← All Blog Articles

OKRs for Product Teams

· Mark Holt

A dog pointing to a star

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have become the gold standard for goal-setting in many product organizations, with tech giants like Google, LinkedIn, and Spotify championing their effectiveness.

But despite their popularity, many product teams struggle to implement OKRs in a way that drives meaningful outcomes rather than becoming another bureaucratic checkbox exercise.

According to recent industry research, while 76% of product organizations have attempted to implement OKRs, only 28% report high satisfaction with their implementation. The gap between the promise and reality of OKRs often stems from fundamental misunderstandings about their purpose and implementation, particularly in the context of product development.

This disconnect is especially costly for product teams, where clear direction and focused execution are essential to delivering value. When properly implemented, OKRs can bridge the gap between business strategy and product execution, creating alignment across teams and ensuring resources are allocated to initiatives that drive meaningful outcomes. When poorly implemented, they can create confusion, frustration, and waste valuable time that could be spent building and refining products.

Understanding OKRs: The Basics

It’s important to recognise that OKRs are actually not one single thing: we have Objectives, and then Key Results

 Objectives

Objectives are concise, qualitative statements that describe the desired direction or impact (e.g., “Delight customers with a friction‑free checkout experience”); they should be inspirational, memorable, and free of metrics so teams feel pulled toward a clear purpose.

Key Results

Key Results translate that purpose into hard evidence of progress: they are specific, time‑bound, and quantifiable outcomes (e.g., “Reduce average checkout time from 90 seconds to 45 seconds,” or “Achieve a Net Promoter Score above 70 by Q4”). While an Objective sets the motivational North Star, each Key Result is a milestone that lights the path, allowing teams to track whether ambition is turning into reality and to course‑correct early if numbers drift off target.

Benefits of OKRs

Before diving into implementation strategies, it’s essential to understand what makes OKRs unique and particularly valuable for product teams. While many organizations treat OKRs as simply another goal-setting framework, their real power comes from a few key characteristics:

  • Outcome orientation: OKRs focus on the outcomes achieved rather than the outputs delivered, distinguishing them from feature-based roadmaps or project plans.
  • Bidirectional alignment: Unlike traditional cascading goals, OKRs facilitate both top-down strategic alignment and bottom-up tactical insights.
  • Ambitious targets: OKRs encourage setting aspirational goals where 70% achievement is considered successful, fostering innovation and stretch thinking.
  • Transparency: OKRs are visible across the organization, creating shared understanding and enabling cross-team collaboration.
  • Learning loops: Regular check-ins and reflections make OKRs a vehicle for organizational learning, not just performance measurement.

For product teams specifically, OKRs offer a framework for connecting product work to business strategy. They help answer critical questions:

  • How do our product initiatives support company objectives?
  • Are we building features that deliver measurable value?
  • How should we prioritize competing product opportunities?
  • How can we measure the impact of our product investments?

When implemented effectively, OKRs transform product development from a feature factory into a strategic function that delivers measurable business outcomes.

The Anatomy of Effective Product OKRs

While the basic structure of OKRs—an inspiring Objective paired with measurable Key Results—remains consistent across departments, product teams have unique considerations when crafting their OKRs. Let’s break down the essential components:

Crafting Compelling Objectives

Product Objectives should be:

  • Customer and business-focused, not feature-oriented
  • Inspirational yet achievable within the timeframe (typically a quarter)
  • Aligned with company strategy but specific to the product area
  • Clear and concise, avoiding jargon or ambiguity

Examples of Poor Product Objectives:

  • “Launch user profile redesign” (output-focused, not an outcome)
  • “Improve user experience” (too vague, not measurable)
  • “Increase engagement by optimizing the onboarding flow” (mixes objective and solution)

Examples of Powerful and Motivational Product Objectives:

  • “Make our platform the go-to solution for first-time investors”
  • “Transform customer onboarding into a delightful, confidence-building experience”
  • “Make our analytics dashboard indispensable for marketing teams”

Defining Measurable Key Results

Key Results should be:

  • Quantifiable with specific metrics and targets
  • Outcome-oriented, measuring value delivered rather than work completed
  • Ambitious yet realistic, targeting 70% achievement
  • Limited in number (2-5 per Objective) to maintain focus
  • Time-bound within the OKR cycle

Product teams should focus on three categories of Key Results:

  • Business outcomes: Metrics that directly impact business performance (revenue, conversion, retention)
  • Product usage: Metrics that indicate product adoption and engagement (active users, feature usage, time spent)
  • Customer satisfaction: Metrics that reflect user satisfaction and loyalty (NPS, CSAT, support tickets)

Example of a Complete Product OKR:

Objective: Transform customer onboarding into a delightful, confidence-building experience

Key Results:

  • Increase onboarding completion rate from a baseline of 68% to 85%
  • Reduce time to first value from 24 hours to 15 minutes
  • Improve new user NPS from +12 to +40
  • Decrease support tickets from new users by 50%

Notice that this OKR doesn’t prescribe specific features or solutions. It focuses on the outcomes the team aims to achieve, giving them the flexibility to determine the best approach to reach these goals.

