OKRs push organizations to achieve ambitious goals and coordinate efforts across teams. They provide transparency around priorities and allow for flexibility.
Google uses OKRs to help communicate goals and measure progress. They distinguish between "committed" and "aspirational" OKRs, with committed OKRs expected to be fully achieved and aspirational OKRs having an expected average score of 0.7.
OKRs originated from Peter Drucker's work on management by objectives (MBO) and were developed further at Intel by Andy Grove. OKRs improved on MBOs by including specific metrics ("key results") and making the process more transparent, bottom-up, and flexible.