By Kate Miroshnichenko

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a popular, collaborative goal-setting framework, popularised by leading businesses across the world. The trouble is that the OKR framework isn’t always implemented in an actionable way that permeates all levels of an organisation.

Jennifer Montague, the VP of Growth at Onomondo, published a blunt verdict in July 2023: OKRs are dead. She argued that the practice of OKR goal setting was nothing more than a quarterly ritual. Goals are set by leadership, reviewed only occasionally, and disconnected from what teams actually do day to day. 

A year later, Ksenia Novikova, the Head of Ops & Growth at Flyer One Ventures, offered a different take. If a company’s OKRs do not work, it is because they were not properly set up or used. 

Taken together, the two perspectives point to the same difficulty. It is not enough for OKRs to be written better, and it is not enough for them to be reviewed more often. To avoid becoming another quarterly exercise, they need to change how a company manages priorities. In other words, OKRs should be treated less as a planning tool and more as a governance transformation. 

As an example of how to implement such a transformation, consider a global technology company that had already tried OKRs once, watched them fail, and then rebuilt the approach from scratch. A year later, it delivered 16 per cent revenue growth in a period when the board had considered 5–7 per cent ambitious.

Why OKRs Fail

When the global tech company first attempted OKRs, the process looked successful at first. With more than 500 employees operating across 195 markets, the company had plenty of complexity to manage. All objectives were clearly written with key results assigned and planning sessions held. The problem was that after such planning, the organisation still felt scattered. Over a hundred initiatives were running in parallel, with each department maintaining its own goal list. The system seemed structured. In practice, it produced the illusion of prioritisation without actual focus.

At the time, company leadership could see this fragmentation. Even after trying to cut the lists down, changes never quite held. Old habits and new mid-quarter priorities crept back into play. Within a couple of weeks, the company reverted to overload, and plans were disrupted as everyone tried to do everything at once. Saying no felt too risky. 

In an effort to fix the problem, the company reached out to SOTA, a business strategy consultancy. The company had already tried implementing OKRs, but in practice, it was failing even when everything looked clean on paper. A second attempt would have to do more than make the process look cleaner from the outside. 

The Solution: Restructuring OKRs

We decided to re-approach OKRs, but in a way that ensured actual delivery of goals. The first change was structural. A cap was put in place to limit the number of Company Objectives to three, each owned by a member of the executive team. Below that sat a small number of Company Key Results, each assigned to a single owner rather than spread across teams or functions. The logic was simple: shared ownership is often no ownership. 

The second change was about what key results were actually measuring. Instead of tracking activities — calls made, features shipped, articles published  — the focus shifted toward outcomes: metrics that would move only if the underlying work was creating real value. Each owner had to know what they were measuring, why it moved, what influenced it, and when to raise a flag if the metric wasn’t moving. 

These changes created an important shift in conversations inside the leadership team. One of the most important effects was that the new structure forced a discussion about what to stop doing. When objectives are limited and outcomes are explicit, resource allocation becomes harder to avoid. Priorities stopped being a list. They became a choice. 

Kate Miroshnichenko

OKR Adoption in Three Stages

OKR restructuring by itself will not change an organisation. It has to be learned, tested, and repeated. That cycle will not happen overnight. In this example, the company moved through three distinct phases over the course of a year.

Phase one was about getting the basics right. Executives set objectives, ownership was assigned, and teams ran their first OKR cycle with close facilitation. It was not about perfecting the system from day one, but about establishing what belonged in OKRs in the first place: the few priorities that were truly strategic, not routine work, process tasks, or business-as-usual activity. In this company, that meant breaking a familiar habit: using OKRs to show how busy teams were, rather than to identify which work mattered most.  

Phase two was about deepening the KR Owner role. Initial team plans were still too broad, with too many operational tasks and too little strategic focus. Rather than accepting that, SOTA worked with KR Owners individually to improve the plans and reframe goals as outcomes rather than activities. A dedicated alignment session clarified what the KR Owner role actually carried: the authority to coordinate across teams, the decisions the owner could make, and what they were expected to say no to. Check-ins were also adjusted so they became working sessions about challenges and progress, not reporting meetings.  

Phase three was less about the OKR process itself and more about how teams used it. KR Owners began leading planning with their teams themselves, bringing in board members only when they needed input. Teams did this with less external support.  What began as a structured intervention was becoming part of how the company ran. 

The Business Impact

After that first year, the company recorded 16 per cent revenue growth against a target of 5–7 per cent, alongside a 19 per cent increase in gross profit. Three quarters in, 75 per cent of employees described the company strategy as clear.

What is worth noting is when the change appeared. Not after the first cycle, and not after the goal-setting session, but after the organisation had run the system long enough for new routines to take hold. A recent study tracking OKR adoption across 21 teams found a similar pattern: perceived goal transparency increased significantly only after multiple cycles, rising as teams moved through successive quarters.

The mechanism, in other words, was repetition. Not the framework on its own, but the operating rhythm around it. 

The Lesson of OKR Transformation

Any company considering OKRs needs to understand that by itself, the framework will not guarantee focus. When it is layered on top of old planning cycles, it becomes nothing more than another quarterly document. 

What makes a difference is whether the company is willing to change around the OKRs. As with the global tech company, real change occurred once OKRs stopped being another plan and became the way priorities were governed. That meant fewer objectives, clearer ownership, regular review, and explicit choices about what not to do. 

The question is not simply whether OKRs are dead, or whether companies are setting them wrong. The more useful question is whether the organisation is prepared for the governance change that working OKRs require.

*Kate Miroshnichenko is a co-founder of SOTA, a Cyprus based company and a expert in strategy execution and organisational transformation.