Introduction

Over the past few years, more and more product organizations have started adopting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to define goals. That’s good news—at least in theory—because OKRs are supposed to help Product Managers stay focused and align their work with broader company priorities.

In practice, though, it doesn’t always go smoothly. I've seen teams hit roadblocks like:

• Predefined OKRs that are really just feature lists, leaving no space to focus on behavior change

• PMs wondering how OKRs actually help with Discovery and Delivery, beyond adding another layer of process

• A general lack of clarity around how OKRs tie into Product Strategy, Discovery, Roadmaps, and Scrum

Sound familiar? If so, this guide will give you practical answers—and real examples—to help you make OKRs actually work in Product Management.

The success of OKRs isn’t just about picking the right metrics. It’s about how you use them.

Product Teams spend a lot of time deep in Discovery or Delivery. But when they step back to figure out the next move, they shouldn't just find a list of features and deadlines.

That’s the real difference between using OKRs effectively and just copying someone else’s playbook.

Content Overview

• OKR Fundamentals for Product Managers

• How to Define OKRs in Product Management

• Using OKRs for Everyday Decision-Making

• Finding Your Own Path to Outcome-Focused Work

Chapter 1: The Fundamentals of OKRs

From a Product Management Perspective

Let’s start by getting on the same page about what OKRs are and how they fit into Product Management.

Your Main Takeaways

• What OKRs can actually bring to Product Management

• Why OKRs aren’t a substitute for Product Strategy—and what to do instead

• Why understanding your “why” for using OKRs is the first step

What Are the Benefits of Using OKRs in Product Management?

Christina Wodtke, in Radical Focus, offers a helpful framework for thinking about OKRs:

“An Objective is like a mission statement, only for a shorter period of time. A great Objective inspires the team, is hard (but not impossible) to accomplish in a set time frame, and can be done by the person or people who have set it, independently.

Key Results take all that inspirational language and quantify it. You create them by asking a couple of simple questions: How would we know if we met our Objective? What numbers would change? A company should have two to five Key Results per Objective. In general, Key Results (KRs) can be based on anything you can measure.”

What Makes a Strong OKR Set?

Christina Wodtke continues:

“If you select your Key Results wisely, you can balance forces like growth and performance, or revenue and quality, by making sure you have both the potentially opposing forces represented.”

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Example: A Balanced OKR Set
Objective: We are an integrated and mature platform solution.

• Key Result 1: Our Enterprise client satisfaction rate is > 75%.

• Key Result 2: No sales pitch is lost due to “immaturity of the product.”

• Key Result 3: 100% of interviewees associate our website with the terms enterprise, trustworthy, and capable.

That covers the technical side of OKRs. But let’s go a level deeper—because in the real world, effectiveness isn’t about checking boxes. It’s about whether the OKRs actually help your team focus and deliver.

Based on my work with product organizations around the world, I’ve found three signs that OKRs are genuinely working—beyond just following the textbook.

1. Grounded in Evidence or Structured Exploration

OKRs are designed to focus a team’s energy. But focus only happens when there’s a clear reason why a particular goal is worth the team’s time—especially compared to day-to-day tasks.

That clarity usually comes in one of two ways:

• Access to strong evidence that shows which behaviors need to change in your audience (internal or external)

• Using OKRs to guide and track structured, explorative Product Discovery

Outcome OKRs don’t magically appear. Teams need to dig into the problem space first.

And importantly, Outcome OKRs don’t list features. They define the impact your team aims to create, not how many features you push live.

2. Relevant to Day-to-Day Decisions

You could write the most well-crafted OKRs in the world. But if they don’t affect how your team makes decisions, they’re not helping.

When Key Results only shift in hindsight—or when they point to areas outside the team’s control—they won’t guide real action.

OKRs don’t have to represent all the work a team does (yes, maintenance matters), but they should reflect what matters most.

If your OKRs can’t shape the way your team works this week, they’re probably not the right OKRs.

3. Tied Directly to Company Priorities

Good OKRs aren’t created in isolation. They should be aligned across every level of the company.

It’s common for leadership to set the high-level OKRs. But the key is what happens next—ensuring teams are part of the process and can translate that strategy into their own context.

Practice Tip: Plan for Alignment Early

Build in time before the new quarter starts for alignment across teams. That way, you avoid the “last-minute scramble” where teams draft OKRs in isolation and commit without clarity.

When each team has time to align with company direction, they can define OKRs that clearly contribute to broader goals. Starting or ending each quarter with a company-wide OKR effort dramatically reduces misalignment and confusion.

