OKRs have moved from a ‘nice to have’ practice to a ‘must have’ practice for companies serious about exponential growth. Let's face it, if your employees are focussing on business-as-usual activities, you are sure to have, well, incremental progress. However, if your company is looking at exponential growth, OKRs become core to your business operating system.
For those who are new to OKRs, here’s a quick overview:
OKRs are a Strategy execution framework that focuses on the vital few rather than the trivial many.
OKRs get teams to focus on the Top 2 or 3 absolute must that have the highest business potential.
Think about it, if your company is looking at very focused outcome-based metrics, there are 12 chances in a quarter during week-on-week check-ins, to course correct rather than dreaded surprises post facto.
OKRs are best when written consistently and tracked in shorter cycles to call out progress, surface risks, and reset experiments that do not move the business forward.
How are OKRs written?
OKRs is an acronym for Objectives and Key Results.
Objectives call out ‘What exactly do we want to accomplish?’
Key Results help us answer the question, what's the eye on the prize or where do we need to land as a team?
Prompt the Fitbots AI Assist for OKRs examples, and you will get a powerful set of OKRs examples linked to an industry and role. Augmented with the power of OKRs practitioners, you are sure to get a winning one.
So, we asked 5 Global OKRs practitioners representing various industries and functions/ departments to share an OKR example.
Apodaca Consulting
Jim is a Strategist, coach, and thought leader with a passion for helping growth-stage start-ups scale in the areas of product, project, and operations management. Using OKRs and Scrum, he partners with organizations to develop healthy autonomous delivery teams and mature agile programs. Jim works with teams to develop measurable outcomes and predictability by creating better organizational alignment and collaboration.
Jim shares his set of Company Strategic OKRs and Tactical OKRs which ladder into moving the needle. What’s unique about this template is to get into a grading on what 90% or 50% looks like to the team.
Objective: Become the market leader for small business financing.
KR 1: Grow market share by 20%
KR 2: Scale our tech stack by 30%
KR 3: Grow our product, engineering, and marketing teams by 25%
Objective: Be the product of choice for SMB financing.
KR 1: Convert 35% of freemium users to subscription
KR 2: Convert 10% of first-time users to subscription
KR 3: Improve sign-up abandonment rate by 40%
Objective: Build a kick-ass tech stack in support of being the market leader for small business financing.
KR 1: Reduce technical debt by 40%
KR 2: Scrum roll out to 25% of product and engineering teams
KR 3: Migrate 80% of core services to AWS
Objective: To be the employer of choice for industry SMB finance.
KR 1: Hire four kickass engineers in DevOps
KR 2: Reduce average lead time for vacancies by 35%
KR 3: Interview 100% of all new hires about their onboarding experience
You could also catch Jim’s podcast on Agile and OKRs right here.
Global OKR Coach, OKRs Training.com
Author and OKRs consultant Kevin Baum is passionate about helping organizations large and small get laser-focused on why they exist, for whom, in order to achieve what outcomes – and how to measure, monitor and improve those results. Since 2003 Kevin has worked with more than 350 organizations across the world as a strategy execution and performance management coach. Kevin's depth of knowledge as a consultant and facilitator spans the spectrum of organizational life – from every level of government to non-profit, private equity, privately-owned, publicly traded, start-up, Fortune 10 companies, and everything in between. Prior to becoming a consultant, Kevin spent 20 years as a government executive, and in that capacity developed a deep and rich appreciation for results metrics as tools to drive decision-making.
Objective: Build a global network of Affiliate partners in order to expand our OKRs service offering on a global scale.
KR 1: Develop standards to Qualify partners by Aug 20XX
KR 2: Increase global affiliate partnerships from X to 14 (by target continent or country)
KR 3: Increase Non-US Web-based inquiries for service from X to Y
KR 4: Increase global affiliate revenue from USD X to Y Million
Catch Kevin’s podcast on how a Fire Chief became an OKRs coach! We truly love this story.
Enterprise OKRs, Agile, and Product Coach at Keybank
Michael Goitein is an Enterprise OKRs, Agile and Product coach at KeyBank. Having been in IT Consulting for 20 years, and 5 years with KeyBank, Michael anchors OKRs at Key Bank which was introduced to them, during an exercise where they re-booted agile transformation.
This is a higher-level example set at a yearly level for a Portfolio or Business Unit.
