Teams should set their own OKRs to boost motivation and ownership
Let’s keep this straightforward: the people doing the work should also define the goals. When OKRs come top-down, especially from someone outside the team, it kills initiative. Goals imposed from above tend to miss the mark. They might be technically unfeasible, lack context, or simply not aligned with the day-to-day reality of the team. That’s a fast way to lose momentum and engagement.
In one case, a product owner set ambitious OKRs without involving engineers. What happened next was predictable. The goals weren’t realistic. The team knew it but didn’t push back, due to inexperience and the desire to avoid friction. Instead of inspiring action, the goals felt forced and disconnected.
When teams set their own goals, they care more. They’re not reacting, they’re driving. They own both the ambition and the delivery. That’s when you get actual breakthroughs. Managers and product leads should still guide the process. Their job is to provide business context, not to dictate execution. If they can present clear priorities and leave room for teams to align based on feasibility, that’s where value gets created.
You want your team moving fast and with purpose. That doesn’t happen when they’re just following orders. It happens when they believe hitting their goals matters, because the goals are theirs.
Key results should measure outcomes rather than prescribe actions
Let’s not confuse planning with progress. When teams misuse Key Results by writing them as task lists, they lock themselves into a fixed path. That kills agility. Halfway through execution, smarter options often emerge. But if your OKRs are written like checklists, you lose the flexibility to go after better answers.
Many companies make that mistake. They state the exact work they’re going to do as their Key Results. Then surprise, they find a better way halfway through but feel constrained by what they originally said they’d do. That’s the cost of building rigidity into what should be an adaptive system.
Objectives should be directional and motivating. Key Results should quantify progress toward those outcomes. That’s it. Nothing more. Let the team discover the best way to get there as they go. Encourage early exploration. Do a short discovery sprint. Use that to generate possibilities, but keep those possibilities separate from what you actually measure.
Executives should champion outcome-first thinking. If people focus on how to reach the finish line instead of just following a roadmap, the result is better, and usually faster. Agile companies understand this. They set goals they can measure, not goals that script their steps. It’s how you stay innovative while still being accountable.
Avoid binary key results to properly recognize incremental progress
If your key results are framed as all-or-nothing, you’re incentivizing failure. Progress isn’t always linear. Complex work unfolds over time. When you define a Key Result as a single completed outcome, something that either happens or doesn’t, you ignore everything that happens in between. That reduces visibility and makes your team feel like they missed the mark even when they moved the work forward.
One team aimed to “Switch to our new component library based on the design system.” That sounds okay until you realize it was binary. You either did it or you didn’t. What happened? They got partway through, then hit bandwidth limits. The result? Zero credit. Zero morale. No useful data on what actually got done, just a missed KPI that didn’t reflect reality.
Write key results with gradation. Define what partial success looks like. Define thresholds: 30%, 70%, 100%. Now progress is transparent. Now you have data instead of just outcomes. If you’re running a team or managing strategy at scale, this is critical. You want to reward real movement, not just final delivery.
C-suite leaders need to design for adaptability. When you implement measurable, non-binary results, you’re not lowering the bar. You’re enabling accurate evaluation and better decision-making. It’s a smarter system overall. Everyone wins.
Objectives must be independent to avoid cascading failures
Objectives that depend on each other are a problem. When one slips, it can pull the next one down with it. That’s not just poor planning, it’s poor design. In one case, a team structured their OKRs so Objective 2 required completing Objective 1 first. When they missed the first, the second never started. Hours wasted. Quarter disrupted. No way to course correct.
OKRs are for setting direction. They are not a project schedule. Planning projects has dependencies, that’s fine. But goals for the quarter? They must stand on their own. If Objective 3 depends on Objective 2, and that depends on 1, then you don’t have three goals. You have one big risk.
Separate objectives mean you’re reducing systemic fragility. If something blocks one team stream, it shouldn’t freeze the entire operation. When objectives are independent, you’re building a resilient organization that can absorb disruption and continue delivering.
Executives should pay attention to goal structure. If your teams can’t isolate value streams, your strategy becomes hostage to uncontrollable variables. Avoid alignment paralysis. Design OKRs so each one can succeed, or fail, without dragging the rest of the quarter down with it. That’s how you maintain focus and momentum no matter what happens.
Limit the number of OKRs to ensure feasibility and maintain stakeholder trust
Overcommitting on OKRs is one of the fastest ways to lose credibility. It doesn’t matter if each objective is strong, if you stack too many into a single cycle, your delivery rate will drop. Teams can’t do everything at once. And when they try, priorities blur, execution stalls, and alignment breaks down.
In the case presented, a team already under pressure from missed objectives attempted to recover reputation by promising more. They not only repeated the previous quarter’s objectives but added two more. Early into the sprint, it became clear they wouldn’t hit all three. They missed one almost entirely and only partly completed the rest. Stakeholders weren’t pleased. The team felt like it failed again.
This is where expectations must be set with discipline. Each objective should be ambitious. But the number of them must stay grounded in reality. A better approach is to use scalable key result assessments, such as defining achievement at 30%, 70%, or 100%, to give both teams and stakeholders clarity on what progress looks like across the spectrum. The low-end is a minimum commitment. The top end is a stretch but possible. Everything is transparent. There’s no ambiguity.
For executives, setting fewer, clearer goals is not a compromise, it’s a strategy. It protects your teams from burnout. More importantly, it builds long-term trust inside the organization. If people learn that missing expectations is common, they stop believing in timelines and begin ignoring goal-driven planning entirely. But if your organization reliably commits to fewer things and follows through, you establish a culture of delivery. Trust compounds. Teams get bolder, and smarter. That’s where sustained performance comes from.
Main highlights
- Empower teams to own OKRs: Teams should set their own goals to boost motivation, accountability, and execution. Leaders should provide business context and priorities, but leave ownership of OKRs to those doing the work.
- Focus on outcomes: Key Results should measure the impact of work, not prescribe actions. Encourage teams to experiment and choose the most effective path to the objective rather than locking them into predefined steps.
- Avoid binary metrics: All-or-nothing Key Results discourage progress tracking and reduce morale. Use scaled benchmarks (e.g., 30%, 70%, 100%) to reflect incremental achievement and maintain forward momentum.
- Separate objectives to minimize risk: Interdependent OKRs can stall execution if one fails. Design goals to be standalone so delays in one area don’t block others from delivering outcomes.
- Be realistic with OKR volume: Overloading goals leads to underdelivery and damaged credibility. Set fewer, high-impact OKRs and communicate clear achievement thresholds to align stakeholder expectations and retain trust.
