The document provides an overview of Objectives and Key Results (OKR), a goal-setting framework used by companies like Google. It describes the components of an OKR (Objective, Key Result, Initiative), explains how to write effective ones, and outlines the benefits of OKRs, including improved focus, transparency, alignment, and employee engagement. OKRs trace their history back to 1954 and were popularized by their use at Intel and Google. The document serves as a comprehensive guide for businesses looking to implement the OKR framework.

1. The Ultimate Guide
to OKR
Everything you need to know about
Objectives and Key Results
by Perdoo
INTRODUCTION
What is an OKR?
What is an Objective?
An Objective is a description of a goal
to be achieved in the future. An
Objective sets a clear direction and
provides motivation. An Objective can
be thought of like a destination on a
map.
What is a Key Result?
A Key Result is a metric with a starting
value and a target value that measures
progress towards an Objective. A Key
Result is like a signpost with a distance
that shows how close you are to your
Objective.
What is an Initiative?
An Initiative is a description of the work
you’ll do to in uence a Key Result. If an
Objective is your destination and a Key
Result shows the distance to go, an
Initiative describes what you’ll do to get
there, (take a car, row a boat, etc.).
Objective
“Where do I want to go?”
An Objective describes where you want
to go and sets a clear direction. Think
of it as a point on a map, a destination
like New York.
Key Result
“How do I know if I’m getting there?”
A Key Result shows you how you’re
progressing towards your Objective.
Think of it as a signpost with a distance
marker.
Initiative
“What will I do to get there?”
An Initiative describes what you’ll do to
in uence your Key Results. Think of it
as the description of what you’ll do to
get to your destination.
OBJECTIVE KEY RESULT INITIATIVES
Directional ✓
Aligned ✓
High Impact ✓ ✓
Ambitious ✓
Measurable ✓ ✓
Inspirational ✓
Understandable ✓
Speci c ✓ ✓
Within Control ✓
Within Circle of In uence ✓ ✓ ✓
Time Bound ✓ ✓ ✓
Amount 1-4 1-5 min. 1
Example Objectives
Pioneer reusable rockets
Become market leader
Launch the most popular new
iPhone App
Generate more revenue than
last year
Become internationally
recognised as an innovator
Example Key Results
Engine tests have a 99%
success rate
Achieve a market valuation of
$150,000,000
Get featured by Apple on the
App Store
Close 10 deals over $100,000
each
Gain 3 national newspaper
mentions in 10 countries
Example Initiatives
Design and build a new
turbopump
Run interviews with 5 CMO
candidates
Hire an app store optimization
agency
Create new Sales collateral
Run 5 PR campaigns
HISTORY
A Quick History of OKR
BENEFITS
The Bene ts of OKR
Business Impact
Current research shows that when comparing groups of
employees who used OKR against those that don’t,
those that used it proved much more e ective at their
jobs, resulting in better performance and increased
sales. In fact, the group who didn’t use OKR actively
asked to be involved in the process in future cycles.
A full rundown of the ROI of Goal Management can be
found here.
Cultural Bene ts
The biggest impact of using OKR in most organizations
without goal management already in place, or those
who focus purely on metrics and KPIs, is a cultural shift
from output to outcomes.
OKR creates focus, transparency, and alignment for all
the work in an organization. These three factors
combine and lead to increased employee engagement.
Strategic Alignment
OKR helps managers and employees
align the work they do, ensuring
everyone in the organization is moving
in the same direction.
Focused Execution
OKR helps focus only on what’s most
important by prioritizing only the work
that has the biggest business impact.
Engaged employees
People achieve remarkable results
when they’re engaged with a purpose.
OKR helps communicate and execute
strategy in a way everyone
understands.
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GETTING STARTED
Preparing for OKR
How to set the right OKR cadence
Creating an Ultimate OKR
Example of an Ultimate OKR
Objective
Make humankind interplanetary
Key Results
Reduce the cost of launching a rocket by 10x
Re-use all rockets at least 5x
Win $10 billion in commercial launch contracts
How to Create Company OKRs
Example Company Objectives
Build a manned rocket capable of reaching Mars
Build the simplest search engine in the world
Become the most popular online bookseller
Example Company Key Results
Achieve 10 successful test launches
Reach 1 million searches per day
Achieve $100 million in global sales this year
Key characteristics of Group Objectives
Aligned
Group Objectives should always
align to the Company Objectives and
support your organization’s Ultimate
Goal. Group Objectives should
always be created once Company
OKRs have been agreed upon.
High Impact
Group Objectives should alway be
the things that, if you achieve them,
will have a huge positive e ect on
your entire organization. Achieving
Group Objectives, just like Company
Objectives, should be cause for a
celebration!
Time Bound
Keeping Group Objectives within a
short and strict time frame,
encourages focus and allows you to
review them in cycles. This not only
helps you quickly identify what’s
working and what isn’t, it also allows
