Objectives and Key Results

Objectives (The “What”)

An objective is what you want to do. It describes your mission-supporting goal and sets a deadline for achieving it. We’ve developed some criteria over the years that we believe help make Objectives better but, for now, let’s think of them as the highest priorities your team needs to accomplish in the next 30-90 days.

You’ll constantly come back to your Objectives to inform and check your actions, and they’ll become rallying points for your team.

Key Results (The “How”)

Knowing how to progress toward your Objectives is well… key. Objectives must be paired with a roadmap that will help you know whether or not you’re on the path to meeting your goals.

That’s probably the simplest way to think about Key Results: they are the benchmarks you can measure that track your progress toward the Objective. Typically, there are 3-5 of them per Objective.

Ryan Panchadsaram (@rypan) is the co-founder of WhatMatters.com and is the technical advisor to John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins.

This completes Lesson 2. In the next lesson, we’ll take a look at what all good OKRs have in common.

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