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All the latest research suggests that OKR goal setting can transform performance, but only if we’re working towards the correct goals, which is why we love using research-based OKR examples.
Creating the perfect goal - the kind that motivates an employee to do their very best work - is not only difficult but time-consuming. An OKR template designed specifically for each employee’s role gives them clear guidelines to follow, shows them where to focus their attention and helps them avoid the (sadly very common!) pitfalls associated with OKRs.
Providing your people with OKR examples delivers benefits for individuals, teams and the company as a whole - it brings consistency to goals across the organisation, which helps with alignment and works to eliminate biases.
With that in mind, we’re sharing an extensive library of OKRs examples, including OKR templates for the most common roles across sales, marketing, engineering, customer success and more.
But first, let’s start with a quick guide to using OKR examples.
Contents:
1. The quick guide to using OKR examples
3. Product Management OKR examples
5. People Operations OKR examples
7. Customer Success OKR examples
What are OKRs?
OKRs stand for objectives and key results. OKRs refer to the goal-setting framework that many leaders use to help people across the organisation stay aligned on goals. Through personal and team goals, OKRs help people measure their progress and connect their work to the company’s success.
What are OKR examples?
OKR examples are sample goals designed to give employees a clear idea of what effective goals look like and provide a template for creating their own. An employee may use a sample goal verbatim, but more commonly, they’ll tweak the objective and/or key results to create one that suits their individual priorities and aligns well with team and company goals.
Where will I find the best OKR examples?
Leaders generally find external OKR templates (like the ones we’re sharing below and via our free download) to be really helpful and share them with their teams just as they are. Some leaders tweak these to create bespoke OKR examples specific to their organisation, while others prefer to create their own examples from scratch.
Our performance platform Frankli features a built-in library of OKR examples to make the goal-creation process quick and easy. You can also create and save custom templates for your people to access when creating a goal.
What should an OKR template include?
An OKR example or template should include a sample objective, plus 3 - 5 sample key results.
What are the benefits of using OKR examples?
- They help your people get started with goal setting. Even employees who are experienced with OKRs find the idea of creating them daunting. Using a template is easier, faster and less intimidating than starting from scratch with a blank page or blank form.
- They help your people create more effective goals. Using a research-based OKR template (like the ones we're provided here) ensure that goals are ambitious, measurable and time-bound, and help employees avoid the all-too-common pitfalls associated with OKRs.
- They help align your teams. Goal examples ensure that employees are working from the same blueprint, bringing consistency to goals across the company.
- They help eliminate bias. If goal examples are provided for multiple employees in the same role, it's unlikely those employees will end up with wildly different workloads.
How do I use OKR examples?
- Find the right OKR examples for your teams. Don’t worry too much about the exact figures on the key results - these are easily changed. Instead, ask yourself whether the objectives generally align with your team and company priorities. You can create your own if you can’t find what you’re looking for elsewhere.
- Tweak the OKR examples (optional). You may be happy for employees to do this during the goal-creation process. On the other hand, it may be useful to amend the examples before sharing. Take sample goals for new starters - you may like to amend these to mention onboarding materials and policies specific to your organisation.
- Share the OKR examples with your team members. You can do this by sharing a link to this article, but the most efficient way to do this is through a platform like Frankli. In Frankli, employees have access to a full library of OKR examples during the goal-creation process. All they have to do is search for their title or department and choose the relevant template and it will automatically populate the creation form. At this point, they can tweak the details and add deadlines.
- Communicate the purpose and importance of your OKRs examples to your team members.
The key points are as follows:
- Goal creation should be a collaborative process between employee and manager.
- Personal goals should align with the Team goals, and Team goals should align with the Company Goals.
- Goal examples are not generally used verbatim, the objective and/or some of the key results will need to be edited to suit your priorities.
Be sure to provide:
- Details of where employees will find the goal examples
- A clear expectation of when goals should be set, e.g. by the first day of each quarter
- A clear expectation of how goals should be tracked (spreadsheets Vs dedicated OKR platform like Frankli).