you to change course in a new cycle
if your Group Objectives are not
contributing to your Company OKRs.
Key characteristics of Group Key Results
High Impact
Group Key Results should re ect a
big change, something that, if you
achieve 70% to 80% of your target,
the rest of your organization will
notice. Make them tough. If they’re
easy to achieve they’re not
challenging enough.
Speci c
Group Key Results should be
focused and have a clearly de ned
scope. While Company Key Results
cover broad metrics, Group Key
Results should measure more
granular progress, like sales of a
speci c product.
Within In uence
Group Key Results should always be
things you measure that you don’t
do, but you can in uence. Writing 10
blog posts is a bad Key Result, it’s
something you do. Achieving 1000
views on a blog post you wrote is a
good Key Result, as it’s something
you can’t control but you can
in uence.
INITIATIVES
What are Initiatives?
Example Group
Objectives
Develop a lighter engine
Make search more responsive
Increase sales of non- ction
books
Example Group Key
Results
Reduce fuel pump weight by
10%
Reduce page load speed to 1
second
Sell $1 million worth of
educational books
Example Initiatives
Build fuel pump prototype
Run a regular performance
report
Add 10,000 books to our online
store
Key characteristics of Initiatives
Speci c
An Initiative must always be speci c. Its scope must be
clearly de ned, and the owner of the Initiative must
know what to do. It cannot be vague like an Objective
can be. An Initiative must, therefore, contain verbs which
are unambiguous, such as establish, write, launch, visit,
release, etc. Objectives can contain less speci c verbs,
such as improve, increase, and so on.
Within control
You should have full control over your Initiatives, which
means that it will be in your power to complete them.
This means there should be no dependencies on
something or someone else. It also means that you can
be held accountable for not completing your Initiatives; it
will be more di cult to hold someone accountable for
not achieving his or her OKRs (as they will not have full
control over the latter).
EXAMPLES
OKR Examples
SPREADSHEET
OKR Spreadsheet
Get the spreadsheet
VIDEOS
OKR Videos
What is OKR? Will OKR work for my company?
What are Objectives? What are Key Results?
How often should I set OKRs? How does mission and vision work with OKR?
How does OKR improve employee engagement? How does OKR improve transparency?
FAQ
OKR FAQ
Learn how to write great OKRs!
Download a copy of our eBook and get practical tips on creating
awesome Objectives and Key Results.
Get the eBook
The anacronym OKR stands for Objectives and Key
Results, a popular goal management framework that helps
companies implement strategy. The bene ts of the
framework include improved focus, increased
transparency, and better alignment. OKR achieves this by
organizing employees and the work they do around
achieving common objectives.
An OKR consists of an Objective, which de nes a goal to
be achieved, and up to 5 Key Results, which measure
progress towards the Objective. Each OKR can also
have Initiatives, which describe the work required to drive
progress on the Key Results.
The framework includes a number of rules which
help employees prioritize, align, focus and measure the
outcome of the work they do.
OKR helps entire companies communicate company
strategy to employees in an actionable, measurable way. It
also helps companies to move from an output to an
outcome-based approach to work.
OKR has a long history that can be traced back to 1954,
when Peter Drucker invented MBO or Management by
Objectives. In 1968 Andy Grove co-founded Intel and while
CEO at Intel he developed MBO into the model of OKR
which we use today.
In 1974 John Doerr joined Intel and learned OKR during his
time there. Doerr went on to join Kleiner Perkins Cau eld
& Byers, one of the rst major investors in Google and
became an adviser to Google in its very early days. Doer
introduced OKR to Google’s founders, Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, who implemented OKR at Google, which still
uses it today.
Before you start using OKR it’s important to have a clear
understanding of the challenge you want to solve, or to
put it another way, the Business Objective you’re hoping
OKR will help you achieve.
For most organizations, OKR solves the challenge of
executing business strategy in a way that’s clear to all
employees, transparent and measurable.
For it be successful, the implementation and management
of OKR should have an owner within the organization. This
person is usually called the “Ambassador” and the role is to
ensure that everyone who will be using OKR, is trained,
engaged and has ongoing help and guidance.
OKR is a framework but it’s also a learning process that
often involves a fundamental shift in people think about
and measure the work they do, moving away from a focus
on output and towards a focus on outcomes.
The structure of an OKR program can be broken down into
4 levels; 2 which cover strategy and 2 which cover
execution.
OKRs are usually created following a cadence of two
timeframes, yearly and quarterly. Company Objectives run
in yearly cycles which coincide with most companies
yearly strategic review cadence. This makes it simple to
take organizational strategy and translate it into Company
