Setting OKRs with a team

Originally published in 2018; updated Sept 2025 to reflect my OKR Map technique.

OKRs as storytelling

One of the great strengths of OKRs is that they force teams to use language to get really clear on what they want (and don’t want) to achieve and how they will measure success.

Writing OKRs is an act of collective story telling about the future. Stories put us in contact with what matters to use. Like all stories, OKRs improve with each retelling & reworking.

OKR-setting is a way of enabling a team to tell the clearest, most compelling story they can. It requires passionate, open, inclusive dialogue until things are precise, robust, and well-understood. This is the time to iron out any confusion or ambiguity – not half-way through or at the end of a cycle when you’re evaluating what you’ve delivered.

Ideally, you’ll be setting OKRs with a true team of 5-9 people with complimentary skills and mutual accountability for shared outcomes rather than a workgroup of individuals working on their own things.

Keep the session small and focused on the team. Minimise distractions. Keep people moving and talking to each other. This is a time to really engage with your colleagues and understand what they think is important and why. Practice reading their body language and intonation as they discuss the team’s goals.

Greater focus in the session means higher quality OKRs and a shorter meeting. Ideally, you’ll have a facilitator from outside the team who can guide the conversation and take notes so the team can be fully present with each other.

Designing the session

OKRs are a team sport. If you want genuine commitment (not just “compliance”) you need to include the team in reflecting on their current situation and agreeing what to take on.

Usually, but not always, OKR-writing follows OKR closing and some type of retrospective.

As an optional activity, a few days before the workshop, you can invite everyone on the team to do a little “daydreaming” (or “strategic thinking” if you don’t like the word “daydreaming”).

I’d ask them to submit 1-2 top “goals” (not even calling them OKRs at this point) for the next cycle. Larger teams can do this via a survey. Appoint someone to collect, analyse, and surface the most popular ideas to bring to the workshop as context.

This can help speed up the process but it seems to work just as well to start from a blank canvas.

Set aside about 4 hours to run the session. If you really focus, you can do it in two hours and give people a couple of hours back, but it’s important not to feel rushed, especially the first few times a team does this.

If you can, do this physically in a large open space with room for breakout discussions. This technique can also be done online with digital whiteboarding tools and virtual breakouts.

Opening the session

It can be helpful to check in and create a bit of space at the start of the session. In online sessions I love using chatterfall to do a quick “Scale of Bowie”. I reveal the photo, ask everyone to type a number in the chat but don’t hit enter until I count to three.

I usually do this by asking everyone to take a few deep breaths or even doing a little ear massage if they’re feeling bold. Thanks to Keith McCandless for teaching me this trick. These techniques can really help to relax and centre the group before we start.

I also find “Mad Tea” (when working physically together) or “Chatterfall” (online) to be useful tools to get folks into a goalsetting headspace.

When setting quarterly OKRs my favourite questions to ask the group are:

1. What I’m most proud of our team achieving in the last quarter is…
2. In the next 6 months I’m most excited for us to…
3. A courageous conversation we’re not having is…

Credit to the brilliant Fisher Qua for that last one.

Introducing the “OKR Map”

Once we’re loosened up a bit, I introduce a technique I’ve developed that I call the “OKR Map”.

This method and related template helps to structure the conversation and remind people that there’s a place for everything they want to contribute even if they don’t fully understand the distinction between objectives, key results, and activities.

I begin by introducing the “OKR Map” template and its various elements. I may even hold a short, rapid-fire a “pop quiz” where I offer a few goal-like statements and ask the group to sort them into the appropriate bucket(s) and discuss. For example, “Redesign our onboarding flow” or “Welcome 50 new donors”. This helps them better understand the distinctions and value of each. Prizes help.

Start with themes

To begin, I ask the group to brainstorm a few “themes” or big areas where they’d like to make some changes in the next cycle. These can be single words or simple phrases like “speed”, “quality”, “team happiness”, or “more repeat customers”. You’ll notice some of these are verging on goals, some are very vague. That’s okay. This is just a warm up to see where there’s energy and interest from the group.

“Sift & sort” the themes by stacking similar ones on top of each other and separating different themes with some vertical space.

Dialogue, negotiate, and dot-vote if you like until one or two theme areas emerge as being most important, galvanising, or urgent.

Write some objective(s)

Now see if you can come up with a single objective to address that theme. In an ideal scenario, a single objective will address multiple themes at the same time.

Remember that the objective should be powerful and inspiring but not necessarily measurable.

Avoid soft language like “help”, “improve”, “support”, or “continue”. Refine this language until it feels inspiring and gets the team leaping out of bed in the morning. The objectives are your rocket fuel.

You can use the same technique of inviting the team to brainstorm objectives, then sift & sort and dialogue and refine until you have one or two objectives you like.

Look out for objectives which contain targets and might actually be key results. If these pop up, it’s no problem, just slide them into the “key results” column and invite the team to keep thinking about an objective for that key result.

Pick some metrics

Now that you have a single, inspiring, important, scary objective (okay, maybe two), it’s time to figure out what metrics will prove that you’re getting closer to achieving it. Spend 5-10 minutes free listing as many metrics as you can think of but using place holders for specific targets.

For example, if your objective is to “Have a terrific staff onboarding process”, you might have a metric around “% of staff who can log into a laptop on their first day” or, “time required to complete new-joiner training”.

A good test of your metric is to pretend that you’re mid-way through the next quarter. Does looking at this metric help you decide what to do this week?

Or does it feel silly, irrelevant, or even annoying in the context of your “real” goals? If it won’t feel essential and empowering to talk about this every week, pick something else.