Connecting OKRs to the Bigger Picture

One of the most effective ways to avoid “OKR Theater” is to clearly understand what benefits you're expecting from OKRs—and make sure they’re connected to how your organization actually works.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at how OKRs relate to other key areas in Product Management.

How Are OKRs Different from Product Strategy?

OKRs and Product Strategy have a shared purpose: helping teams make better decisions at every level of the organization. But they play different roles.

Product Strategy lays out the broader direction—how you move toward your long-term Product Vision.
OKRs, on the other hand, break that strategy down into concrete goals for a shorter time frame, like a quarter.

A helpful way to think about this is what I call the Product Strategy–Metrics Sandwich. It’s a simple mental model that shows how Strategy and OKRs work together—and where each fits in the flow from vision to execution.

The Role of Product Strategy in Shaping OKRs

Product Strategy is all about making focused choices and trade-offs. These choices typically follow a few shared patterns, regardless of the framework or canvas you’re using:

• Strategic Narrative: This provides the why behind everything else. It includes your Vision, guiding Principles, and your mid-to-long-term goals. Together, these elements build the context for your decisions.

• Playing Field: This defines where you’re competing. It includes your target market—both internal and external audiences—their most urgent jobs to be done, and the current alternatives they’re using.

• Winning Moves: These are the strategic bets you’re making to stand out on that playing field. Think: distribution channels, value propositions, key offerings, and how you plan to differentiate from competitors.

The decisions made in each of these areas feed directly into a Product Team’s OKRs. Essentially, you're answering the question:
“How would success look if this strategy works?”

From there, you define Key Results that help the team validate whether their actions and tactics are actually supporting the strategy.

Taking Ownership of Strategy as a Product Team

A strong Product Strategy should clearly highlight what’s missing in the current state—and set the priorities needed to reach the product’s future vision.

But here’s the thing: if the strategy isn’t clear, it’s not just a leadership issue.

Product Teams shouldn’t sit back and wait for clarity from managers or the C-suite. Instead, they can—and should—take initiative to define direction themselves. Tools like the Product Field can help teams collaboratively map out their strategic focus and quickly spot blind spots.

Getting to the “right” set of OKRs is rarely a one-shot effort. It’s an iterative process—often both within a single cycle and across multiple ones. But the whole process becomes a lot smoother when you’ve got a solid strategy in place to start from.

The OKR Cycle for Product Teams

The standard OKR cycle is usually a quarter. But that’s not a hard rule.

Depending on your business model—B2C vs. B2B—or other operational factors like your company’s fiscal calendar, you can and should adjust the cycle length to what actually works.

What matters most is this:

• You want enough time to observe meaningful progress toward your Key Results.

• You don’t want the timeframe to be so long that priorities become outdated or predictions fall apart.

Pick a cycle that helps you strike that balance.

Make Check-Ins Count

One of the biggest advantages of using OKRs—besides setting Outcome-focused goals collaboratively at the start of a cycle—is what happens during the cycle.

Here’s a hard truth:
If you don’t regularly check in on your OKRs, don’t act surprised when you fall short at the end.

OKRs aren’t just a kickoff ritual. They’re a tool to guide what you actually do each week. That means checking progress on each Key Result weekly or biweekly and making real decisions based on that data. Which actions are moving the needle—and which aren’t?

This isn’t just another box to check. It’s your opportunity to adjust course before it’s too late.

We’ll dig deeper into how your OKR cadence ties into Product Discovery later on.

Starting with the WHY Behind OKRs

Like any framework, there’s no one “right way” to use OKRs. But there are smarter ways to tailor them to your team and company—based on your goals, structure, skills, and incentives.

That tailoring should start with one thing: your WHY.

Before jumping into implementation, sit down with your Product Team—or your product management community—and ask:

• What kind of organization are we trying to build? What patterns do we want to see?

• Why do we want to work with OKRs in the first place?

• What are we hoping OKRs will help us achieve in Product Management?

Once you’ve clarified the outcomes you’re aiming for, start tracking them. But don’t try to overhaul everything at once. Focus your early efforts where they’ll make the most impact.

Is the goal to create more transparency?
Improve collaboration?
Shift the mindset from outputs to outcomes?

Breaking that vision down into something actionable helps avoid turning OKRs into a bloated system of meetings and busywork.

Define the MVP for Your OKR System

Even in the early stages, you’ll want to establish a few foundational elements to avoid analysis paralysis. Ask yourself:

• Will you start with a pilot team? If so, which one?

