Best Objectives and Key Result Examples

What is OKR and why do we need examples?

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. It's a lightweight goal setting framework used by teams and organizations to set, align and track measurable goals. OKR empowers your teams to achieve their biggest goals with focus.

It's game chaining for any business wanting to get the entire business behind the biggest priorities.

OKR is used by industry giants like Google, Amazon and LinkedIn to inspire their teams and drive growth. They've been using it since they were small start ups. Here's why... 

It's been proven time and time again to drive growth for highly competitive business. In fact, this is why it was created. Andy Grove invented OKR at Intel in the late 60's during the chip wars with Motorola. It was the secret sauce for Intel winning the chip war, and that's why so many tech firms have embraced it to drive their success.

Why is it important to have good OKR examples? Wether you're starting out or highly experienced with OKR, you can get inspiration from well written OKR Examples. They show you how to structure a well written OKR and what content you should include.

On that note, let's look at what makes a great OKR!

What does a great OKR look like?

First, why another OKR example blog? Yes there is loads of them out there. Most of the examples out there are terrible. Here's why...

Most examples have Key Results that are actually a todo list. This mistake creates busy work and stops the team from thinking about what success looks like. Instead, they just try and get the job done (and miss out on the benefits).

Let's look at a good vs bad OKR example. Let's say “Release a new version of the app” is a terrible example of a Key Result. Maybe the outcome they’re looking for is  “Increase customer satisfaction from a score of X to Y”. For most products (but not all), that's still a lagging indicator. So maybe, a good leading indicator of people liking the app is repeat users. So that would give 

This is a common mistake we see in OKR Examples in other blogs. If it's not that, they using lagging indicators instead of leading indicators. Otherwise, you can do a load of work, but not actually achieve the Key Result within the quarter.

So what makes a good OKR? Our OKR Cheat Sheet summarises the key attributes, but here’s a breakdown of a good OKR. The key element is that Key Results:

• There is a clear “To” and “From” metric to improve clarity.
• Is a leading indicator.
• There’s clear scope of where we will focus.

While this may not be the longest or complete list, it’s the best examples we have seen that articulate quality OKRs. Most are based on real-world examples from companies we have worked with. Seen a better article? Please let us know!

Company OKR Examples

Objective

Become the number one accounting provider for Small businesses in San Francisco

• Key Result 1: Build an awesome experience which increases the reorder rate from 45% to 70%
• Key Result 2: Become a customer problem-solving machine by increasing first call resolution from 75% to 90% maintaining our per customer case rate
  
• Key Result 3: Business see the benefits of generating an increase in Marketing Qualified Leads from 60 MoM to 200

HR Example

Objective

Create high impact leaders across the business

• Key Result 1: Leaders believe they have the tools and practices needed to effectively lead from 50% to 100%
• Key Result 2: Team members believe managers help set performance goals from a median of 2 to 4
• Key Result 3: Team members believe their leaders communicate an inspiring vision from 52% currently to 75%

Sales Examples

Objective

Have our customers fall back in love with our offering

• Key Result 1: Increase customer number of customers who return twice in a week from 10% to 40%
• Key Result 2: Customers referral rate from 25% to 60%
• Key Result 3: 50% increase in customer satisfaction
• Key Result 4: Increase first-month customer satisfaction from 3 to 4.

Objective

Become the go-to accounting platform for NCY independent consultants

• Key Result 1: Increase Marketing Qualified Leads from $600K to $1M for NCY independent consultants
• Key Result 2: Increase Sales Qualified Leads from $400K to $600K NCY independent consultants
• Key Result 3: Reduce time from Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Qualified Leads from 10 days to 2 days
• Key Result 4: Increase Sales journey customer satisfaction from 4 to 5

Objective

Crush our launch in Melbourne, Australia

• Key Result 1: Generate $200K in Sales Qualified Leads in Australia
• Key Result 2: Progress leads from Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Qualified Leads within 2 days
• Key Result 3: Maintain a Sales Qualified Leads to Close conversion ratio of above 20%
• Key Result 4: Maintain a profit margin ratio of 45%

Objective

Be the best sales team in the industry

• Key Result 1: Increase speed to respond to leads from 2 days to 2 business hours
• Key Result 2: Increase Sales journey customer satisfaction from 4 to 5
• Key Result 3: Reduce cool down period cancellations from 5% to 1%
• Key Result 4: 100% of customers are informed of cool down cancellation policy (countermeasure for KR3)

Finance Examples

Objective

Create a lean and mean Finance machine

• Key Result 1: Speed up the end of month cycle time from 2 weeks to 4 days
• Key Result 2: Increase accuracy of financial inputs from 95% to 100%
• Key Result 3: Increase end of month cycle employee satisfaction from 2 to 5

