Why teams often struggle with OKRs: A conversation with Jeff Gothelf

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are one of the most popular frameworks that many companies use to define success; however, many product teams struggle to use them effectively. We sat down with Jeff Gothelf, Author and Leadership expert, to discuss his latest book, "Who Does What by How Much?" and explore how product teams can better leverage OKRs.

We've spent the better part of this year finishing and launching "Who Does What by How Much?" It's an opinionated book that puts a customer-centric spin on objectives and key results to make them powerful and useful. The core focus is ensuring that organisations set goals that are human-centric, rather than feature-centric. Ultimately we want companies to build products that solve real needs for real customers in a meaningful way.

The popularity of OKRs has risen sharply in the last decade, particularly after John Doerr's "Measure What Matters" highlighted their use at Google. Many organisations were drawn in by the message that "Google uses them, and Bono uses them," leading to widespread adoption similar to how companies have embraced other methodologies like Agile and Design Thinking.

However, “Measure What Matters” wasn't a clear guide to  implementing these ideas at scale. While organisations see the value in OKRs and want to emulate successful companies, they often struggle with the deployment and utility of OKRs. This has led to a rash of poor implementation and team burnout across industries.

Until our book, no one had taken a strong, opinionated stance about what good OKRs should look like and, frankly, why they were worth doing at all. We advocate for customer-centric OKRs where the objective is a qualitative statement about a future benefit for customers, and key results are outcomes measuring user behaviour that indicate you have delivered value.

Organisations often get this wrong in two fundamental ways:

Some form of preparation is necessary. While it might seem self-serving since I provide training, you can't simply announce, "We're doing OKRs today" and expect success. Whether through books, classes, or formal training, organisations need to educate their entire workforce about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and what success looks like. This becomes particularly critical when implementing OKRs at scale.

OKRs should enable objective conversations throughout the organisation. When a team is underperforming, the conversation should focus on what the team has learned rather than where they've failed. If leadership feels OKRs don't align with corporate strategy, the team should be able to tell a compelling story about how their goals support the organisation's higher purpose.

For example, if you're on an authentication team and corporate goals focus on cost reduction, you might explain: "We aim to create the most efficient authentication process in online food shopping. This will reduce call centre complaints about login issues by 90%, decrease password reset requests, and reduce time to first purchase." These outcomes directly connect to cost reduction and profit improvements.

If a team can't tell this story convincingly, then leadership might be right about the misalignment, and the OKRs may need adjustment. The key is that these conversations become objective rather than subjective – focusing on what’s actually taking place within the product the team is building rather than stakeholder opinion.

While the basic formula remains consistent across industries, context matters significantly when identifying customers and users. This becomes particularly important in several scenarios:

For example, consider an HR team implementing an unlimited holiday policy. Their key results might include:

However, if they find that people actually take fewer holidays under the new policy, it raises important questions about implementation success and whether the policy achieves its intended outcomes.

Here are the basic guidelines:

The most common question is where to start, especially in large organisations. The key is to start small and scale gradually:

Don't worry about enterprise-level OKR tracking software until multiple teams have successfully used OKRs. The key is to win small, gather evidence, and use that to drive broader adoption.

Rather than asking how AI can help OKRs, we should consider how OKRs can help AI initiatives. OKRs provide an objective lens for evaluating AI implementations by focusing on:

This approach helps organisations avoid implementing AI for its own sake and instead focus on delivering real customer value. When leadership pushes for AI implementation, teams can use OKRs to guide the conversation toward concrete outcomes and user benefits rather than just checking a box.

The framework helps teams ask critical questions:

This objective lens ensures AI implementations actually add value rather than just following trends.