How to Define Team Level OKRs in 7 Practical Steps (OKR Cycle Step 1 of 3)

This episode is long, but VITAL!

It kicks off your OKRs journey with the most critical step: setting and aligning effective OKRs.

Many teams try OKRs to gain focus, but fall into common traps like:

• Defining too many objectives
• Writing key results as task lists
• Working in silos without clear alignment.

This leads to "busy teams but no progress"

You’ll learn how to avoid these pitfalls by focusing on 1-3 objectives, distinguishing outcomes from activities, and clearly defining why each objective matters now.

Ben also walks you through the importance of mission and alignment to ensure your OKRs connect vertically to strategy and horizontally across teams.

Using real client examples, you’ll see how strong objectives, measurable key results, and cross-functional collaboration come together to create clarity, focus, and impact. If your organization has struggled with OKRs before, you’re not alone, this episode shows you how to get them right from the start.

Sample OKR from today's episode for a marketing team:

Marketing Team Mission: Provide tools to enable our sales team to sell and beat the competition Alignment Check: We depend on sales, product, and customer success. Sales and finance depend on us. Objective: Increase the quality of leads, cost effectively Why Now? We are not measuring the return on investment (ROI) of major marketing spend at events, and our new CEO wants visibility now to create an ROI-based marketing plan next year. Cost per lead at $105 is not viable as we scale and is a key driver in the financial plan. The sales team reports that the quality of leads we deliver is poor.

Key Results:

• Obtain baseline ROI of marketing as measured by reporting revenue/cost for 5 conferences where we spent $50,000 or more
• Reduce overall cost per lead from $105 in Q4 to $75 in Q1
• Double the quality of leads as measured by an increase in leads that convert to opportunity within six weeks of creation from 20% to 40%

Team-Level Mission Exercise:

Characterists of Effective Key Results:

1. “Key” not “all” – Is the key result just “business as usual” or is it a “key” result
2. Specific – Using specific language improves communication and avoids ambiguity
3. Measurable – Progress should not be subject to opinion
4. Results not tasks – Key results are results/outcomes, not tasks
5. Clear – Use High School English with only standard acronyms
6. Aspirational – You achieve more when you set the bar high
7. Scored – Use 0-1 scores to clearly communicate targets, manage expectations
8. Owned – All KRs have an owner who agrees to update progress and ensure the KR does not slip through the cracks

Further Reading: Team-Level OKRs in 7 Steps

For your free 1:1 OKR consult, contact Ben@OKRs.com

Video Training of OKRs Cycle Step 1

Video Training featuring 3 Steps of OKRs Cycle

Thanks for listening and see you next time!