• Who’s responsible for guiding the team through OKR planning and check-ins?

• What does your decision-making model look like? Bottom-up? Team lead veto? Top-down?

• Which parts of the team’s work will OKRs cover?

• Are OKR measurement and reflection built into existing tools and routines? If so, how—and who owns that?

Start small. Expand over time as you learn what works.

In practice, adopting OKRs consciously starts with a clear WHY and extends through to the tactical connections with everyday Product Management.

Chapter 2: How To Define OKRs in Product Management

To actually help your team focus and measure progress, OKRs need to go beyond surface-level “best practices.” This chapter is about how to lead your team through drafting OKRs that actually work.

Your Main Takeaways

• What inputs you need to define meaningful success criteria

• How to distinguish between Outcome and Output OKRs

• How to define OKRs that actually track your team’s progress

Capturing a Holistic View of Product Success

Asking “What does success look like for this product at the end of the cycle?” is a tough question—especially if your team doesn’t have clear inputs to work from.

Bottom-up autonomy is great, but it doesn’t guarantee clarity.

It’s up to the Product Team to either ask for or generate the context they need to define OKRs properly. These inputs may include:

• Quarterly or annual company/department OKRs

• The company's Purpose and Vision

• Product Vision and Strategy

• Previous OKRs or theme-based Roadmap items

• Product Discovery insights (validated user problems or solutions)

Why Inputs Matter When Defining OKRs

The quality—or absence—of strategic inputs often reveals deeper issues within a team or organization.

Think about it:

• How can a team define Key Results focused on outcomes, not just tasks, if they don’t have access to users or lack Product Discovery skills?

• How are teams supposed to connect their work to business goals if there’s no clarity on the company’s direction?

• And how can OKRs align across teams if no one’s communicating about high-level priorities?

Each of the inputs we discussed earlier offers value. But in my experience, the lack of a clear Product Strategy is the most damaging.

If you don’t have a tangible Product Strategy, it honestly doesn’t make sense to use OKRs.

That doesn’t mean you need to complete every input on a checklist before writing OKRs. Instead, treat them as guidance. If you’re missing one or more, prioritize closing those gaps in the next cycle. The stronger your foundation, the more useful your OKRs will be.

Go Beyond Surface-Level Metrics

Success, as measured by Key Results, shouldn’t be a recycled list of the same KPIs you already track.

Yes, it’s fine to start with familiar metrics like revenue or growth. But don’t stop there. Push yourself to explore other measurable signals of product success.

Examples of Holistic Success Metrics

• Conversion rate of a specific product or feature

• Customer satisfaction (NPS or similar methods)

• Reviews on platforms like G2 or the App Store

• Onboarding completion rates for new users

• Sales team behavior changes (e.g., fewer follow-up calls to demo a feature)

• Outcomes from user testing sessions or experiments

• Churn or retention trends based on customer behavior

The goal is to build a fuller picture of success—not just one dimension of it.

How to Define Meaningful OKRs with Your Product Team

Defining OKRs in Product Management isn’t a solo act. It should be collaborative, with input from the entire cross-functional team—PMs, designers, engineers, and more.

A practical way to do this is through a workshop, where a facilitator guides the team through the process. This allows everyone else to focus on contributing meaningful content instead of managing the flow.

Start with Shared Context

Before anyone starts suggesting Objectives or Key Results, everyone needs to understand the context for the upcoming cycle. That includes reviewing all relevant inputs—and ideally having the owners of those inputs present to explain the intent behind them.

This step ensures nothing gets lost in translation and avoids drafting OKRs based on secondhand assumptions.

Don’t Get Stuck on a Linear OKR Process

Traditional OKR advice usually suggests defining the Objective first (the qualitative part) and only then writing the Key Results (the quantitative part).

But in reality, this linear flow often backfires.

Crafting a strong Objective is more art than science—and many teams get stuck trying to wordsmith the perfect sentence. Meanwhile, progress stalls.

Here’s the truth: Sticking to a rigid order isn’t more important than making progress.
Many Product Teams benefit from a non-linear approach to drafting OKRs. Sometimes starting with potential Key Results helps you reverse-engineer a clearer Objective. And that’s okay.

Keep Your OKRs Aligned with Your WHY

As you brainstorm OKRs, the main thing to watch for is whether your ideas actually match the WHY behind your OKR system—and whether they reflect the right level of discussion.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of defining OKRs that sound useful but don’t really support your goals or context. Stay grounded in your purpose.

