Approving a growth target is easier than deciding which growth to pursue. A sales team may want more custom contracts, while a product team needs the same engineers to improve a standard offering. Both teams could write clear objectives and key results, or OKRs, and report progress. Their targets would not settle which customers the business intends to serve.
An OKR pairs an objective—what a team aims to achieve—with key results that make progress observable. It can turn a chosen direction into commitments that other teams can see. It can also reveal that teams mean different things by “growth.” But when leaders leave the underlying choice unresolved, sharper targets can make competing plans look more disciplined without making them compatible.
The choice gives the measure its meaning
John Doerr presents OKRs in Measure What Matters as a way to focus effort, show shared commitments and track progress. Those are useful jobs for a goal system. A target such as “increase new contracts,” however, says nothing about which customers to pursue, what service to promise them or whether fulfilling those contracts is the best use of limited capacity.
Roger L. Martin, coauthor with A.G. Lafley of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, distinguishes a plan of actions and costs from a strategy that explains where a business will compete and why customers would choose it over alternatives. Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, describes strategy as a diagnosis of the central challenge, a guiding approach and actions that work together. These are strategic arguments, not evidence that either author’s method guarantees success. They clarify the question a growth target cannot answer: why is this particular kind of growth worth pursuing?
Without an answer, each function can make a reasonable plan from its own position. Sales pursues contracts, product improves the offering, and customer success protects existing accounts. Conflict appears when the plans require the same people or make incompatible promises to customers. Alignment Debt is the accumulated cost of unresolved disagreement, inconsistent interpretation and weak commitment to shared strategic choices. An OKR review may expose that debt. Editing the key results will not, by itself, resolve the disagreement.
Follow one choice into the work
In a hypothetical business, custom contracts repeatedly require engineering work that its standard offering does not. Leaders face a choice: keep tailoring the product for individual deals, or focus on customers whose needs the standard offering can meet. Suppose they choose the latter because they believe reliability and easier onboarding will matter more to those customers than customization. That belief needs testing; a higher contract count would not establish it.
The choice helps separate terms that are often treated as interchangeable. The strategic priority is to serve customers who fit the standard offering; it guides which work receives scarce attention. A goal might be better retention among those customers. The desired outcome is the change that would indicate progress—for example, more of them renewing without exceptional support. An initiative, such as simplifying onboarding, is work the team believes might help produce that outcome. The priority helps select the goal; an initiative is one possible response, not evidence that the goal has been met.
The resulting objective might be to make the standard offering dependable enough that chosen customers stay. Key results could track renewals in that customer group and the support effort required to serve them, with targets set against actual baselines. Neither measure alone would prove the strategy works. Leaders would also need to watch for contrary signals, such as improving renewals among a shrinking group of suitable customers. “Launch an onboarding program” is an initiative. If it launches without improving the intended outcome, completing the work should prompt a reassessment, not a declaration of success.
Now put a proposed sales OKR beside the product objective. “Increase all new contracts” appears to support growth, but it could reward the custom deals leaders chose to avoid. A sales commitment aimed at customers suited to the standard offering would fit the choice better. Leaders must still decide who can approve an exception, what would justify one and whose engineering work would give way. Otherwise, the trade-off returns with every attractive prospect.
Focus Multiplier is the disproportionate impact created when an organization concentrates scarce resources and attention on the few choices that matter most. In this example, the principle directs attention to whether sales commitments and engineering capacity support the same customer choice. It does not establish that the chosen customers are the right ones. Concentrating on a mistaken choice can make the mistake more consequential, which is why the results and the underlying assumption both need review.
Let the drafting reveal uncertainty
There is a serious argument for writing OKRs before every strategic question is settled. If sales proposes contract volume while customer success proposes retention among standard-offering customers, drafting has surfaced a disagreement that broad language concealed. Leaders may decide that they have enough evidence to choose a direction. They may instead authorize a limited test of both possibilities. In either case, the value comes from making the uncertainty discussable and deciding what to do about it.
Google’s published OKR guidance describes goals as a way to communicate priorities, while cautioning against treating OKRs as task lists or employee evaluations. It also notes that fully achieving a low-value objective may contribute little. More broadly, Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham’s review of goal-setting research finds advantages to specific, challenging goals under appropriate conditions, including suitable ways to perform the task. Their findings concern goal setting generally, not proof that an OKR is strategically sound.
Measurement can create a second problem even when the objective seems sensible. Lisa D. Ordóñez and her coauthors argue that specific goals can draw attention away from important work that the goal leaves unmeasured. That is a risk to examine, not an inevitable effect of OKRs. If the hypothetical business tracks renewals but ignores the exceptional engineering effort needed to secure them, its score may improve while the customer approach becomes harder to sustain. The practical question is whether hitting a key result would be credible evidence of progress, and what else leaders must inspect alongside it.
A study by Jenna Butler, Thomas Zimmermann and Christian Bird of one software company found that translating high-level goals into workable measures and tasks remained difficult; managers, communication and access to data mattered. Its single-company findings do not show that OKRs improve competitive performance. They do reinforce a narrower point: agreeing on a measure takes conversation about what the goal means and how the work will be done.
For an early-stage business, a provisional OKR may be a useful way to organize learning. Leaders can state the uncertain customer assumption, limit the resources committed and agree when they will review the evidence. If two tests need the same engineers, they must also decide how capacity is divided and what finding would change that allocation. Calling both directions priorities does not remove the constraint.
Approve the choice and the measure together
Before approving an OKR as aligned with strategy, ask what problem it addresses, which customers and approach the business has chosen, and what attractive work will stop or wait. Check whether scarce people, funding and decision authority follow that choice. Then ask whether the key results would show meaningful progress and which contrary signals deserve attention.
Review functional OKRs side by side rather than approving each team’s set in isolation. Put their customer groups, intended outcomes and requests for shared capacity on the same page. If two objectives require the same people for opposing purposes, the useful result of the review is a leadership decision. Tidy wording can follow it.