How to write great key results
The key results you choose will make or break your OKRs. Learn how to pick the right ones for your team, company, and product.
Key results tell us if we’re getting closer to achieving our goals.
They seem simple, but writing great key results can be hard.
The perfect key result
Since key results measure our progress towards an objective, the best key result is a direct measurement of that objective itself. For example, say we have an objective to “Make our website more resilient”. That’s a laudable goal and ideally, there’s a number on a dashboard somewhere that says “Website Resiliency: 12”. Perfect! Our key result might be “Increase Website Resiliency from 12 to 17”.
That’s a great metric. It’s clear, concise, and verbatim what we’re trying to achieve with our objective. The only problem is it’s impossible to measure. Site resiliency is multi-dimensional and trying to bundle the different aspects of that goal into a single number doesn’t work. It’s like trying to measure “engagement” or “satisfaction” or “alignment” — fantastic things to aim for but you can’t calculate them directly.
Direct measurement is wonderful when it works, but it almost never does.
