The first months in a management role are a blur of one-to-ones, requests from above and the slow realization that nobody will tell you what your team should focus on. Objectives and Key Results, usually shortened to OKRs, are a simple way of answering that question for yourself and your team. The method comes from Andy Grove at Intel and reached Google through John Doerr in 1999, but a single team with a notebook can run it perfectly well.
In this ZandaX article, we provide a simple, short guide to what the method is, why it suits a new manager in particular, and where people trip up the first time around.
The Two Parts of an OKR
An Objective is a short, qualitative statement of where you want the team to be at the end of a period, usually a quarter. Key Results are the two to four measurable outcomes that would prove you got there. A longer walkthrough of
what OKRs actually are is worth reading before you draft your first set, but the shape is easy to grasp from one example.
Imagine you have just taken over a customer support team of six. Your Objective for the quarter might be: "Customers get a clear answer quickly, without having to chase us." The Key Results could be: first response time falls from 9 hours to 3 hours; the share of tickets resolved in a single reply rises from 41% to 60%; and tickets reopened by the customer drop from 120 a month to 50. None of these says "introduce a new template"; that is something you might do, not evidence that customers are better off.
Notice two things about the example. Every Key Result has a starting number as well as a target, because without a baseline you cannot tell in week five whether you are moving. And the Objective says nothing about how the team will get there. That is deliberate. The Objective is the destination, the Key Results are the evidence, and the work in between is left to the people doing it, which is usually where the best ideas come from.
Why a New Manager Benefits
The most immediate gain is a shared answer to the question "what matters this quarter?" When someone asks whether to spend Friday on the knowledge base or the backlog, the Key Results give you both a reference point that is not simply your opinion. For a manager who is still earning the team's trust, that matters more than it sounds. You are not asking people to follow you; you are asking them to follow a plan they helped to write.
The second gain is a reason to hold a short, regular check-in. Twenty minutes a week, looking at three numbers and asking what is helping and what is in the way, is a habit most new managers struggle to build. OKRs give the meeting a purpose beyond status reporting, and the cadence matters more than the exact wording of the goals. A team that reviews slightly imperfect OKRs every week will do better than a team that wrote perfect ones in January and never looked again.
The third gain is a polite way to say no. Requests arrive from every direction, and a new manager without a stated focus tends to accept all of them. With OKRs you can say "that is a good idea, but it does not move any of the three things we committed to this quarter, so can it wait until we plan the next one?" You are protecting a plan your team helped to write, not refusing on personal grounds. Over a few months this is also how your own manager learns what your team is for.
Writing Your First Set
Don’t write them alone! Block an hour with the team, put the question "if this quarter goes well, what will be true at the end of it?" on the whiteboard, and let people talk before anyone reaches for numbers. The Objective usually emerges from that conversation in plain language. Only then ask what would prove it: which numbers would move, by how much, and where you would read them. If a proposed Key Result has no source of truth, drop it or find one, because a number nobody can look up will never be updated.
Keep the first set deliberately modest. One Objective is fine for a small team; two is the sensible ceiling. Three Key Results per Objective is plenty. Resist the urge to capture everything the team does; OKRs are for the
change you want to make, and the rest of the work carries on regardless.
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The Weekly Check-In
This is the part that decides whether the method works. Once a week, at the same time, the team looks at each Key Result and answers three questions: where is the number now, is it on track, and what is getting in the way? Each person says a sentence or two; nobody presents. The point is to notice drift early in the process. A Key Result that hasn’t moved for three weeks is a signal to change the approach, not a failure that needs to be hidden until the end of the quarter.
Write the answers down somewhere the team can see them, even if that is a shared document. A record of what you believed each week is what makes the quarter-end review honest, and it is the first thing you will want to look back at when planning the next one.
The Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes First Time
The first is too many Objectives. Five Objectives with four Key Results each is twenty numbers to track, which means, inevitably, that the team focuses on none of them.
The second is writing tasks and calling them Key Results. "Launch the new ticketing form" is a task; it can be done without anything improving for customers. A Key Result describes a measurable outcome, not an activity. If you can tick it off without any number moving, it belongs on a to-do list instead.
The third is setting and forgetting. OKRs written in the first week of the quarter and next opened in the last week have done nothing at all. Goals that are never revisited quietly stop being goals, and the team notices long before you do.
The fourth is treating a miss as a failure. If you set a Key Result to go from 41% to 60% and you reached 54%, you improved something real and learned how fast it can move. Ambitious targets that land at seventy per cent are the method working as intended. Let’s face it, targets that are hit every time are usually too small.
Where OKRs Don’t Fit
OKRs are for
change, not maintenance. If your team's job is to keep a process running steadily at a level everyone is happy with, a KPI on a dashboard does that with less ceremony. They also work poorly for a team with no real say over how it works, because a Key Result you cannot influence is just a number to worry about. And avoid tying OKR scores to bonuses; once money depends on the number, people set targets they are certain to hit, and the ambition that makes the method useful disappears.
For a first quarter, keep it modest: one Objective, three Key Results with honest baseline numbers, and a twenty-minute conversation every week. If that habit sticks, the rest follows.