The Danger of “Trickling Down” Key Results Through Cascades

Using OKRs across multiple levels of a company isn’t inherently a problem. But it can create complexity fast—and not the helpful kind. Here are two tips that simplify things and avoid common pitfalls:

1. Less Is More

Minimize the number of OKR cascades wherever possible.

• Company-level OKRs? Helpful and necessary.

• Department-level OKRs? Often more trouble than they’re worth.

In most cases, department OKRs limit Product Teams by nudging them toward Output-focused goals instead of Outcome-driven ones. That shift can quietly derail your OKR efforts.

2. Weak Links, Not Strong Ties

There’s a persistent myth that each Key Result in a higher-level OKR must directly translate into a team’s Objective. That’s not true—and trying to force this kind of cascade usually leads to awkward, misaligned goals.

Instead, treat high-level OKRs as input, not blueprints. They should inspire and inform the team’s thinking—not dictate it.

Keep the OKR Corridor Wide Enough

If you’re aiming for bottom-up, Outcome-driven OKRs, don’t narrow the path too early. Forcing team-level OKRs to mirror higher-level ones defeats the purpose of empowering teams to focus on real behavior change.

Differentiating Outcome and Output OKRs

There’s a common misconception that OKRs naturally come with built-in Outcomes. But setting goals without a clear distinction between Outcomes and Outputs will almost always limit the conversation—and lead straight to solution-first thinking.

Let’s clarify the difference.

What’s an Outcome?

An Outcome is a measurable change in behavior that contributes to a larger Impact.

This definition is inspired by Josh Seiden’s Outcomes Over Outputs—and it’s one of the most important shifts a Product Team can make.

An Outcome is a change in human behavior that creates an Impact.

What’s an Output?

An Output is the artifact delivered through work. It’s the feature, the release, the thing you built. It’s one way—sometimes a great way—of achieving that behavior change. But it’s not the change itself.

OKRs Can Include Either—But You Need to Know the Difference

There’s nothing wrong with setting Output-based Key Results. Depending on your team’s experience with OKRs, it might even be a more practical starting point.

But if you're trying to force every Key Result into an Outcome “just because,” you’ll likely get stuck.

The key is awareness. Know whether your OKRs are focused on what you’re building or what you’re trying to change. That clarity is what helps teams improve their OKRs over time and stay aligned on what success actually looks like.

Tip for Practice: Use “How Might We…” Statements

Try rewriting your Key Results as “How might we…” questions. It’s a simple way to check if you’re focused on real Outcomes—or if you’ve slipped into feature-mode too soon.

Example: Outcome vs. Output OKR Sets

Here’s how the difference plays out in practice:

Outcome-Based OKRs Are More Than Just Rewriting Metrics

As we’ll explore later, moving toward Outcome-based OKRs in Product Management isn’t just about rewording your Key Results to sound more “Outcome-ish.” There’s a deeper shift in how you define success and what you measure along the way.

Balancing Specific and Responsive OKRs

Picking the Right Leading or Lagging Indicators 🔗

One of the biggest advantages of using OKRs in Product Management is the ability to track progress—and actually adjust your actions while there’s still time.

But that only works if you go beyond the Outcome vs. Output debate. It’s not just about what you measure, but when that measurement becomes meaningful.

Yes, aiming to describe behavior change is a great goal. But if all your Key Results are lagging indicators, you won’t see the impact of your work until it’s too late to act on it.

It’s okay if some of your Key Results are more action-oriented and not perfectly “by the book.” If they help your team make better decisions sooner, they’re doing their job.

Understanding Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

This is where the concept of leading and lagging indicators comes in—and it’s often overlooked in OKR planning.

• Lagging indicators are outcomes that show up after the fact—things like revenue, customer retention, or app store ratings. They’re useful for reflection but hard to influence directly in real time.

• Leading indicators are early signals that point toward the outcomes you want. They give teams a chance to respond and make changes before the quarter is over.

Here’s the problem: by the time your lagging indicators shift—say, your revenue increases—you’ve already moved on to the next initiative. There’s no clear connection between your recent actions and those results.

If you want to avoid falling back on Outputs as your only measurable results, you need leading indicators that guide the team toward success—not just describe it after the fact.

Example: Reverse-Engineering a Lagging Indicator

Here’s how you can take a lagging indicator—like company revenue or user growth—and work backward to find more actionable, leading indicators that tell you whether you're on the right track:

Ask the Right Question to Define Leading Indicators

Here’s the key question every Product Team should ask when trying to identify meaningful leading indicators:

“Which customer behaviors do we need to encourage to achieve our business goal?”

