OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) — free online maker
Three ambitious objectives, each with measurable results that prove you got there. Guided prompts on every block, autosave in your browser, and one-click PDF export.
45-90 minutes to a first draft6 blocks How to fill it in
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What is the OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)?
OKRs pair a qualitative objective — what you want to achieve, stated memorably — with a small set of quantitative key results that prove whether you achieved it. Objectives are inspiring and directional; key results are numeric and uncomfortable, because they leave no room to argue about whether the quarter went well.
The discipline that makes OKRs work is subtraction. Three objectives per quarter, three to five key results each, and everything else explicitly not a priority. A list of twelve objectives is a to-do list wearing a framework's clothes, and it will produce exactly the same diffuse results as no framework at all.
Developed by Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s as an evolution of management by objectives, and brought to Google by John Doerr in 1999. Doerr's Measure What Matters (2018) made the practice mainstream.
Use it when…
- Quarterly planning, where a strategy needs turning into commitments
- Aligning several teams around a small number of shared outcomes
- Any quarter where everything feels important and nothing is finishing
- Making progress legible to a board or investors between reporting cycles
The 6 blocks, in the order to fill them
- 1
Objective 1
What is the most important thing this quarter?
One qualitative, memorable statement of what you want to achieve. It should be ambitious enough to be motivating and specific enough that people know when it is not happening.
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Key Results — Objective 1
How will you prove it, in numbers?
Three to five measurable results, each with a starting value and a target. The test of a good key result is that two reasonable people looking at the same data would agree on whether it was met.
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Objective 2
What is the second priority?
A second objective, meaningfully different from the first. If two objectives are served by the same key results, they are one objective and you have room for something else.
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Key Results — Objective 2
What numbers prove objective 2?
Same rules: three to five, baseline and target, outcomes rather than activities. Check that these are genuinely within your influence — a key result nobody in the room can move is a forecast, not a commitment, and it will be quietly ignored by week three..
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Objective 3
What is the third — and final — priority?
The last objective. Many teams do better with two, and adding a third because the template has room for one is a real failure mode.
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Key Results — Objective 3
What numbers prove objective 3?
Same discipline again. Before you finish, run one check across the whole page: if every key result here were achieved, would the quarter have been a clear success? If not, something important is missing.
How to fill this block
Worked OKRs examples
Complete, realistic canvases with an analysis of what each one reveals. Open one on its own page, or load it straight into the editor above.
OKRs FAQs
What is the difference between an objective and a key result?
An objective is qualitative and directional — what you want to achieve, stated in a way people remember. A key result is quantitative and verifiable — the number that proves you achieved it. A useful sentence to complete is: 'We will [objective] as measured by [key results].' If the objective contains a number, it is probably a key result in disguise.
How many OKRs should we set?
Three objectives per quarter at most, with three to five key results each. Fewer is usually better. The framework's value comes almost entirely from what it excludes, so a team with eight objectives has gained a document and lost the benefit.
Should OKRs be tied to compensation?
Generally no. OKRs are meant to be ambitious, and scoring 60-70% on a stretch objective is considered healthy. As soon as bonuses depend on the score, people set targets they are confident of hitting, and the framework quietly converts into conservative forecasting. Keep OKRs for direction and use a separate process for performance review.
What is the difference between OKRs and KPIs?
KPIs are ongoing health metrics you watch continuously — uptime, churn, gross margin. OKRs are time-boxed change goals for a specific quarter. A KPI that is drifting in the wrong direction is often the reason an OKR gets set, but the two serve different purposes and should not be merged into one list.