Objective: Research and improve customer satisfaction
Key Results:
Exceed Net Promoter Score (NPS) of over 8.0
Get 1000 survey responses to annual satisfaction survey
Conduct 50 phone interviews with top customers
Conduct 15 phone interviews with recently churned customers
Present an action plan of 10 improvements for next quarter
Objective: Successfully launch version 3 of our main product
Key Results:
Get over 10000 new signups
Get published product reviews in over 15 publications
Achieve sign-up to % trial ratio of over 25%
Achieve trial to % paid ratio of over 50%
Objective: Achieve record revenues while increasing profitability
Key Results:
Hit quarterly revenue of over $1000000
Start sales in 2 new countries
Achieve first quarter revenues totaling over $100000
Increase gross profit margin % from 54% to 63%
Objective: Simplify and clarify our product, messaging, presentation of things we do
Key Results:
25 on-site user-testing sessions to understand key product misunderstandings
10 tests of our recent infographics and slide decks for customer understanding
Get 1000 answers to an online user survey sent to all last quarter's signups
Conduct a team hackathon to create and publish full portfolio of product materials
Present an action plan for next quarter's messaging improvements
Objective: Increase recurring revenues
Key Results:
Reach monthly recurring revenue (€ MRR) of $250000
Increase the share of monthly subscriptions vs one-time contracts sold to 85%
Increase average subscription size to at least $295 per month
Increase annual renewals to 75%
Reduce churn % to less than 1% monthly
Objective: Finish raising new capital for our growth needs
Key Results:
E-mail and phone outreach to 100 VCs and seed funds
Get at least 30 second contact meetings or conference calls
Solicit at least 3 term sheets of our minimum required terms
Close an investment round with the minimum of $10 million pre-money
Objective: Improve internal employee engagement
Key Results:
Conduct 3 monthly meetings
Interview 48 employees on their needs for improving our work culture
Implement using OKRs in all teams
Reach weekly employee satisfaction score of at least 4.7 points
Objective: Be excellent - improve to be the best in whatever we do
Key Results:
All 13 teams to have an internal brainstorm meeting
Benchmark everything related to product to 10 key competitors
Survey 100 customers on their thoughts where we need to be better
Create an action list of 10 company-wide improvement activities
Objective: Successfully launch version 3 of our main product
Key Results:
Get over 10000 new signups
Get published product reviews in over 15 publications
Achieve sign-up to % trial ratio of over 25%
Achieve trial to % paid ratio of over 50%
Objective: Activate user-testing of our product
Key Results:
Conduct at least 21 face-to-face user testing and interview sessions
Receive at least 15 video interviews from Usertesting.com
Objective: Implement new 360-degree product planning process
Key Results:
Document clear role division between sales, marketing, design and development
Decide on and document the process of input methods to and from sales, marketing, design and development back into product management
Integrate user testing into all activities in product planning and design phase
Integrate user testing into pre-launch testing phase
Objective: Research, analyze and understand what our users and non-users really think
Key Results:
Sales team to conduct 50 phone interviews with key accounts
Support team to conduct 50 phone interviews with churned accounts
Product management to interview 25 external team leaders (non-users)
Design team to conduct 30 web-based user testing sessions on new and old users
Objective: Achieve record revenues while increasing profitability
Key Results:
Hit quarterly revenue of over $100,000
Start sales in 2 new countries
Achieve first quarter revenues totalling over $100,000
Increase gross profit % margin from 23% to 54%
Objective: Increase recurring revenues
Key Results:
Reach monthly recurring revenue ($ MRR) of $250k
Increase the share of monthly subscriptions vs one-time contracts sold to 85%
Increase average subscription size to at least $295 per month
Increase % annual renewals to 75%
Reduce churn % to less than 1% monthly
Objective: Kickstart sales process activity indicator improvements
Key Results:
Increase calls per salesperson to 6300 per quarter
Achieve at least 315 demo calls per salesperson per quarter
At least 33% of online signups % reached via calling them back
Have each salesperson spend at least 84 hours per month on support chat