Connecting OKRs to Product Roadmaps

One of the most challenging aspects of implementing OKRs for product teams is connecting them to existing product roadmaps and planning processes. Rather than treating OKRs as a parallel or competing system, successful teams integrate them with their roadmap to create a cohesive planning framework.

The Hierarchy of Product Planning

An effective product planning hierarchy might look like this:

  1. Product Vision and Strategy (1-3 years): Long-term direction and strategic objectives
  2. Objectives (Quarterly): Measurable Objectives to achieve within the quarter
  3. Roadmap (Quarterly with rolling updates): Initiatives and capabilities to be developed
  4. Sprint/Release Plans (2-4 weeks): Specific features and improvements to be delivered

In this hierarchy, OKRs serve as the bridge between high-level strategy and tactical roadmap decisions. They provide the “why” that guides roadmap prioritization and helps teams make trade-off decisions.

From OKRs to Roadmap Items

To connect OKRs to your roadmap effectively:

  • Start with Objectives, not the roadmap. Develop Objectives based on strategic priorities, then identify initiatives that will drive those outcomes.
  • Map initiatives to Objectives explicitly, indicating which initiatives support which objectives and key results.
  • Include impact estimates for each initiative, projecting how much it will move the needle on relevant key results.
  • Maintain flexibility to adjust the roadmap as you learn which initiatives are most effective at achieving key results.
  • Visualize the connections between OKRs and roadmap items in your product management tool.

Example of OKR-Roadmap Connection:

Objective: Transform customer onboarding into a delightful, confidence-building experience

Key Result: Increase onboarding completion rate from 68% to 85%

  • Initiative: Interactive product tour (Est. impact: +8%)
  • Initiative: Onboarding progress visualization (Est. impact: +4%)
  • Initiative: Single sign-on integration (Est. impact: +5%)

Key Result: Reduce time to first value from 24 hours to 15 minutes

  • Initiative: Template library for quick starts (Est. impact: -6 hours)
  • Initiative: Streamlined account verification (Est. impact: -2 hours)

By creating these explicit connections, you ensure that roadmap items are directly contributing to OKRs, and by extension, to company strategy. This approach also helps stakeholders understand why certain initiatives are prioritized over others, reducing the “feature request tug-of-war” that many product teams experience.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Despite best intentions, many product teams stumble when implementing OKRs. Here are the most common pitfalls and strategies to avoid them:

Pitfall 1: Creating Output-Based Key Results

Many teams mistakenly frame their key results around features delivered rather than outcomes achieved. This undermines the purpose of OKRs and reverts to traditional feature-based planning.

“Build redesigned user profile editor”

Is truly awful!.. I think what Eddie meant to say is

“Increase profile completeness from 45% to 80%”

Solution: Always ask “What will change for our users or business if we deliver this?” to identify the true outcome. If a key result can be “completed” rather than “achieved to a degree,” it’s likely an output, not an outcome.

Pitfall 2: Setting Too Many OKRs

In an effort to cover all work, teams often create too many objectives and key results, diluting focus and making tracking overwhelming.

Solution: Limit product teams to 2-3 objectives per quarter, each with 3-5 key results. Remember that OKRs are meant to highlight priorities, not document all work. Use the 70/20/10 rule: 70% of resources toward primary OKRs, 20% toward secondary priorities, and 10% for exploration.

Pitfall 3: Treating OKRs as a Performance Evaluation Tool

When OKRs become tied to performance reviews or compensation, teams tend to set easily achievable goals rather than ambitious targets.

Solution: Explicitly separate OKRs from performance evaluations, especially in early cycles. Emphasize that OKRs are a learning and alignment tool, not a judgment mechanism. Celebrate learning from missed targets as much as achieving goals.

Pitfall 4: Neglecting the Tracking Process

Many teams set ambitious OKRs but fail to establish a regular tracking and review process, resulting in OKRs being forgotten until the end of the quarter.

Solution: Integrate OKR reviews into existing product rituals. For example:

  • Include OKR updates in sprint reviews
  • Display OKR dashboards prominently in team spaces
  • Dedicate the first 10 minutes of weekly product meetings to OKR progress
  • Establish a mid-quarter deep-dive review to assess progress and make adjustments

Pitfall 5: Lack of Alignment Across Teams

Product teams often create OKRs in isolation from engineering, design, marketing, and sales, leading to disconnected or competing priorities.

Solution: Facilitate cross-functional OKR workshops where dependent teams align on shared or complementary objectives. Create visibility into OKRs across teams and encourage collaboration on key results that require multiple teams’ contributions.

Pitfall 6: Insufficient Metrics Infrastructure

Teams sometimes set OKRs around metrics they can’t reliably measure, leading to ambiguity in tracking progress.

Solution: Assess measurement capabilities before finalizing OKRs. If important metrics aren’t currently tracked, consider:

  • Using proxy metrics that can be measured now
  • Including instrumentation work in the roadmap to enable future measurement
  • Partnering with data teams to develop needed dashboards

By proactively addressing these common pitfalls, product teams can significantly improve their odds of successful OKR implementation.

