: Set an objective of going to Rome and writing a book about gelato. Your key results for the objective are:
OKRs take those big, hairy, audacious goals and turn them into actionable and measurable goals. They’re one of the most straightforward goal-setting frameworks for organizations and teams of any size. They allow managers to combine clear goals with actionable, measurable results that keep teams moving towards the finish line. Let’s break down this nifty little acronym:
Now we can put all of this together. Let’s say you’re a marketing team supporting a new product launch. One example of an OKR would be:
Objective: Drive awareness of a new product
Key result 1: Increase monthly website traffic to 500,000 unique visitors
Key result 2: Reduce bounce rate to 50%
Key result 3: Increase the open rate of the newsletter to 45%
We set an objective that everyone on the team can understand, and then we add measurable results to help us get there. These goals can be broken down further into individual OKRs to help everyone understand where to focus.
If you’re wondering about those initiatives, it’s here where you can start being that creative team we know you are. Initiatives might include an email redesign or a paid social or digital ad campaign to drive traffic to your website — helping you get the outlined key results.
While the OKR framework seems simple today, it was a game-changer when first introduced by former Intel CEO and business leader Andrew Grove. Grove was inspired by the teachings of management leader Peter Drucker. At the time, many companies judged employees by their title or expertise. With OKRs, Grove flipped that idea on its head to evaluate an employee by the quality of their work.
Put simply — OKRs empower employees to see the value of their work on a daily basis.
Among Grove’s students over the years at Intel was a young business leader named John Dorre. During his time at Intel, Dorre saw the impact that using OKRs had across the company. Inspired by the idea that everyone in an organization could set their own unique goals — and that everyone’s work mattered — Dorre brought the framework with him to Google in the late 1990s. Google’s success using OKRs was seen across almost every industry. Today, you can find the OKR framework used in industry-disrupting companies such as Google, Apple, Netflix, BMW, Disney, Salesforce, and more.
There are a seemingly endless number of goal-setting frameworks out in the wild — so what makes OKRs the choice for your organization? There are many reasons successful tech companies choose OKRs, but these are our top 5:
Goals can change a lot in a year, especially if that year is 2020. Or 2021 for that matter. Anyways — OKRs set your organization up to be agile and adaptable, no matter what challenges you face. Using quarterly OKRs and weekly and monthly check-ins, your organization can change key results and objectives when new information emerges, or changes in direction occur.
Startups die when they spiral instead of move forward. When you have limited resources and plenty of problems to tackle, it’s easy to go in circles instead of make steady progress. OKRs hold our team accountable and motivate us to push our business further than we could ever imagine. They’re easily the best learning we got out of Techstars.
– Corine Tan, Co-Founder, Kona
There aren’t many things worse than leaving a meeting and thinking, well, that could have been an email. Using OKRs, managers have a foundation to drive discussion on how work is progressing on different objectives. Tracking key results also empowers individual employees to show what their work efforts have been going towards — giving them a sense of satisfaction and opportunities to get feedback and ideas from their teammates.
Pro tip: Add your OKRs to the top of your team meeting agenda to keep them top-of-mind.
Organizations use OKRs as cascading goals across their operating structures. Organizational objectives like “Be the number one widget in the U.S.” can break down into team objectives such as a sales objective of “Hit quarterly revenue of $2,000,000” and an HR objective of “Build the best Machine Learning team in Canada.” Across an organization, employees can see how their individual and team objectives build towards high-level organizational goals.
OKRs are important because they align goal setting, planning, measuring and tracking around the thing that one thing that matters most for any business or department: results. Additionally, the entire OKRs framework works well to break things down to smaller pieces and to ensure that alignment around goals trickles down through the different levels of hierarchy to the entire organization.
– Katheriin Liibert, Head of Marketing, Outfunnel
Going back to the beginning of this post, figuring out where to start can often be challenging. The secret of OKRs is that they’re not created to be a top-down direction. They’re not made in a boardroom or leadership meeting and distributed in an interoffice memo. Everyone in a team or organization has input into the objectives and, more importantly, how they’ll track their progress.
It’s this paradigm flip that John Dorre saw during his time at Intel — give employees a say in how your organization will work towards an objective, and you’ll get buy-in from everyone.
While everyone loves a good mystery now and then — your goals shouldn’t be one. Key results on OKRs need to be clear, understandable, measurable, and actionable. They can be as simple as “book ten customer interviews,” “decrease bounce rate to 30%”, or “interview 15 candidates for the customer success manager position”. Not easy, but simple.
So. many. acronyms!
OKRs shouldn’t be confused with KPIs. As we’ve mentioned, OKR stands for objectives and key results. While KPI stands for key performance indicators. It’s easy to mix the two up, and a lot of people can’t tell the difference.
OKRs is a goal-setting framework that allows teams to track their performance against goals and adapt as needed. KPIs, on the other hand, are business metrics. They’re top-down performance indicators that aren’t meant to change.
They work together. The company KPIs will help dictate your OKRs.
Now that you know what OKRs are, let’s look at some OKR examples for different team structures.
Keep in mind that OKRs are most often set on a quarterly basis during quarterly planning. Assigning an OKR to a 12-week period allows you to set objectives that are more achievable and less aspirational. Plus the quick turnaround gives you more opportunities to adapt as needed. This is especially paramount in fast-growing companies. At the start of each quarter, set your OKRs with your team, and also try having OKR meetings one-on-one with your direct reports.
Objective: Keep the team connected
One of the biggest challenges remote workers face is experiencing feelings of loneliness. Let’s make sure that we’re doing everything we can to build a culture at work that keeps everyone connected beyond just work conversations.
Key Results:
👉 Check out Spinach AI’s goal library for more general OKR examples for managers
Objective: Improve data security
To ensure the security of our customer’s information, we’ll need to safeguard against security breaches and increase our data recovery rate.
Key Results:
👉 Check out Spinach AI’s goal library for more OKR examples for engineers
Objective: Reduce monthly customer churn to <1%
In order to achieve healthy and sustainable growth, we need to do everything we can to ensure that our churn rates remain low. This is especially true for preventable churn cases.
Key Results:
👉 Check out Spinach AI’s goal library for more OKR examples for sales teams
Objective: Decrease customer acquisition cost by 15% by the end of the quarter
Now that we have enough data to understand where our opportunities and low-hanging fruit are, let’s spend time optimizing our funnel to reduce how much it costs us to acquire new customers.
Key Results:
👉 Check out Spinach AI’s goal library for more OKR examples for marketing teams
OKRs are living, breathing goals that should be referred back to regularly. Now that you know why they’re so effective, how to create them and have some examples to get you started, make sure you don’t set them and forget them. For the most effective OKRs, set them quarterly, but discuss them weekly.
Want more inspiration to get started? We’ve got a step-by-step guide on how to write OKRs and a free library filled with over 240 OKR examples to help you jumpstart your goal-setting. 🎯
You made it to the end of this article! Here are some things you can do now:
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,
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,
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, faster.