OKRs Examples from 5 Leading Practitioners
6 min read

OKRs Examples from 5 Leading Practitioners

OKRs Examples from 5 Leading Practitioners

 

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. 

Jim Apodaca

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.   

Annual Company Strategic OKRs

Company: 

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%  

Quarterly Tactical OKRs

Product Team: 

Objective: Be the product of choice for SMB financing. 

KR 1: Convert 35% of freemium users to subscription

  • .5 / Target: Convert 25% of freemium users to subscription
  • .9 / Commit: Convert 10% of freemium users to subscription

KR 2: Convert 10% of first-time users to subscription

  • .5 / Target: Convert 5% of first-time users to subscription
  • .9 / Commit: Convert 3% of first-time users to subscription

KR 3: Improve sign-up abandonment rate by 40%

  • .5 / Target: Improve sign-up abandonment rate by 30%
  • .9 / Commit: Improve sign-up abandonment rate by 15%

Engineering:

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%

  • .5 / Target: Reduce technical debt by 25%
  • .9 / Commit: Reduce technical debt by 15%

KR 2: Scrum roll out to 25% of product and engineering teams

  • .5 / Target: Scrum roll out to 20% of product and engineering teams
  • .9 / Commit: Scrum roll out to 10% of product and engineering teams

KR 3: Migrate 80% of core services to AWS

  • .5 / Target: Migrate 70% of core services to AWS
  • .9 / Commit: Migrate 50% of core services to AWS

Human Resources:

Objective: To be the employer of choice for industry SMB finance. 

KR 1: Hire four kickass engineers in DevOps

  • .5 / Target: Hire three kickass engineers in DevOps
  • .9 / Commit: Hire two kickass engineers in DevOps

KR 2: Reduce average lead time for vacancies by 35%

  • .5 / Target: Reduce average lead time for vacancies by 30%
  • .9 / Commit: Reduce average lead time for vacancies by 20%

KR 3: Interview 100% of all new hires about their onboarding experience

  • .5 / Target: Interview 90% of all new hires about their onboarding experience
  • .9 / Commit: Interview 75% of all new hires about their onboarding experience

You could also catch Jim’s podcast on Agile and OKRs right here.

Kevin Baum 

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.  

Annual Company Strategic OKRs

Company: 

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.  

Michael Goitien

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.


Annual Company Strategic OKRs

This is a higher-level example set at a yearly level for a Portfolio or Business Unit.

Company: 

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.


Quarterly Tactical OKRs

Team: 

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)


Richa Arvind

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.

Annual Company Strategic OKRs

This is a higher-level example at a yearly level for a Cloud-based ERP company.

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


Quarterly Tactical OKRs

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.

SMB Squad: 

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

Sarah Castillio

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.  

Annual Company Strategic OKRs

Here’s a prized template from Sarah’s repertoire on how to drive ESG with OKRs.

Company: 

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.

Fitbots Can Help You Achieve Your 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:

  • 5-Step Method to reduce Strategic/Company OKRs writing to a matter of hours, helping leaders focus on action rather than verbose discussions
  • AI-Assisted OKR Writing to reduce the time spent by teams in crafting effective OKRs that reflect company strategy
  • Alignment and Misalignment Boards that ensure complete alignment such that there is no wastage of time, effort, revenue
  • OKRs and KPIs management alongside a vast number of integrations
  • Progress Boards, Trends Boards, Insights, and Reports at the organization and team level for effective decision-making and performance improvement
  • Individual reports and insights to support performance-related conversations
  • On-demand OKR Coaching and Certification 

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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