How Product Teams Can Move On from OKR Theater

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can either elevate or derail a Product Team’s ability to create real value—for both users and the business.

Used well, OKRs help teams measure progress meaningfully—beyond vanity metrics. They shift focus from Outputs to Outcomes, encourage alignment with company goals, and create discipline around how success is defined and tracked.

But here’s the catch:
Many teams run into a familiar roadblock when trying to embed OKRs into their process.

It’s called OKR Theater—and it’s more common than you think.

What Is OKR Theater?

OKR Theater is a close cousin of John Cutler’s concept of Success Theater—celebrating milestone checkboxes while ignoring whether anything of real value was actually achieved.

It often looks like this:
A team hits all its OKRs, but the metrics are shallow, the goals weren’t tied to real user problems, and nothing meaningful changed for the business or the customer.

How OKR Theater Happens

When OKRs prioritize vanity metrics over solving validated user problems, teams lose sight of impact. Progress becomes performative.

Instead of using OKRs to sharpen focus, they become a presentation slide for quarterly all-hands meetings—something to show off, rather than something to guide decision-making.

How to Recognize OKR Theater

The first step to fixing OKR Theater is being able to spot it.

There’s a fine line between using OKRs to align work and using them to look good.

If OKRs are more about celebrating completion than learning and adjusting, you're likely in OKR Theater territory.

Three Ways to Spot OKR Theater in Your Organization

OKR Theater doesn’t always look obvious at first. But if you’re paying attention, there are a few clear signs. Here are three of the most common patterns to watch for:

1. You're Focusing on an Arbitrary Number of OKRs

Sure, setting three or five or even ten OKRs sounds tidy. Clean numbers feel good. Some teams are even told they should always have a specific number.

But here’s the truth:

A one-size-fits-all approach to the number of OKRs doesn’t work.

It’s not about how many OKRs you have. It’s about why you’re setting them in the first place—and how they’ll actually help your team move forward.

Creating five OKR sets just to check a box keeps the focus on process compliance, not progress. It takes energy away from defining Key Results that matter.

The right number of OKRs depends on:

• Your team’s skills and capacity

• The way you work

• The lifecycle stage of your product or feature

There also needs to be a shared understanding of what your OKRs are meant to cover:

• Only strategic priorities?

• Only business-as-usual work?

• A mix of both?

Answering that upfront helps clarify how much of your team’s capacity should be structured by OKRs—and how many OKRs actually make sense.

2. Your Teams Work in Silos but Share OKRs

This happens when teams aren’t set up to work cross-functionally but are expected to deliver shared OKRs anyway.

Here’s what it looks like:

• Your UX resource is tied up elsewhere

• Infra or platform teams aren’t available this cycle

• The growth team can’t get to your experiment until Q3

Sound familiar?

OKRs that rely on cross-functional delivery require teams that are actually set up to deliver cross-functionally.

As your organization grows, the case for embedding critical roles and expertise into Product Teams becomes stronger. If your goal is to shift from Outputs to Outcomes, you also need to revisit how your teams are structured.

One practical move: Organize teams around broad user problem spaces—and make sure all required skills are within reach.

3. You’re Targeting Impacts Instead of Outcomes

Impact metrics reflect the success of strategic priorities—usually at the company or department level. They’re important. But they’re also limited.

Why?

Impact metrics are lagging indicators. They depend on many different factors and teams. That makes them hard to connect directly to daily work.

Yes, impacts often show up on dashboards. But they don’t offer teams enough granularity to steer their own progress.

A Better Approach: Connect Outcomes to Impacts

Use Impact Mapping to link real user behavior changes (Outcomes) to company-level goals (Impacts). That way, you’re not just measuring what happened—you’re measuring what you can influence.

When OKRs focus on tangible User Outcomes—rooted in validated problems—they become far more actionable and connected to both experimentation and delivery.

Using Outcomes Without Losing Sight of the Bigger Picture

When used correctly, Impact Mapping allows you to use Outcomes as a tangible proxy for measuring real progress—without losing alignment with company-level priorities.

That’s also why Product Discovery insights are essential inputs when defining OKRs. They give teams the clarity needed to connect validated user problems to meaningful results.

How to Overcome OKR Theater

Now that we’ve looked at how to recognize OKR Theater, let’s talk about how to move past it—and make OKRs a tool that actually works for your team.