Objective: Lead the market with the best Fitness SMB SaaS value proposition
KR 1: Increase from 10K to 50K yearly new incremental paid users
KR 2: Increase from $4 million to $6 million in incremental revenue
KR 3: Increase client Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 32 to 45
Please note: these are all set to move Lagging Business Impact metrics.
Objective: Lead the market with the best Fitness SMB SaaS value proposition
KR 1: Increase article call-to-action link clicks from 1% to 3%
KR 2: Increase clients starting free-to-paid upgrade flow from 20% to 40%
KR 3: Reduce client drop-off during upgrade flow from 50% to 30%
Mike’s pro tip: “If we do these Leading metrics effectively at the Team level, and measure them week-over-week, we have a hypothesis this will lead to the longer-term, slower-moving Lagging metrics.”
Do catch Mike’s podcast with Fitbots on How OKRs were introduced to a Legacy Enterprise. Ep 28: OKRs for a Legacy Enterprise (fitbots.com)
Global OKRs Coach, Fitbots
Richa is a strategy execution consultant and OKR Coach, who has deep interest and extensive experience in helping startups and scale-ups achieve their growth metrics. She works with leadership teams to execute their strategic priorities with outcome focus, agility, structure, and transparency using OKRs and outcome-based coaching. While coaching, she focuses on implementing visible changes through coaching, and also creating sustainable behavioral, cultural, and long-term changes which lead to creating real outcomes.
She has worked with more than a thousand teams from Edtech, Fintech, Healthcare, eCommerce, Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Education, companies across all spectrums of valuation and growth
Richa’s coaching combined with powerful questions has helped companies set and drive OKRs to supercharge performance.
Here is a template that Richa recommends.
This is a higher-level example at a yearly level for a Cloud-based ERP company.
Objective: Double down on brand positioning efforts in order to increase revenue share in the SMB segment
KR 1: Increase the list of advocate customers from 250 to 800
KR 2: Increase new logos in the SMB segment from 45 to 70
KR 3: Increase Upsell Based revenues from 300K to 800K
KR 4: Reduce Platinum customers churn from 13% to 8%
KR 5: Increase SMB-led revenues from 1.5 M to 3 M
While company KRs are critical lagging metrics, here are a few leading metrics taken by the SMB Squad (Product+Sales+Customer Success) to increase upsell-based revenues in the SMB segment for 90 days.
Objective: Enhance product features and functioning in order to strengthen upsell-based revenue channel
KR 1: Increase new feature adoption from 28% to 55%
KR 2: Increase C-SAT scores from 3.8 to 4.2
KR 3: Reduce new feature release cycle time from 8 weeks to 6 weeks
KR 4: Increase penetration in key accounts from 18% to 30%
KR 5: Increase upsell-based revenues from 300K to 500K
Director, Global Business Operations, Staffbase
Sarah is leading the OKRs implementation at Staffbase. Sarah has some great experience in Project Management, Business Strategy, and more recently as the Director of Business Operations at Staffbase. We hosted Sarah on the Fitbots Goal Getters podcast, where Sarah shared powerful perspectives on ‘How not to over-engineer your OKRs’ is a must-listen on how OKRs can be made simple using a few hacks.
Here’s a prized template from Sarah’s repertoire on how to drive ESG with OKRs.
Objective: Enhance environmental sustainability & awareness throughout the organization
KR 1: Improve awareness of resources & initiatives through a monthly internal comms post, reaching at least 80% of the global audience
KR 2: Create a consolidated ESG KPI dashboard with at least 75% of KPIs automated
KR 3: Earn an Ecovadis Sustainability Rating, gaining at least a Silver Medal rating
KR 4: Introduce ESG into the procurement process, ensuring at least 80% of new suppliers are in compliance with sustainability standards
We thank all the extraordinary practitioners for their OKR Templates and hope that they provided you with some insight and helped you understand how you can achieve your own OKRs.
At Fitbots, our mission is to help companies drive transformational growth with OKRs, KPIs, and initiative/milestone management, by simplifying how they connect their mission to metrics. Fitbots has worked with over 5,000+ teams, helping them get OKRs right and tracking powerful insights on our software.
With Fitbots, your teams can achieve 10X more by setting & tracking the right outcome metrics, save an average of 450 hours each quarter on report-making and clumsy powerpoints and increase transparency by 100%. We have consistently rated as a High Performer on G2 and are the proud recipients of multiple G2 badges. Our top-rated offerings include:
Click here to book a call with our OKRs expert on how we can help you get OKRs right, and manage them with powerful insights.
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