What are Objectives and Key Results? (with OKR examples)
If you’ve heard about OKRs but wondered what they really mean or how they work, you’re not alone.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework designed to boost clarity, focus, and alignment in organizations (and for people).
Understanding OKRs for Better Organizational Focus
If you’ve heard about OKRs but wondered what they really mean or how they work, you’re not alone. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework designed to boost clarity, focus, and alignment in organizations. When implemented coherently, OKRs help teams prioritize what truly matters and measure progress toward ambitious goals. This post will introduce you to a straightforward, practical approach to OKRs that fits well in dynamic environments aiming for real change and innovation: I call this approach: No-BS OKRs.
What Are OKRs and Why OKRs Matter
OKRs consist of two parts: objectives and key results.
The objective is a clear, ambitious statement expressing what you want to achieve and why it matters. It gives direction but typically isn’t measurable on its own.
The key results are specific, measurable outcomes that indicate progress toward the objective. These don’t describe activities but the actual outcomes or improvements you want to see.
Together, objectives provide the purpose and focus, while key results clarify progress and success measures and help keep efforts focused on progress and results instead of in “do the thing, check the box” mode. This combination encourages teams to direct their energy on what’s truly important during their goal cycle, over the course of a quarter, trimester, or year.
OKR Examples in Hard to Measure Parts of the Business
While marketing or sales departments may have abundant data to set their OKRs, some of the trickier parts of the business, like product teams and creative units, often struggle to define actually-measurable OKRs.
Let’s look at a few examples from hypothetical teams in two teams that often struggle to create measurable key results: Product and Creative.
Example OKRs for Product Teams
This hypothetical product team is juggling customer expectations, internal stakeholders, and technical constraints, making goal setting complex. Their objective may be:
Create a friction-free product experience that delights users and promotes sustainable growth.
Examples of key results here might be:
Outcome Key Result: Improve weekly active user retention from 45% to 70% within 90 days post-launch.
While the team might not control retention fully, aiming for this outcome guides prioritization.
Progress Key Result: Reduce the average user path to value from seven clicks to three by the end of the quarter.
This process-focused metric serves as a leading indicator of progress toward the major outcome of user retention.
Target Behavior Key Result: Increase spontaneous user feedback mentioning ease of use from zero to five comments per week.
Target Behavior Key Results are unique to No-BS OKRs: they let you set goals about important things that need to change, where you don’t yet have instrumented business metrics. Anything that can be observed or listened for can be counted, and a goal set around. Though not a formal metric today, this behavior indicates whether the product improvements is heading in the right direction.
This mix of outcome, process, and behavior key results gives product teams clear focus while recognizing some metrics need observation and adjustment to steer decisions.
OKR Examples for Creative Teams
This hypothetical creative team has to balance significant client demands with their own energy and sustainability. They’ve been burning hot for awhile, and cracks are starting to show in the team’s resilience.
An objective here might be:
Balance delivering remarkable client work with nurturing our team’s creative energy to avoid burnout.
That answers clearly the questions of:
What’s most important to focus on? + Why does that matter?
Example key results in this situation might include:
Outcome Key Result: Increase new client referrals by four per month (from two to six).
This is a taller order than most “client satisfaction” goals: it’s a higher bar (and more valuable) for clients to be satisfied ENOUGH to recommend your work.
“But Sara, that’s not within our control! We can’t set a goal we don’t control the outcome of — that’s demotivating if we don’t achieve it!”
Actually, dear reader — that’s a thought gremlin we work to eradicate with No-BS OKRs.
If you’ve set a goal you control the outcome of, you’ve created a plan, not a goal.
The strongest key results are almost always written about what we aspire to achieve if everything goes right, and even if there are variables that we don’t fully control. Planning is for the known. Goal setting is for the unknown. And key results are stretch goals about the unknown: which means we can hope to influence them, but not control the outcome completely.
And failing to achieve a stretch goal is only demotivating if the organizational behavior makes it that way. If leaders are walking the talk of No-BS OKRs, then they’re modeling that stretch goals are not “win/lose” propositions: they’re “win/learn” scenarios. It may be necessary to fail at a goal for a long time to learn what you need to know to ultimately succeed… and that’s only demotivating if the goal is actually truly impossible, or, if the organization imposes consequences for failure — which is against the rules of No-BS OKRs.
Progress Key Result: Boost client satisfaction scores on pulse surveys by 10 percentage points.
Tracking client satisfaction is an important indicator of progress toward the outcome key result above — if client satisfaction starts to slip, that important outcome (and your objective) may be at risk.
Progress Key Result: Improve the team’s average internal energy score from six to eight, using a biweekly self-assessment model.
This focus on sustainability helps reduce burnout risk.
OKRs aren’t only about the first measures to come to mind (which are almost always financial). OKRs provide a space for aligning on what needs to grow or improve in terms of culture, operational excellence, human experiences, and many other aspects of the business.
How OKRs Drive Clarity and Better Decisions
One of the main advantages of well-crafted OKRs is how they shape everyday decision-making.
For example, when a product team has “improving weekly active user retention” as a key result, prioritizing features or fixes that support retention naturally takes precedence over other features or fixes that aren’t aligned to what the organization has agreed its key results are. This alignment helps avoid distractions and keeps energy focused on efforts and outcomes that matter most.
Similarly, by including target behavior key results such as frequency of positive user comments or progress metrics like team energy scores, teams can monitor early signals or intangible factors that impact success but may not be captured by more traditional metrics or KPIs.
Summary and Next Steps to Effective OKRs
Teams that do OKRs well don’t try to measure everything; they prioritize goals that genuinely move the needle in terms of progress, and toward important outcomes. They combine ambitious goals with pragmatic process improvements and behavioral indicators to track progress, learning, and achievement from multiple angles. This balanced approach makes OKRs an effective tool for navigating complexity and driving sustained growth (even in chaotic and fast-changing or hard-to-predict operating situations).
If you are working on a goal or a challenge at your organization, consider how an objective paired with clear key results could bring clarity, focus, and alignment to your efforts.
Key Takeaway: Using OKRs to Increase Clarity and Focus
OKRs provide a powerful framework to sharpen organizational focus through a clear objective that explains what’s most important and why it matters — your focus and purpose — and measurable key results that define what progress and success might mean, if everything goes right.
Creating and implementing OKRs thoughtfully in different parts of your business—whether product development, creative teams, strategy, or other sometimes hard-to-measure areas—helps your teams prioritize what truly matters while tracking progress via outcomes, progress indicators, and observable behaviors (including spontaneous feedback). This strategic clarity ensures everyone understands the organization’s shared goals and can align their work accordingly.
Ready to bring more clarity and impact to your organizational goals?
Start by defining one clear objective and supporting key results for your next goal cycle. This focus can transform how your team works and delivers value.
Taking the first step to implement OKRs can be a game-changer for your team’s productivity and engagement.
Want more No-BS OKR fundamentals like this?
Subscribe to my No-BS OKRs Fundamentals YouTube Playlist here
Check out my new No-BS OKRs Fundamentals Private Podcast, or
Take the No-BS OKRs Compatability Quiz to see if No-BS OKRs are right for you!
Meet Sara Lobkovich, OKR Coach for people whose identity, cognitive style, or values puts them at odds with mainstream business culture.
Learn more about Sara here, and how she works with clients like you to move strategy out of decks and docs and into new practices designed to enable you to learn your way to strategic achievement.
NOW AVAILABLE IN EBOOK, with print launch coming soon!
Sara’s debut book, “You Are a Strategist: Use No-BS OKRs to Get Big Things Done” is now available wherever you purchase ebooks, with print launch happening May 6, 2025!
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