That single question can dramatically shift how your team thinks about success and progress.

Why Leading Indicators Matter

The main point of leading indicators is simple: they help Product Teams measure whether they’re on track—during the cycle, not after it’s over.

But they’re not always obvious. You may need to experiment with which behavior changes you can realistically measure and influence in a given timeframe. That’s part of the process.

Leading indicators aren’t the only thing that matters. Your organization will still care about lagging metrics like revenue or retention—and that’s valid.

But if your team only tracks those lagging metrics, you’ll always be reacting, not steering. That’s where leading indicators shine: they help you predict your contribution to company-wide impact.

They offer signals—like shifts in user behavior—that either increase or decrease your confidence in the path you’re on.

Understand What Drives Business Outcomes

Ultimately, this all ties back to a core idea:
You need to understand which customer behaviors and solved problems lead to achieving your broader business goals—and then use those insights as the foundation for defining OKRs at the Product Team level.

Chapter 3: Using OKRs to Guide

Everyday Decision-Making in Product Management

It doesn’t matter how well-written or Outcome-oriented your OKRs are—if they’re not part of your day-to-day decision-making, they won’t help you.

This chapter offers practical advice for applying OKRs within key Product Management practices like Product Discovery, Scrum, and Product Roadmaps.

Your Main Takeaways

• How OKRs connect across different areas of Product Management

• Communicating OKR priorities through Roadmaps

• How OKRs and Product Discovery influence each other

• Combining OKRs with Scrum rituals and daily execution

Seeing the Bigger Picture Before You Get Tactical

Before jumping into tactics, take a step back and look at the broader structure behind your team’s decisions.

• Product Vision and Product Strategy represent the long-term WHY:

  • Why does your company exist?

  • What do you stand for?

  • Why do you believe you can win in your market?

• Quarterly OKRs are a miniature version of this WHY.
  They represent short- and mid-term priorities and bring the strategy down to a level where teams can act on it.

  OKRs are a “strategy in a nutshell” for individual Product Teams.

Connecting Strategy to Execution

In contrast to the WHY, we also have the WHAT—the concrete efforts and activities that teams plan and deliver:

• Product Roadmap Themes and Discovery Priorities often span a medium-term horizon. These usually include larger initiatives or features that take time to influence users or impact business metrics.

• User Stories and Tasks operate on shorter timeframes and are executed during development sprints (e.g., in Scrum).

Each layer plays a role. The key is understanding how to align them—so strategy (OKRs) isn’t floating in a slide deck, disconnected from daily work.

Avoiding a Parallel Universe:

OKRs and Product Roadmaps

One of the most important relationships in Product Management is the connection between OKRs and Product Roadmaps.

Roadmaps aren’t just planning tools—they’re one of the few essential artifacts that serve both:

• As input during the OKR drafting process

• As output to communicate which priorities have been selected to achieve the committed OKRs

If these two artifacts drift apart, you risk creating a parallel universe—where strategy and execution don’t speak the same language.

Make sure your Roadmap and your OKRs work together, not against each other.

Not All Roadmaps Are Created Equal

Most teams are familiar with the classic Feature-based Roadmap—a timeline packed with prescriptive features and shipping dates meant to bring order to the chaos of the future.

But if you’re trying to adopt Outcome OKRs, that kind of roadmap often works against you.

A Feature-based Roadmap is more of an obstacle than an enabler of Outcome OKRs for Product Teams.

It narrows the focus too early and locks teams into solutions instead of guiding them toward solving the right problems.

The Case for Theme-Based Roadmaps

A more flexible and supportive alternative is the Theme-based Roadmap—sometimes known as the Now/Next/Later roadmap. This format uses loosely defined time horizons that can align with the current OKR cycle, the next one, or anything further out.

This approach offers guidance without prescribing specific solutions. It allows teams to adjust course based on discoveries and learnings—rather than commit to features they haven’t validated yet.

How OKRs and Theme-Based Roadmaps Work Together

When Product Teams use Theme-based Roadmaps alongside OKRs, the two tools support each other—especially around quarterly OKR alignment and commitment.

You don’t need to convert your Key Results into deadlines and Gantt charts. Instead, your Roadmap themes inform OKR priorities—and OKRs help sharpen the focus of those themes.

It’s not about choosing themes or Epics. A Theme-based Roadmap can include Epics—if they’ve already been identified through Discovery.

