How product managers can make OKRs drive real results

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TLDR

In my recent conversation with Ben Lamorte, the world’s most experienced OKR coach and founder of OKRs.com, we explored how product managers and leaders can transform their approach to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Ben shared insights about why many OKR implementations fail and how to avoid common pitfalls. The key to success lies in focusing on measurable outcomes, maintaining transparency, and avoiding the temptation to create too many OKRs. Whether you’re just starting with OKRs or looking to improve your existing implementation, this comprehensive guide will help you create an effective OKR framework that drives real results.

Key Topics:

• Understanding OKRs: Their evolution from Intel’s early days to modern implementation
• Common pitfalls: The top reasons why OKR programs fail and how to avoid them
• Implementation strategies: Key factors for successful OKR deployment
• Practical guidelines: Choosing the right cycle length and organizational levels
• Success factors: The importance of transparency and outcome-focused metrics
• Change management: How to transition your team to effective OKR usage

Introduction

Does the mention of OKRs make you break into a cold sweat, or does it energize you with a sense of purpose? Whether you’re nodding in recognition or scratching your head wondering what OKRs even are, you’re about to discover how this powerful framework can transform your work life. In this episode, we’ll cut through the confusion and show you exactly how to turn Objectives and Key Results from a dreaded management mandate into your secret weapon for driving success. Miss this episode, and you risk continuing to struggle with misaligned priorities, unclear metrics, and the frustration of not seeing how your work impacts the bigger picture.

With us is a true OKR expert, Ben Lamorte. Ben has more OKR coaching experience than anyone. Consequently, he has become the coach to OKR coaches. He has also helped business leaders and organizations to define and make measurable progress on their most important goals, guiding more than a hundred organizations in deploying OKRs. He is the founder of OKRs.com, which provides resources and coaching services. He co-authored Objectives and Key Results: Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement and authored The OKRs Field Book.

Understanding OKRs: From Intel to Modern Product Teams

The evolution of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) began at Intel during the 1970s and 1980s, where Andy Grove transformed the traditional Management by Objectives (MBO) system into something more dynamic and outcome-focused. He decoupled objectives, which are broad qualitative statements, from their specific measurable results, creating a framework that would eventually reshape how organizations set and achieve goals.

While MBOs were typically tied directly to bonuses, OKRs intentionally separate performance measurement from goal setting. This separation encourages teams to think bigger and take calculated risks without fear of compensation impacts. Here’s how the two approaches differ:

Core Components of Effective OKRs

Ben emphasized that OKRs serve as a critical thinking framework rather than just a goal-setting tool. The objective answers the question “What is the most important area to focus on?” while key results address “How will we know we’ve achieved it?” This structure creates clarity and alignment across teams by:

• Establishing clear, measurable targets that indicate progress toward objectives
• Creating a common language for discussing goals across the organization
• Enabling teams to understand how their work contributes to larger organizational goals
• Promoting regular check-ins and adjustments based on measurable progress

As organizations like Oracle and Google adopted and refined the OKR framework, they demonstrated its effectiveness in driving alignment and results. These companies used OKRs as a communication tool, ensuring everyone spoke the same language about priorities and progress. This common understanding became particularly valuable for product teams, who often need to coordinate efforts across multiple departments and stakeholders.

The beauty of this system lies in its flexibility and focus on outcomes rather than activities. For product managers, this means shifting conversations from feature lists and deadlines to measurable impacts and customer value. This outcome-focused approach helps teams stay aligned on what truly matters while maintaining the agility to adjust their approach based on real results.

Common OKR Implementation Failures and How to Avoid Them

Some people have tried using OKRs and don’t like them. I asked Ben what reasons he has seen for this. Ben shared that the landscape of OKR implementation changed after 2018, when John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters sparked widespread interest in the framework. While the book effectively conveyed why organizations should implement OKRs, it left many teams struggling with practical implementation. Before this, most organizations that used OKRs were doing a pretty good job. After, more organizations wanted to start using OKRs, but many failed because they didn’t have a good reason to use them and had no idea how to use them effectively.

Ben pointed out several pitfalls that often derail OKR implementations. Understanding these common failure points is essential for product managers and leaders who want to ensure their OKR program drives real value rather than becoming another administrative burden.

• Using too many OKRs: OKRs are supposed to help an organization focus on the most important areas of progress, but some organizations use OKRs for every task.
• Confusing tasks with key results: An action like “update the blog” is a task, not a key result. Key results should be measurable outcomes that tells the team whether they are making positive progress, like “200 people sign up for the demo after reading the blog post.”
• Only one name next to every key result: Measure What Matters teaches that only one person should be accountable for every key result, but in many cases this is the wrong approach and causes teams to struggle with cross-functional alignment. Instead, enable cross-functional ownership when appropriate. For example, if a key result depends on both marketing and IT, assign two names to that key result.
• No name next to a key result: Ensure someone is accountable to every key result.
• Every key result written as commit-level: There are two types of key results: commit, which are achievable, and stretch, which are moonshots. Most teams only make lists of commit results, causing them to not stretch themselves enough. Other times, they have stretch results on their commit lists, but don’t identify them as stretch results. Instead, consider listing one commit result and one stretch result for each level.
• OKRs tied to bonuses
• Direct cascade: The company sets objective and key results, and a department adopts one of the key results as their objective. This limits the department’s thinking to the key results selected by the company and ignores the difference between objectives and key results.
• Failing to define why the objective is important and why it is important now
• Making OKRs a compliance system: Treat OKRs as a critical thinking framework, not a performance management system.
• OKRs at the individual level: When a company has team OKRs and individual OKRs for each person, the team members will prioritize their individual OKRs, even though the team OKRs are more important to the company.