Do the simplest thing that can possibly work

I see so many teams burning days/weeks building beautiful metrics infrastructure, before they get started on the thing that a customer cares about.

if you’re trying to improve conversion then of course you could go out and tag the life out of everything in your funnel or… log an event at the top of the funnel, and log another event at the bottom of the funnel.

Yeah it’s a bit manual to calculate the answer, but you’re weeks ahead in value delivery.

OKRs for Different Product Team Structures

The implementation of OKRs should be adapted to your specific product team structure. Different organizational models require different approaches to ensure OKRs drive alignment while empowering teams.

For Component-Aligned Teams

If your organization follows Conway’s Law and structures teams around technology components:

  • Ensure team OKRs connect directly to user or business outcomes, not just component improvements
  • Create a single shared Objective that spans multiple teams
  • Include integration-focused key results that measure how well components work together
  • From experience, it’s important to “Pull from the front”. The front end teams are the ones that need to dictate the tempo to which the other teams will dance. From a Lean perspective (waiting), there’s nothing worse than a back-end team spending months building a new capability if the front-end team can’t integrate it for another 3 months.
  • Establish regular cross-team OKR reviews to maintain system-level perspective

Example: Authentication Team OKR

Objective: Make authentication frictionless while maintaining industry-leading security

  • Increase first-attempt login success rate from 82% to 95%
  • Reduce authentication-related support tickets by 40%
  • Maintain 99.99% successful blocking of unauthorized access attempts

For Cross-Functional Product Teams

If your teams are organized around customer journeys or product areas:

  • Create OKRs that span the entire customer experience within the team’s domain
  • Include metrics that measure handoffs between your area and adjacent ones
  • Allow teams significant autonomy in defining their OKRs while ensuring alignment with company objectives
  • Facilitate OKR sharing across teams to identify overlaps and dependencies

Example: Onboarding Team OKR

Objective: Create the smoothest onboarding experience in our industry

  • Increase onboarding completion rate from 68% to 85%
  • Reduce time to first value from 24 hours to 15 minutes
  • Improve new user NPS from +12 to +40
  • Increase 30-day retention of new users from 65% to 80%

For Platform or Enabling Teams

If your team provides platforms or services to other product teams:

  • Create OKRs focused on platform adoption, efficiency, and developer experience
  • Include key results based on internal customer satisfaction
  • Measure the impact of platform improvements on product team velocity
  • Co-create OKRs with the teams that consume your services

Example: API Platform Team OKR

Objective: Make our API platform the preferred integration method for partners and customers

  • Increase API consumption from 15M to 50M calls per month
  • Reduce API integration time for partners from 2 weeks to 3 days
  • Achieve 90% satisfaction score from internal and external developers
  • Maintain 99.99% API availability

For Product Leadership Teams

If you’re part of a product leadership team responsible for the overall product portfolio:

  • Focus OKRs on portfolio-level outcomes that individual teams can contribute to
  • Include key results related to cross-product integration and consistent experience
  • Measure how well the product portfolio addresses overall customer needs
  • Create key results around product strategy execution and alignment

Example: Product Leadership OKR

Objective: Become the comprehensive solution for mid-market financial operations

  • Increase product adoption breadth from avg. 2.1 to 3.5 modules per customer
  • Reduce customer time spent switching between products by 40%
  • Achieve 85% feature parity with best-of-breed point solutions
  • Increase cross-product upsell conversion from 12% to 25%

By tailoring your OKR approach to your specific team structure, you can maximize alignment while still respecting the unique focus and expertise of each team. The key is ensuring that team-level OKRs connect clearly to broader company objectives while remaining relevant to each team’s specific domain.

Conclusion

Successfully implementing OKRs for product teams isn’t about following a rigid formula but about embracing the core principles of outcome orientation, alignment, measurement, and learning. When implemented effectively, OKRs become more than just another goal-setting framework—they transform how product teams think about their work, elevating the focus from building features to delivering measurable business outcomes.

The journey to effective OKRs is iterative, with each cycle offering opportunities to learn and improve. Most organizations require at least 2-3 quarters to fully embed the OKR approach and begin realizing its full benefits. During this transition, maintaining leadership support, consistent application, and regular reflection is essential.

Remember these key principles as you implement OKRs for your product teams:

  • Focus on outcomes over outputs, measuring the impact of your work rather than just its completion
  • Connect product initiatives explicitly to OKRs, ensuring every roadmap item contributes to key results
  • Embrace ambition and learning, using OKRs to stretch your thinking and discover new approaches
  • Adapt the framework to your context, tailoring the implementation to your team structure and culture
  • Improve your approach with each cycle, refining your OKRs based on experience and feedback

By applying these principles consistently, you can transform your product development process from a feature factory into a strategic function that delivers measurable business impact. The result will be better products, more engaged teams, happier customers, and stronger business results—a worthy outcome for any product organization.

References