But if Product Discovery hasn’t been done yet and the team can’t decide which Epic to pursue, it’s too early to define Outcome OKRs. In that case, it may be more straightforward to just assign the team a feature to build.

How Product Discovery and OKRs Influence Each Other

Product Discovery is the collaborative, iterative process of answering two fundamental questions:

1. Why is this a problem worth solving?

2. What solutions are worth pursuing?

As mentioned earlier, Discovery pairs well with Theme-based Roadmaps. It helps teams stay focused on Outcomes rather than defaulting to predefined features too soon.

The Challenges of Using OKRs in Product Discovery

While OKRs and Product Discovery can complement each other, they also come with challenges—especially when it comes to timing.

Let’s say you define your OKRs at the start of the quarter and then spend six weeks on Discovery. That doesn’t leave much time to actually ship something, let alone see its impact reflected in your metrics.

Shipped features often need weeks in the hands of users before they trigger meaningful behavior change—and therefore influence your Key Results.

This lag can make it feel like you’ve failed to meet your OKRs, even though you’re doing exactly the right work.

Measuring Progress in the Problem Space

Making Discovery Work Visible Through OKRs

When you're deep in Product Discovery—navigating both the problem and solution space—it’s harder to predict which user behaviors are worth targeting.

But that doesn’t mean progress can’t be measured.

In fact, OKRs can play a valuable role in making your Discovery work visible and intentional. In these cases, you have two viable approaches for shaping your OKRs:

1. Emphasize the Process

While process alone won’t guarantee results, it can act as a leading indicator that you’re staying on track.

These Key Results focus on how the team works—and whether that approach supports meaningful exploration. Examples include:

• Number of user interactions or workshops conducted (Output)

• Percentage of research or experimentation efforts that are quantitative vs. qualitative (Outcome)

• Average cycle time for user tests or feedback loops (Outcome)

This approach helps teams hold themselves accountable for doing the right kind of work—even when outcomes aren’t immediately visible.

2. Measure Future-Driven User Behaviors

The second approach focuses on early behavior signals that point toward future success. These Key Results require some initial confidence in your Discovery direction.

The idea is to measure assumptions that are critical to your feature idea’s success.

Examples include:

• Completion rates of usability tests

• Customer Effort Score during prototype testing

• Email open and click-through rates from early marketing experiments

• Opt-in or opt-out rates for beta programs

These exploratory Key Results are particularly useful during Discovery phases or when your product is still in stealth mode.

You may also want to revisit your OKR cycle length. In fast-moving or uncertain stages, three months can be too long—and too unpredictable.

By aligning on and regularly reviewing Discovery-focused OKRs, teams can raise visibility around a part of their work that’s often hidden.
And remember: the point of Discovery OKRs isn’t to mimic some ideal OKR format—it’s to make the work of Discovery a real priority.

Combining OKRs with Scrum Practices and Routines

On the Delivery side, your goal is to ensure that as many items in your product backlog as possible can be linked to an OKR.

That’s how you connect the team’s daily work with the company’s bigger goals.

If you’re using tools like JIRA, this is straightforward. Add custom fields to associate user stories with specific OKRs.

The same principle works in other tools like Asana, Trello, or monday.com—just in different formats.

The key is to create a temporary, visible connection between individual tasks and your team’s OKRs. This gives team members clarity on how their work contributes to outcomes that matter.

Takeaway: Finding Your Path Toward

Focusing on Product Management Outcomes Using OKRs

One of the biggest barriers to making OKRs truly valuable in Product Management isn’t the complexity of the framework itself.
It’s the way OKRs are often presented: rigid, overly prescriptive, and divorced from the messy, iterative nature of real-world teams.

Blame the now-infamous Google OKR video, or the endless “how-to” guides promising the perfect OKR formula. Add in the growing dogma that Outcomes are the only valid use case—and it’s no wonder many Product Teams feel overwhelmed or stuck.

Start Imperfect. Adapt Along the Way.

What teams need isn’t more theory. It’s clarity of intent, regular reflection, and permission to iterate.

A sole focus on Outcomes is a powerful goal—but it’s not something you achieve overnight with better phrasing or cleaner templates.

The path to meaningful OKRs starts with where you are—not with someone else’s ideal.

For every team discouraged by overhyped definitions and rigid frameworks, there should be one that just gets started and figures it out along the way.

Make It Yours

Forget the one-size-fits-all approach. You know your organization, your product, your constraints—and your opportunities—better than anyone.

That’s your unfair advantage. Use it.

Find your own way of working with OKRs that fits your context, supports your strategy, and moves your product forward.