Once you’ve come up with some metrics, sift & sort again to narrow your metrics down to 2-3 for this objective. In some cases, you might only need a single metric to prove you’ve hit your objective.

Add targets to create key results

With metrics agreed, it’s time to set specific, numerical targets. As Marissa Mayer says “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.” Targets are what set key results apart from KPIs or health metrics. Targets are also the place where you can really dial up or down the level of challenge to achieve the right level of “motivational discomfort”! 😉

“It’s not a key result unless it has a number.” – Marissa Mayer

The best key results actually contain two numbers: a baseline or current value for the metric—where we are today—and a target to hit by the end of the cycle.

Remember that key results should be a little scary. If the team has a metric to track “% of new starters with a working laptop on day one” the target might be 100%, 80%, or something else. If the current baseline is 20%, getting to 50% might be a huge challenge already. In this scenario, aiming for 100% might be demotivating and impossible.

Find a number that feels scary but which kickstarts the team’s creative thinking for ways to meet the target. On day one, you should feel like you have about 50% confidence in achieving each Key Result.

Consider activities

While not strictly part of your OKRs, you will need to take action, deploy projects or initiatives, and do things to deliver your OKRs.

Activities inevitably creep in when teams are setting OKRs often masquerading as key results.

For example, if we want more repeat customers we may propose a key result which says “roll out a loyalty programme”. This is a useful activity but not actually a measurable result. The key result in this case might be something like “40% of revenue from repeat customers” but rolling out a loyalty programme may still be a useful activity.

The OKR Map template makes it simple to identify activities and slide them into the appropriate column.

Reviewing the activities can be a useful starting point in creating backlogs, project initiation documents, business cases, etc. but should support the OKRs, not the other way around.

Work from right to left

It is possible to work from right to left starting with existing projects & activities and attempting to derive some OKRs based on their successful completion.

This can be a useful way to introduce OKRs to teams with in-flight projects but do so with caution and make sure you’re not simply using OKRs to justify maintaining the current portfolio of work.

Work in every direction

Move horizontally, vertically, grouping, separating, reworking.

This part of the process should be loose, playful, and emergent. You’re exploring as a group, trying things out, moving things around. After writing some key results, go back and see if you can rewrite the objectives to be tighter or more inspirational. Perhaps you now need to merge or separate some objectives.

Remember that your OKR Map is a place to work out your goals and results and refine the language. Only when things have settled a bit, transfer your OKRs to a more structured document and start sharing.

What if we can’t measure our metrics?

Sometimes you have a great OKR in the making but no idea how to measure it. You might not be ready for this great OKR in this quarter. You may need a prerequisite initiative to make sure you can measure this thing and then tackle it in the next quarter.

You can actually create an OKR to help you measure something for a future OKR. For example, if you don’t know what percentage of new staff have a working laptop on day one, you could create an OKR to get 100% of new starters to fill out an onboarding survey about their experience including a question on whether they were able to log into their machine on day one.

Need help with your next OKR setting workshop?

Check out my OKR services.

Disagree and commit

One more thing: it’s okay to disagree! It’s okay to have a different viewpoint and enough backbone to express it. It is NOT okay to let that viewpoint prevent you or – worse – an entire team from committing to a clear course of action. Use the OKR workshop to explain your position as precisely, fully, and openly as you can. At the same time, commit to really hearing the viewpoints of others. Then get out of the way, make the best decision you can, and commit to it.

In his 2016 Letter to Shareholders, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos talks about “High Velocity Decision Making” and the importance of not killing momentum with consensus. He invites us to practice saying “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?”

An OKR check-list

Look at that crisp, beautifully crafted OKR. Exciting, isn’t it? Before you run off and start delivering, quickly ask the following:

1. Is the objective big and aspirational?
2. Do the key results make sense?
3. Are the key results mostly in your team’s control?
4. Are they clear and unambiguous?
5. Are they easy to measure with clear, non-binary targets?
6. Are they actually results and not just “tasks to do”?
7. Are they tough and inspiring but not impossible?
8. Are you happy to measure your team’s success this quarter based on reaching around 80% of these targets?
9. BONUS: do you have a clear baseline for each key result so you know where you’re starting?

Share, align, and clarify

If you’ve answered “yes” to most of the above, then they’re ready to share our OKRs with other teams and stakeholders for feedback. This is your chance to gather valuable feedback, give feedback to others and generally align your goals across the entire organisation.

You might discover that you need to tweak some of the language or the targets themselves. You may have missed something major or included something which another part of your organisation didn’t expect or is already doing.

For quarterly OKRs I suggest spending a full 3-4 weeks writing, refining, and aligning your OKRs within your team, with other teams, and with stakeholders around the organisation to achieve precise alignment and perfectly clear language. Remember to disagree and commit at scale if necessary. This is easier said than done!

Test it out with a check-in

Finally, the very best way to strengthen your OKRs is to start using them to perform your weekly check-ins. Doing a real check-in will immediately tell you if an OKR is too fluffy, impossible to measure, not relevant, too ambitious, etc. When this happens, you should change your OKRs.

Summary

A good set of OKRs is a compelling story about the future. It expresses a clear hypothesis and uses precise language to powerfully steer your daily activities. Keep the OKR setting session small and focused. Start big and then add enough detail so it’s completely clear what you want and how you’ll get there. Debate with the team, debate with other teams and stakeholders. Tweak and adjust until they’re just right. Then stop debating, commit, and deliver!

I hope this post helps you begin setting OKRs in your team. Let me know how it goes and then look into aligning your OKRs with other teams.