Objective

Create a lean operation business

• Key Result 1: Reduce failure demand across technology and operations teams from 25% to 10%
• Key Result 2: Increase team turnaround time from an average of 20 days to 10 days
• Key Result 3: Increase customer satisfaction from 4 to 4.5

Objective

Prime ourselves for growth with stellar funding options

• Key Result 1: Reduce average funding costs from federal funds rate +2% to federal funds rate +.5%
• Key Result 2: Reduce additional funding approval time from 30-day average to 2-day average
• Key Result 3: Increase loans with an early repayment option from 25% of loans to 75% of loans

Operations Examples

Objective

Create a world-class customer contact centre

• Key Result 1: Increase first call resolution form 90% to 98%
• Key Result 2: Increase customer satisfaction from 4 to 4.5
• Key Result 3: Increase customer retention rate from 85% to 95%

Objective

Surprise our customers with rapid delivery

• Key Result 1: Reduce average time to ship from 48 hours to 10 hours
• Key Result 2: Reduce parcel damage rate from .02% to .01%
• Key Result 3: Increase delivery address accuracy from 98% to 100%
• Key Result 4: Speed up return restocking from an average of 10 hours down to 2 hours

Objective

Crush our approach to managing risk events

• Key Result 1: Increase flow efficiency of risk events from 20% to 60%
• Key Result 2: Reduce 12 month or greater open risk events from 55 to 10
• Key Result 3: Increase risk event closure customer satisfaction from 20% to 60%

Technology Team examples

Objective:

Launch the new Business Intelligence tool to empower internal teams with enhanced data-driven decision-making capabilities within this quarter.

Key Results:

1. Increase user adoption of the new BI tool from 0% to 70% among eligible internal team members.
2. Elevate trainee confidence in using the new tool of 80% or higher.
3. Make it easy to use with an average customer effort score of 2 or less (on a scale of 1-5, where 1 is very easy and 5 is very hard).

Objective:

Boost team collaboration and productivity with a new video conferencing tool.

Key Results:

1. Increase video conferencing tool adoption from 0% to 80% among team members by the quarter's end.
2. Reduce technical issues from an estimated initial 30% to below 10%, enhancing user experience and reliability.
3. Improve user satisfaction score from initial feedback of 3.0 (out of 5) to 4.5, reflecting better usability and feature quality.

Objective:

"Strengthen organizational cyber defenses and improve overall cybersecurity resilience."

Key Results:

1. Reduce phishing email click-through rate from 15% to below 5%, showing increased employee vigilance.
2. Achieve a cybersecurity drill response time under 30 minutes, down from the current average of 60 minutes.
3. Increase monthly system scan completion rate from the current 70% to 100%, ensuring thorough and proactive vulnerability identification.
4. 
   

NGO Examples

Objective

Have our donors become our biggest advocates

• Key Result 1: Reduce time to thank donors for contributions from 7 days to 8 business hours
• Key Result 2: Increase twice-weekly use rate from 2%of donors to 15%
• Key Result 3: Increase donor referral rate from 5% to 15%

Objective

Save lives in 1 village of a developing nation by reducing preventable disease

• Key Result 1: Observation and survey results show 80% increase in handwashing with soap
• Key Result 2: Rate of communicable disease decreases by 60%

Product and Engineering

Objective

Have our customers fall back in love with our products

• Key Result 1: Deliver an incredible experience to increase satisfaction from 40 to 80
• Key Result 2: Deliver an incredible first-time user experience to increase initial satisfaction from 10 to 80
• Key Result 3: Make the experience sticky to increase customers who return twice in a week from 10% to 40%
• Key Result 4: Help our customers share the love by increasing the referral rate from 25% to 50%

Objective

Grow by making our upgrade path feel like butter

• Key Result 1: Increase sign-up to trial conversion ratio from 10% to 30%
• Key Result 2: Increase trial to paid conversion ratio from 5% to 7%
• Key Result 3: Increase referral rate for < 1 month paid accounts from 2% to 30%

Objective

Make it easier than ever to share an article

• Key Result 1: Reduce time to publish a post from 5 seconds to 3 seconds
• Key Result 2: Reduce time reshare a post from 7 seconds to 2 seconds
• Key Result 3: Increase customer share satisfaction from 3 to 4

Agile Coach Examples

Objective

Create a digital team that can consistently deliver awesome

• Key Result 1: Reduce cycle time for planned and structured work from 10 days to 2 days
• Key Result 2: 100% of all work items > 2 weeks follow pull based delivery lifecycle
• Key Result 3: Consolidated mission teams where 100% of team members believe they have a near term roadmap

Objective

Trained teams are crushing it with Agile

• Key Result 1: 100% of teams self-report as “Proficient” with their agile ways of working
• Key Result 2: Increase flow efficiency from 10% to 25%
• Key Result 3: Mean time to deploy down from 7 days to 5 days