Objectives.
Group OKRs owned by teams and departments follow a
quarterly cadence. This allows shorter review cycles and
makes it easy for organizations to change direction if
tactics are not driving progress towards the Company
OKRs for the year.
More info on how to nd the right OKR cadence can be
found in here.
If you’re working at a fast moving company with shifting
goals, this post explains OKR can keep you on track when
your business goals are shifting.
Most organizations have a mission and vision but often
these are di cult to understand and can be confused with
one and other. We recommend turning your mission and
vision into an Ultimate Goal or when using Perdoo, an
Ultimate OKR. Your Ultimate Goal de nes your
organization’s long-term purpose and acts as the north star
to which all other OKRs align.
An Ultimate Goal should aim for a point at a considerable
distance in the future; 10, 15 even 25 years is reasonable. A
good example of an Ultimate Goal is when John F
Kennedy decided that America should put a man on the
moon, and coined the term “Moonshot Goal”.
An Ultimate goal helps provide the focus for your entire
organization, for example, in 1958 NASA had 8 goals
including examples like;
“The establishment of long-range studies of the potential
bene ts to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the
problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and
space activities for peaceful and scienti c purposes.”
By 1961, thanks to Kennedy, NASA had one Ultimate goal;
“Before the decade is out, land a man on the moon and
return him safely to earth”.
This video explains how to turn mission and vision into
your Ultimate Goal, or Ultimate OKR.
Company level OKRs represent your strategy. These are
the 3 or 4 things your organization decides it must achieve
in the next 12 months. Most organizations review their
strategy yearly and this sets the timeframe for Company
OKRs.
It’s important when you decide what you want to achieve
in the next 12 months that everyone in your organization
has the chance to give their input. We recommend starting
with an OKR workshop where all key stakeholders
responsible for company strategy rst ask for and then
gather, input from employees on what they think top
priorities should be.
This input can then be then discussed in relation to
existing company strategy and broken down into 3 to 5
OKRs. This can be done using post it notes, collaborative
documents or even a whiteboard. The objective of the
exercise is to come to an agreement on what the
organization should have achieved by the beginning of the
following year.
Initiatives describe the work required to in uence Key
Results. In contrast to Key Results, which clearly measure
progress toward an Objective, Initiatives are just
hypothesis for what work might deliver the biggest
impact. Initiatives are tasks, projects, or similar activities
related to an OKR without having a direct connection to
the Objective’s progress. Regularly checking in with your
Key Results will help you decide whether your Initiatives
delivered the desired results or not. If they don’t, you
should think about changing your Initiatives.
The bene t of setting OKRs AND Initiatives is that there is
a clear separation between outcomes (Key Results: what
did we achieve?) and outputs (Initiatives: what did we
do?). You can commit to the same OKR while staying agile
on an operational level by using Initiatives.
We’ve spent time gathering together some common
examples of how OKR can be used for di erent
departments within an organization. These examples
represent our experience internally as well as the
experience of our customers. These guides can be used by
anyone looking to introduce OKR to their teams or even
their entire organization.
These guides can be found in our resources section.
There are several ways to manage OKRs: you can use a
spreadsheet, a dedicated software tool like Perdoo, or
even pen and paper. We’ve built a basic template that
allows you to create your rst OKRs. It’s free, simple to
use, and great for small teams with less than 25
employees.
What is an OKR?
A Quick History of OKR
Bene ts of OKR
Getting started
What are Initiatives?
OKR Examples
OKR Spreadsheet
OKR Videos
OKR FAQ
OKR Ebook
What’s the di erence between OKRs and KPI’s?  Why don’t you recommend setting individual
OKR’s?

How do I tell what’s a Strategic OKR and what
is a Tactical Objective?

What do I do if my strategy changes during my
OKR cycle?

How do I create OKRs for something that’s not
measurable?

What’s the di erence between an Objective
and a Goal?

What’s the di erence between OKR and MBO?  What’s the di erence between OKR and
SMART goals?

What’s the di erence between OKR and
Balanced Scorecards?
 How long does it take to implement OKRs? 
How many people need to use OKR to see the
bene ts?
 Who should be in charge of my OKR program? 
What percentage of completion makes an OKR
a success?
 How do I tie bonuses to OKRs? 
How many Objectives should my company
have?

How many Key Results should my company
have?

Ready to get started?
Get a guided demo with an OKR expert.
Request a Demo
Helping companies and teams
realize their ambitions
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US: +1-415-800-4497
hello@perdoo.com
   
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