We know that too many priorities is the same thing as having no priorities. Our OKRs are an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the parts of the business where we want to make huge leaps and big changes. Therefore, we’ll avoid the temptation of writing goals for everything and will instead manage our “business as usual” activities through health metrics and KPIs. We know this means not every team or every person will be working on OKRs each quarter. At all costs we’ll avoid writing key results that are simply tasks and will instead stay focused on outcomes. We commit to setting fewer goals in our desire to achieve radical focus.

We understand that rolling out OKRs to every individual employee will inevitably lead to “planning hell” and incredible complexity. We also acknowledge that explicitly tying OKRs to performance management (including promotions and compensation) is doomed to fail since it encourages individual performance over team/company performance and will discourage employees from committing to stretch goals. Instead, we’ll focus on OKRs as a team activity. If we do set individual goals around career growth, we commit to explicitly de-linking that process from our strategic goals.

We thrive on agile, cross-functional teamwork across all levels of our organization. We therefore avoid a “cascading” goals process where managers at each level simply break down goals into subgoals for their direct reports. Instead, we leverage simultaneous top-down (executive) and bottom-up (team) alignment of goals to create a more flexible network of cross-functional priorities. We know that this approach keeps OKRs agile and enables innovation and breakthrough results.

Continual improvement is an integral part of our OKRs process. We commit to regular reflection and retrospectives, and seek to make our goals planning and execution better each time we do it. We seek out best practices, and then document them in a living playbook. We believe that OKRs (like any business process) should remain flexible and commit to making the process fit the culture and values of our organization.