How to Write Effective OKRs: Examples and Tips
As a manager, executive, or key leader, you must become an expert in writing objectives and key results, otherwise known as OKRs. You’ll likely write OKRs quarterly and share them with team members, other departments, or sometimes the entire company.
OKRs are a framework for tracking key project outcomes, helping teams identify target goals and project milestones. When written correctly, OKRs are simple, direct, and clearly defined.
This article explains OKRs and provides examples of good OKRs for different teams. It also discusses best practices for writing OKRs, equipping you with all the tools you need to boost your strategic agility.
Start with a free Confluence OKR template that makes sharing your OKRs with your company easy.
What are OKRs?
OKRs, short for objectives and key results, are goal-setting frameworks used to define and track the progress of your key objectives and their outcomes.
Objectives are what you want to happen. Key results are the metrics that make those objectives measurable. OKRs are a crucial part of strategic planning.
What's an OKR vs. KPI?
Knowing the differences between an OKR and a KPI is important for setting and measuring goals effectively.
A KPI is a key performance indicator. It's a quantitative measure of a team or individual's performance in service of a specific goal. KPIs often align with SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
OKRs and KPIs are both popular goal-setting methods. They help teams set meaningful goals and execute effective strategies to achieve them. Incorporating OKRs and KPIs into your goal-setting methodologies enhances your project documentation and overall strategic planning.
OKR examples
Below are some objective and key results examples that you can apply in frameworks to set measurable goals and gauge success. These sample OKRs cover marketing and sales, as well as examples for both team and company levels.
Sales team OKR examples
Objective: Increase sales revenue.
Objective description: Increase sales revenue by changing team behaviors and processes.
Key results:
- Increase sales revenue by 10% in Q3.
- Increase sales revenue by an additional 10% in Q4.
- Move 25% faster on qualified leads.
- Close 25% more customers in Q3.
- Close 35% more customers in Q4.
Marketing team OKR examples
Objective: Increase web traffic.
Objective description: Increase web traffic by enacting marketing best practices.
Key results:
- Increase web traffic by 20%.
- Increase engagement on social media platforms by 5% year over year.
- Generate 10% more marketing-qualified leads from Q2 to Q3.
- Improve SEO performance by creating a guest post campaign.
- Increase unique visits by 450%.
HR team OKR examples
Objective: Improve employee retention.
Objective description: Concentrate on activities that increase employee satisfaction and engagement.
Key results:
- Reduce employee turnover rate by 20%.
- Increase employee engagement by implementing three employee resource groups.
- Achieve a 100% completion rate on the employee satisfaction survey.
- Offer three new workshops per quarter to enhance employee skills.
- Plan one annual offsite meeting for the entire team, including remote workers.
Product development OKR examples
Objective: Deliver integrations faster.
Objective description: Engage product and engineering teams in finding time-saving solutions for integration delivery.
Key results:
- Ship integrations in four weeks or less rather than taking months.
- Implement a low-code automation platform to take manual work off engineering.
- Increase sprint velocity by at least 10 points.
- Hire staff to work on low-code automation.
- Replicate fast code shipping processes.
Project management OKR examples
Objective: Improve overall project quality.
Objective description: Meet or exceed customer expectations on project delivery, including speed of delivery.
Key results:
- Deliver projects faster than projected.
- Gain a 25% boost in customer satisfaction by delivering more granular surveys with each project.
- Don't allow unforced errors. Reduce the error rate by 75% or more.
- Appoint a team member to conduct a postmortem on every delivered project.
- Utilize a customer success team that includes product marketing to perform customer feedback interviews upon each project's completion.
How to write OKRs
The more specific your OKRs are, the more they will support you and your team. OKRs help plan and motivate teams by providing clear, measurable, and time-bound goals. Well-crafted OKRs are a guiding light throughout the project, offering direction and focus.
The examples listed above can help inform how to write OKRs that pertain to your company, but if you need a more in-depth playbook for creating the best OKRs for your team, follow these steps:
Define your objectives
To write good OKRs, first define a basic objective. This initial objective can be improving quality, increasing sales, or shipping projects faster. It doesn't need to be highly specific, as you'll refine it into detailed, actionable steps in the next phase.
Identify key results
After defining the objective of your OKR, you'll determine the key results you want from it. These key results should be specific, measurable, and time-bound.
Align OKRs across the company
Align your OKRs by communicating them across all teams throughout the company. This helps each team member work on team OKRs while staying congruent with company OKRs.
Communicate OKRs with the team
Once you set your OKRs, properly communicate them to your team. Confluence makes it easy to share your OKRs in a way that will make them easy to access and achieve.
Track and review progress
Keeping OKRs in a centralized workspace helps everyone involved track and review their progress over time, ensuring your OKRs are taking the right trajectory. Centralized workspaces like Confluence enable teams to move faster and make better decisions.
Best practices for writing OKRs
To ensure effective and reliable OKRs, follow these best practices:
- Follow the most common OKR examples for your industry.
- Keep your OKRs simple but specific. Every word should hold meaning.
- While creating OKRs, stay focused on the outcome you want to achieve. Set measurable goals with specific metrics, like the examples above.
- Review your OKRs regularly to ensure they stay on track as you progress through the project.
Avoiding common OKR pitfalls
Setting effective OKRs requires attention to detail and strategic planning. To ensure your projects stay on track, avoid these common pitfalls:
- Setting too many objectives: Having too many objectives can dilute focus and overwhelm your team. It’s better to prioritize key objectives that align with your company’s core goals.
- Setting vague results that are difficult to measure: Key results should be clear, specific, and measurable. Vague or ambiguous key results make it difficult to assess progress.
- Neglecting regular progress tracking and updating: Regularly tracking and updating progress is crucial. Without it, you risk losing focus of your goals and failing to address issues in a timely manner.
- Failing to cascade OKRs effectively throughout the company: Ensure that OKRs are communicated and aligned. Otherwise, teams may work in silos and miss opportunities for collaboration.
Boost your strategic agility with OKRs
Confluence makes it easy to create and share OKRs that resonate with your company. Regardless of the size of your team, Confluence allows you to keep company knowledge and project pages updated and accessible. Its intuitive navigation and powerful research capabilities allow your work to stay organized and connected to the right teams, projects, and goals.
Confluence lets you centralize company-wide and project-related knowledge in a single source of truth, making your OKRs instantly accessible and ready to move your business forward. With Confluence, you can easily find what you’re looking for. Confluence surfaces important information before you even know you need to look for it.
Start writing better OKRs in Confluence today with a free Confluence OKR template.
