For the past few years, I've been helping venture-backed startup founders and small business owners "do" OKRs.
Here's what sometimes happens:
Talented founders raise a bunch of money and hire like crazy.
Chaos ensues. New hires are eager to help, but collectively aren't moving the needle as much as VC money necessitates. The founders realize that how they were running the startup in the early days does not scale.
One of their investors (or another founder) tells them to try OKRs.
The CEO skims a few blog posts on OKRs or a book like Measure What Matters.
Execs spend a day or two creating a bunch of objectives and key results, which are handed off to lieutenants to implement with their respective teams.
Months pass.
It doesn't "feel" like the OKRs are doing anything (and, TBH, everyone has forgotten what the OKRs were).
A chunk of the investors' money is gone.
The founders start getting anxious because it feels like they're working harder than ever but not making enough progress, and they're not quite sure why.
Someone close to the CEO (their chief-of-staff, an advisor, or a biz ops lead) will start pinging private chat groups and MBA program alums, asking for help.
I'll get connected, learn more about the specific situation, and help them make the right changes.
Although every business is different, I've found that there's usually one common problem we need to address before we dig into templates or schedule workshops.
What's the problem?
The leadership team didn't understand how OKRs fit into their journey before trying to use them.
The "paint-by-numbers" approach to OKRs is straightforward enough. But unless you first understand the "spirit" of OKRs and how they fit into your existing map of startup reality, they're unlikely to stick.
That's why-before anyone sticks a single post-it to a whiteboard-I share a metaphor:
Building a startup is like crossing a foggy river to get to the top of a hill on the other side.
You start your entrepreneurial journey on a riverbank, gazing across the water at your ultimate destination: an unoccupied plot of land at the top of a hill where you'll build a world-changing, value-creating institution that will last generations.
Like a compass that points north, the direction of that ultimate destination (no matter where you find yourself during customer discovery, pacing up and down the shoreline) is your mission. The future reality on top of the hill is your vision.
Your mission and vision remain relatively fixed. Maybe once a year, you rise above the startup chaos and check if you're still in alignment.
Here's the challenge: to get to the other side-to achieve your mission and manifest your vision-you need to cross the river. And the river is covered in a thick layer of fog. So the shortest path from where you are to where you ultimately want to go is radically unknown.
But just a few feet ahead of you, if you squint hard, you can see a few flat rocks poking out of the water. You have a strong hunch that beyond some of those proximal stepping stones are other stepping stones, and if you take the proper steps forward, you will be able to cross the river and achieve great success.
Those big stepping stones you can barely see, right at the edge of the fog, are possible objectives and key results. They're close enough that you can perceive them but far enough away that you can only step towards one at a time: No matter which stone you choose, it'll take about three months (one quarter) to get there.
You've got food in your satchel (capital in your bank account) and an unfinished river map (internal knowledge base).
You try to get closer to your ultimate goal with every step. At the very least, you dispel the fog and explore the dark spots on the map.
Through this process, you discover two types of unexpected insights:
Limiting factors that prevent you from making additional progress (e.g., a competitor who turns out to have an exclusive distribution deal with a prospective channel partner) and
Growth factors you can leverage to accelerate forward motion (e.g., an unanticipated customer need for which your proprietary tech is the perfect solution).
Every quarter, you take stock of these insights and exploit them to take bigger and better steps forward. You direct your limited energy toward removing limiting factors and catalyzing growth factors. These insights compound, giving you an information edge, difficult for incumbents and competitors to replicate.
Your teammates are like cells in your body (it's no coincidence that the root of "corporation" means "body"). With scale, they specialize in a departmental structure (organs) with restricted fields of view. The chief executive needs to synchronize these components with his or her strategic intent.
The executive team can achieve synchronization by orienting components toward two aligned ends:
The company's long-term mission + vision and
1x shorter-term objective and 3x key results.
Without those unifying ends, the team's motion will be "stochastic" or "Brownian," i.e., lots of work but little movement in the right direction. It's what happens when your team members work their tails off for weeks or months-but when you turn around to gauge progress, you realize you're not so far from where you started.
Unified or not, those cells (employees) are hungry for calories, so your cash will dwindle regardless of whether you're getting closer to the other riverbank.
With that in mind, if you want to make outsized progress in the right direction while you scale your team, you should select a single proximal objective and maintain focus company-wide with weekly and quarterly heartbeats.
How?
Plan quarterly. Set 1x objective and 3x key results in no more than 5 hours. ("What's the next stepping stone?")
Sync weekly. In 1 hour, rank key results by how confident you are that you'll achieve them and-instead of sharing status updates-focus executive attention on identifying creative ways to increase confidence dramatically by the next meeting. ("How might we get closer to the next stepping stone given what we've discovered in the past week?")
Review quarterly. In 2 hours, "uncover the truth" about what happened over the last quarter; identify insights gained and update your model of reality. ("What are the previously unknown limiting and growth factors that you can draw on your 'river map' and exploit next quarter?")
Once you realize OKRs are like stepping stones in a river between you and your long-term vision, it becomes easier to use them correctly. Then, team members feel unified at every level and know what they need to do to accelerate progress.
That means fewer status updates, more alignment, and faster learning across the company.
It means greater capital efficiency and a compounding competitive edge.
Suddenly, magically, everything seems to work.
And, for VC-backed founders, remember: if you plan on going from 0 to IPO in 10 years, you've only got 40 steps you can take to get across the river. Each OKR is a multimillion-dollar decision. Pick wisely!
Learn how to use OKRs to drive growth
Are you ready to get your team hyper-focused, decrease management overhead, and achieve outsized startup success?
Do you want to cross the river in the fewest number of steps?