1. Connect Your OKR System to a Clear “Why”

One major cause of OKR Theater is the unconscious adoption of best practices—especially when those practices were designed for a very different company.

You might have been inspired by Google’s goal-setting framework. That’s fine—but it’s not enough.

“Because Google does it” isn’t a reason your team will rally behind—or one you can measure success against.

Instead, build your OKR purpose from within:

• Use your Product Vision

• Reflect on your Product Strategy patterns

• Pull in insights from team retrospectives

Use these inputs to define your own reason for using OKRs—and describe what success will look like as a result.

This gives you an objective starting point for measuring the impact of your OKR system. You can then design how you use OKRs around that purpose—and adjust over time.

Every OKR cycle should be approached with the courage to adapt.
There is no one “right” way—only the way that works in your context.

2. Stop Translating Everything Into OKRs

Trying to squeeze 100% of your team’s work into OKRs is a fast track to frustration.

Why? Because this usually leads to taking your feature-focused backlog and dumping it into an OKR tool—resulting in a spreadsheet that looks busy, but lacks strategic focus.

Instead, support teams in building a clear understanding of what OKRs are actually useful for in their current context.

This could mean:

• Separating strategic initiatives from support or maintenance tasks

• Using OKRs to create structure for everyday work

• Setting expectations around how much of the team’s capacity should be covered by OKRs

When teams know what OKRs are meant to guide—and what they’re not—they can structure their sprint backlogs to balance flexibility for ad hoc tasks with focus on long-term priorities.

Focus on What Matters — and Measure It Proactively

Product Teams should prioritize what truly matters—and choose success metrics that reflect the parts of their work they want to actively drive forward.

That’s the key difference between Key Results and KPIs:

• Key Results reflect time-bound, strategic priorities that teams are trying to influence directly.

• KPIs are ongoing metrics that passively measure performance over time.

Measure Progress Using Leading, Not Lagging, Indicators

One common pitfall: choosing lagging indicators that look great in a slide deck but don’t help teams adjust or learn.

These metrics often fall into the “impact” category—things like revenue, retention, or NPS—that only move after many actions converge.

Aesthetically pleasing dashboards are nice, but they’re no substitute for actionable feedback.

Instead, focus on leading indicators—metrics that move early, reflect behavior change, and help teams course-correct during the cycle.

Leading Indicators Help You Look Ahead

When product teams use leading indicators to define their OKRs, they’re essentially building a way to predict the future.

It’s not easy—these indicators can be tricky to identify and even harder to measure. But they’re worth the effort. Why?

Because they give teams the ability to measure progress and adjust priorities in both Discovery and Delivery—before it’s too late.

Step One: Know What You’re Measuring

A key part of overcoming OKR Theater is simply recognizing what you’re actually tracking.

• Are your Key Results built on lagging indicators—things that only shift after everything else is done?

• Or are they leading indicators—signals you can act on mid-cycle?

This distinction matters. Leading indicators let you measure progress in real time, not just reflect on it later.

A Practical Example

Start by designing a process to identify and document key attributes of successful users or buyers. This could include:

• Product usage behavior

• Onboarding completion

• In-app engagement before key actions like a purchase or upgrade

Look at your last set of successful conversions—then reverse-engineer the common patterns in usage.

That’s where your leading indicators live: in the behavior that consistently precedes your biggest impact moments.

Choosing the right metrics—and setting aside the noise—is what keeps your team out of OKR Theater and focused on what really matters.

Derive Leading Indicators from Lagging Indicators

The best leading indicators come from reverse-engineering proven customer journeys.

Not every early metric is worth tracking. Just because a metric is “leading” doesn’t mean it’s meaningful.

Focus on those indicators that have a proven connection to outcomes that matter—so your decisions stay grounded in real evidence.

Takeaway: Don’t Let OKR Theater Get in Your Way

Rolling out OKRs across a product organization is never a one-and-done deal. It’s an iterative process—one that requires regular reflection and ongoing refinement.

But here’s the good news:

You don’t have to get it perfect. You just have to get started.

The real win is having the awareness to recognize where OKR Theater creeps in—and the mindset to shift focus back to what’s meaningful.

So take a look at where your team might be:

• Relying too much on lagging indicators

• Tracking metrics that look good but say little

• Overthinking OKR structure instead of using it as a learning tool

With a few small adjustments, your OKR process can evolve into what it’s meant to be:
A practical, empowering framework that helps your team shift toward Outcomes—one step at a time.