setting-okrs-and-goals

What this skill does

# Setting OKRs & Goals

**Category:** Product Management

**Source:** https://refoundai.com/lenny-skills/s/setting-okrs-goals

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Setting OKRs & Goals | Refound AI

Lenny Skills Database     SKILLS  PLAYBOOKS  GUESTS  ABOUT               SKILLS  PLAYBOOKS  GUESTS  ABOUT                     Product Management   55 guests | 74 insights

Setting OKRs & Goals  OKRs bridge the gap between high-level strategy and weekly execution. They create alignment, cadence, and accountability—but only when done right. The best OKRs are simple enough for anyone to remember, actionable enough to inspire behavior change, and connected closely enough to company goals that success at the team level drives success at the business level.

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The Guide  6 key steps synthesized from 55 experts.

1 Keep it simple: three company goals, max  Goals are communication tools. If you have twenty priorities, you have none. Limit company-level goals to three or fewer to ensure focus. Every additional goal dilutes attention. Make sure one goal clearly 'wins in a fight' when trade-offs are necessary, and assign exactly one owner to every goal.

Featured guest perspectives

"No company needs more than three company goals and the point of company goals is to help people know what the most important things are to success... Ensure one goal 'wins in a fight' to clarify prioritization when trade-offs are necessary. Assign exactly one owner to every goal; if two people own it, no one owns it."

— Molly Graham    "We have three main OKRs that we're focused on for this year, for example, across the whole company. And then we have department level OKRs, many of which are in support of the company level OKRs."

— Annie Pearl        2 Make objectives inspiring, not fluffy  Your objectives should make you excited to get out of bed in the morning. 'Ship the thing' is not an objective—it's a task. Write objectives that capture the change you want to see in the world, meaningful enough to motivate the team. Then define key results as outcomes, not activities.

Featured guest perspectives

"Objectives, people make them so fluffy that they don't have any meaning... Your objectives should make you, when your alarm goes off and you wake up, you go, 'Oh yeah, I'm changing the world today...' And then the key results, it's always going to be tasks."

— Christina Wodtke    "There are three things that really matter about the good OKR, and one is legibility. People look at it and understand what it is... I think actionability, I want OKR to inspire action... And the third one is authenticity, which is, does this actually, honestly depict what you're doing."

— Yuhki Yamashata        3 Focus on input metrics teams can actually move  Don't goal teams on lagging indicators like retention that take months to move. Break down high-level output metrics into the specific input levers that teams can directly influence. Create a translation layer that shows how local team metrics roll up to company goals.

Featured guest perspectives

"We realized we're not really actually working on things that matter to customers that are going to move the needle over the long term... So we then figured out ways to measure them creating a set of input metrics. And so then when we would develop our operating plans... we were hyperfocused on those inputs."

— Bill Carr    "Maybe instead of motivating everyone on GMV, you motivate them on GMV per surface and you divide up the surfaces, or maybe you motivate them on actually different goals that underlie... Can you goal on those input metrics?"

— Ami Vora    "The local team has their own metric that they can directly influence... And then we created via the finance and data team, a translation layer for every team's metric into MAO."

— Sri Batchu        4 Triangulate with a mix of metric types  Use three key results per objective that provide different lenses on success: one hard quantitative metric, one quality or customer-facing metric, and one financial metric. This triangulation ensures you're not gaming a single number at the expense of the whole picture.

Featured guest perspectives

"I like three. I think about it as triangulating. I always like something that's really hardcore numbers. I like something that's a little squishier, like a quality, make sure you don't forget about it. And I usually like something that involves a dollar sign."

— Christina Wodtke        5 Make OKRs dynamic with weekly check-ins  The fundamental unit of OKRs is the weekly commitment. Ask: 'What am I doing this week to get closer to our goals?' This creates a learning cycle where you adapt tactics based on what's working. OKRs without regular review become paperwork, not management tools.

Featured guest perspectives

"What am I doing this week to get closer to our goals?' If you could answer that question, you could give up all the OKR stuff, but if you just asked the question, 'What are we doing this week to get closer to our strategic goals, our longer term goals?' That is the very heart of it."

— Christina Wodtke    "The WBR or Weekly Business Review... It would be a series of metrics for different parts of the business... The way he ran that meeting would lead all those leaders to build these muscles because you wanted to be prepared to speak to the variances or trends in your business."

— Ian McAllister        6 Avoid the common traps: activity goals, over-precision, and metric gaming  Activity goals ('write 10 blog posts') don't drive impact—outcome goals do. Don't chase false precision with complex formulas when rough estimates are fine. And watch for metrics that teams optimize at the expense of customer experience. The goal is better outcomes, not better-looking dashboards.

Featured guest perspectives

"If our goal is to write 10 blog posts this month. And I'm like, no, that's not a goal, that's maybe a tactic. But the goal should be traffic and the conversion rate from that traffic or the signups that come from that. So you shouldn't have activity goals, you should have impact goals."

— Emily Kramer    "One of our key metrics that we always optimized... was DAU... but we often had features that would not lead to a good customer experience and the team would just be blind towards leaving hostile customer experiences in place because it was good for metrics and aggregate."

— Kayvon Beykpour    "Goodhart's law just says, 'Any metric that becomes a goal ceases to be a good metric.'... no metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business because business are complex."

— Tobi Lutke

✗ Common Mistakes

Having more than three company-level goals, which dilutes focusWriting fluffy objectives that don't inspire actionGoaling teams on lagging indicators they can't directly influenceUsing activity metrics instead of impact metricsOptimizing a single metric at the expense of customer experience     ✓ Signs You're Doing It Well

Every team member can recite the company's top three goals from memoryWeekly check-ins regularly reference progress toward OKRsTeam-level metrics have a clear translation layer to company goalsObjectives make people excited to come to work, not just compliantYou adjust tactics based on what you learn, rather than blindly executing the original plan

All Guest Perspectives

Deep dive into what all 55 guests shared about setting okrs & goals.

Ami Vora 1 quote

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"Maybe instead of motivating everyone on GMV, you motivate them on GMV per surface and you divide up the surfaces, or maybe you motivate them on actually different goals that underlie... Can you goal on those input metrics, can you goal on number of people who visit, number of people who convert, number of people who reorder?"  Tactical:  Break down high-level output metrics (like GMV) into movable input metrics (like conversion or reorder rate).Assign unique 'swim lanes' or surfaces to different teams to prevent overlap and friction.

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