Many companies have challenges implementing OKRs. If your organization is starting to use OKRs, don’t start blindly rolling them out as fast as you can. Take time to be thoughtful about why you’re doing it and what problem you’re trying to solve.

Transparency

Unlike traditional goal-setting approaches that keep objectives private between manager and employee, OKRs should be visible across the organization, enabling better alignment and collaboration. John Doerr’s startup companies would even write their OKRs in the bathroom for everyone to see.

Key Success Factors for OKR Implementation

The Importance of Alignment around Deployment Parameters

Successful implementation of OKRs requires alignment on answers to ten questions about deployment parameters before rolling out OKRs. These parameters help organizations avoid common pitfalls and create a framework that works for their specific context. All ten questions are in Ben’s book and on his website, but some key considerations include:

• Cycle duration: Choosing between quarterly, four-month, or six-month cycles based on business rhythm
• Organizational levels: Determining where in the organization to implement OKRs
• Goal-setting approach: Balancing commitment targets with stretch goals
• Cross-functional alignment: Establishing mechanisms for collaboration across teams
• Review cadence: Setting up regular check-ins to monitor progress

Choosing the Right Cycle Length

Ben challenged the conventional wisdom about quarterly OKR cycles, sharing insights about what actually works best for different organizations:

The Five Mantras for Success

Ben has five mantras for successful OKR implementation, but in our discussion he shared just three. You can find the others in his book.

A Real-World Success Story: Transforming Through OKRs

During our conversation, Ben shared a success story that illustrates how organizations can transform their goal-setting approach through OKRs. The case involved a trading card marketplace company that initially struggled with their OKR implementation but ultimately achieved remarkable results by adapting the framework to their specific needs.

This company got half of their annual business from one conference. Their CEO set an audacious goal for this conference to be a wild success. He clearly defined the why and why now around that objective, but the conference was eight months away, much longer than a typical OKR cycle. Ben encouraged the company to set an OKR for the conference anyway.

The CEO was initially unable to identify measurable outcomes that would show whether the conference was a success. He said the team would just have a feeling afterward about whether it went well or not. However, after talking with Ben, he identified several trackable metrics, like the number of private demos they complete. The team came up with OKRs that everyone in the organization was able to align around. They made two times their expected annual sales within the first week after the conference. This huge success was because everyone at the company was focused on a single goal with clear, measurable outcomes.

Ben advised that if you have a big event, don’t hesitate to write an OKR around that event’s timeframe. Tune your OKRs to what’s happening in your business.

Conclusion

Throughout our discussion, Ben Lamorte shared invaluable insights about making OKRs work effectively for product teams and organizations. His experience as the most experienced OKR coach revealed that success with OKRs isn’t about rigid implementation of rules, but rather about thoughtful adaptation of the framework to each organization’s unique context. The key lies in identifying measurable outcomes, maintaining transparency across teams, and ensuring that OKRs serve as a bridge between strategic planning and day-to-day execution.

For product managers and leaders looking to implement or improve their OKR process, the path forward is clear: start with clear deployment parameters, focus on meaningful outcomes, embrace transparency, and maintain the flexibility to adapt as you learn. By avoiding common pitfalls like over-cascading, task-based key results, and compliance-driven implementation, teams can transform OKRs from a management mandate into a powerful tool for driving focus, alignment, and exceptional results. The journey may take several cycles to perfect, but the potential impact on organizational alignment and product success makes it well worth the investment.

Useful links:

• Read about the 10 OKR deployment parameters
• Learn more about Ben’s OKRs coaching
• Check out The OKRs Field Book
• Learn more about OKRs Coach Network

Innovation Quote

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” – Peter Drucker 

Application Questions

1. Looking at your current product team’s goals, how could you transform task-based objectives into outcome-focused OKRs? For example, instead of “Launch feature X,” what measurable customer or business outcomes would indicate real success?
2. How could your team use cross-functional OKRs to improve collaboration between product, engineering, and other departments? What shared outcomes could create better alignment across these teams?
3. Thinking about your organization’s business rhythm, what OKR cycle length (2-month, 4-month, or 6-month) would work best for your product development process? How could you align OKR cycles with major product milestones or market events?
4. How could you modify your current OKR process to include both commitment-level and stretch goals? What would be appropriate stretch targets that could inspire innovation without causing team burnout?
5. What steps could you take to increase transparency around product team OKRs? How could making objectives and progress more visible help improve alignment with other teams and stakeholders?

Bio

Ben Lamorte is a leading figure in the space of “Objectives and Key Results” (OKRs). He has more OKRs coaching experience than anyone on the planet. Lamorte coaches business leaders focused on defining and making measurable progress on their most important goals. He started OKRs.com in 2014 and over the past decade has helped 200+ organizations based in 20+ countries implement OKRs including eBay, Adobe, Capital One, 3M, Booking.com, Zalando, and Nike. After co-authoring one of the first books dedicated to OKRs, Lamorte wrote The OKRs Field Book, the first book written specifically for OKRs coaches published by Wiley in 2022. Ben studied Engineering and Mathematics at University of California, Davis and holds a graduate degree in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University.

Thanks!

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