Objective: Collect more accurate sales leads data
Key Results:
Create the list of lead metrics and scripted questions to collect in CRM
Make sure at least 75% of leads have the obligatory question answers filled in
With development automate the data collection from our backend to CRM
Redesign signup form to ask for 3 new obligatory screening questions
Objective: Increase the quality of our sales approach
Key Results:
Make sure at least 50% of signups % called back in first 24 hours
Have all salespeople listen in to at least 10 product demos of other team members
Create a best practices sales process document with minimum allowed service levels
Objective: Improve internal employee engagement
Key Results:
Roll-out monthly 1:1 meetings with all people
Interview 48 employees on their needs for improving our work culture
Implement using OKRs and Frankli software in all teams
Reach quarterly eNPS score of >= 40 points
Objective: Define and promote company culture and values
Key Results:
Survey all employees on our current values (min 75 answers received)
With 3 separate teams, conduct brainstorm sessions to redefine our culture
Design and promote our new values on intranet and in office environment
Objective: Execute recruitment outreach campaign for engineering
Key Results:
Conduct career day seminars in 5 universities
Harvest Linkedin to collect 250 potential new candidates
Organize an open career day at the office with at least 50 participants
Redesign and publish our careers and jobs website section
Objective: Boost manager development and success
Key Results:
Increase participation in our 'First-time Manager Success' training to 83% of first-time managers
Increase Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of the 'Manager' segment by 25% to 58
Create a mentoring program pairing first-time managers with company leadership (Directors, VPs and C-suite)
Objective: Design and launch internal Employee Academy
Key Results:
Survey 15 team leaders on our educational needs and gaps
Talk to 3 other company's HR Directors on how they do internal education
Define 10 training modules and design content for each
Conduct the first 3-day team offsite to test out the Academy curriculum
Objective: Create and celebrate a diverse and inclusive team
Key Results:
Increase women in leadership positions (Director and above) to 43%.
100% of hiring managers, interviewers and recruiters attends our unconscious bias workshop
Increase underrepresented minorities in tech roles to 39%.
Objective: Improve our testing procedures
Key Results:
Implement test-driven development in 3 new development teams
Increase unit test coverage to 75% of code
Conduct a security assessment of our codebase using automated tools
User-test page prototypes on 12 people
Make sure satisfaction score of product management to testing team is at least 7.5
Objective: Refactor our old user management module
Key Results:
Survey 5 external API users regarding issues with our authentication
Discuss the user management code usage with 5 engineers having used it in production
Rewrite and launch new version of our user management module
Rewrite the API user authentication for new version
Objective: Review and improve our data security procedures
Key Results:
For learning, review security policies of 5 other companies
Conduct external penetration testing using at least 2 different software packages
Document our backup policies and make sure they get implemented
Objective: Deliver features to specification and on-time
Key Results:
Average of 90% story point completion rate from sprint max scope to release
No more than 5 days late on releases per quarter
Max 5% hotfix tickets relative to release tickets
No more than 10% increase in story points from sprint start to max scope
Max 5% of tickets get kicked back following UAT
Objective: Build a stable, secure, and scalable platform
Key Results:
No SLA downtime violations
No more than 5% of users experience an error
Average deployment downtime < 30 minutes
100% of feature areas with automated test coverage
Objective: Research and improve customer satisfaction
Key Results:
Exceed Net Promoter Score (NPS) of over 8.0
Get 1000 survey responses to annual satisfaction survey
Conduct 50 phone interviews with top customers
Conduct 15 phone interviews with recently churned customers
Present an action plan of 10 improvements for next quarter
Objective: Improve satisfaction with support team's work
Key Results:
Decrease number of complaints and negative feedback per quarter from 15 to 5
Increase positive feedback items and praise from 5 to 15 per quarter
Increase end-user satisfaction rating from 4.0 to 4.5
Objective: Meet the customer retention targets
Key Results:
Logo churn below 2%
Net MRR Churn below -3%
Increase NPS by 5 points
Objective: Grow a vibrant online customer community
Key Results:
Average posts interactions (likes + comments) > 400
Increase the total number of members by 40%
At least one post every 3 days
Objective: Decrease the churn % for customers post onboarding phase
Key Results:
Identify 2 customer behaviors that precede a customer churn event
Decrease the churn with 4%
Improve customer re-engagement campaigns so customers get back on track faster
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Objective: Simplify and clarify our product, messaging and presentation of things we do
Key Results:
25 on-site user-testing sessions to understand key product misunderstandings
10 tests of our recent infographics and slide decks for customer understanding
Get 1000 answers to an online user survey sent to all last quarter's signups
Conduct a team hackathon to create and publish full portfolio of product materials
Present an action plan for next quarter's messaging improvements
Objective: Activate user-testing of our content
Key Results:
Talk to 10 external editors to receive feedback on our articles and infographics
Conduct 21 face-to-face content testing and interview sessions with users
Organize an online survey with min 100 answers to rate our various content
Objective: Achieve record metrics in all areas of marketing
Key Results:
170000 website visitors
23000 signups7500 trials
3500 new paid customers
Maximum paid user acquisition cost of $25
Objective: Improve our content and its distribution
Key Results:
Implement 12 new channels or mediums where to post old or new content
Get 60 marketing takeaways from reading 1h of marketing materials a day
1 test from a product review site for paid promotion
Objective: Understand our customers and analyze their behavior
Key Results:
Conduct 12 online client surveys and analyze the results
Map our customer journey to understand what influences their buying decision
Map and analyze all of our current marketing channels and give at least 10 recommendations to improve them
Objective: Successfully implement the weekly newsletter
Key Results:
Finalize the content strategy, key messages and topic structure for next 6 months
Grow subscriber base at least 5% per week, getting to 50000 readers
Increase the CTR% to above industry average 3.5%
Objective: Redesign and launch our new landing page
Key Results:
Test existing landing page on external users for understanding issues
Conduct stakeholder interviews with 10 people from sales and marketing
Design new version of our site structure, navigation and all pages
User-test page prototypes on 12 people
With development and marketing, launch by November 1st
Increase visitor to % sign-up ratio from 9% to 15%
Objective: Promote our design team as the best place to work
Key Results:
Apply for 5 external design competitions
Publish 2 open source design and UI/UX freebies
Conduct 3 monthly designer meetups at our office
Objective: Become a strongly design-driven company
Key Results:
Establish a set of live brand and design guides and assets, as PDF and online
Set budget for design software, online presence accounts (like Dribbble), and premium resources that don't make sense to create ourselves (mockup templates, wireframe kits, stock photos and illustrations)
Run at least 1 Google Sprint (gv.com/sprint)
Objective: Support marketing and sales with design deliverables
Key Results:
12 infographic and slide sets
1 special campaign marketing minisite
Objective: Improve the trial sign up flow
Key Results:
Reduce the number of steps to sign up for trial
Increase the percentage of completed sign ups
Reduce number of inputs during the trial
Objective: Improve annual budgeting and business planning
Key Results:
Conduct a day-long planning session with each division manager
Receive business line budget proposals before Sept 1st
Have each business line manager start using our online dashboards
Close the final budget by November 30th
Objective: Finish raising new capital for growth needs
Key Results:
E-mail and phone outreach to 100 VCs and seed funds
Get at least 30 second contact meetings or conference calls
Solicit at least 3 term sheets of our minimum required terms
Close an investment round with the minimum of €10 million pre-money
Objective: Get to grips with your new role at (Company X)
Key Results:
Review your employee handbook
Attend weekly 1:1 with your manager
Meet 1:1 with each member of your new team
Complete AML and GDPR Training
Complete tech setup
