6 Reasons Why OKRs Are Holding You Back

Intro

In 2018, after raising $7 million and growing our team to 15 people, we decided it was time to add some structure to our “strategy”. While we had tripled our revenue from the previous year and were on track to do it again, the company felt like it was barely holding together. As we scaled, things became exponentially more complex, and we found ourselves highly reactive, constantly putting out fires, struggling to keep our heads above water. There was a noticeable lack of focus and alignment, persistent communication breakdowns, and a general absence of transparency and accountability.

Apparently, we weren’t alone. Conversations with our peers revealed that this was a ubiquitous problem for high-growth startups. And everyone seemed to offer the same solution: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

OKRs are a framework popularized by John Doerr and Google. According to Doerr’s book Measure What Matters, OKRs were a key ingredient in Google’s massive success.

We gave OKRs a shot—multiple times—and each attempt left us frustrated and questioning their value. The problem wasn’t just their inherent weaknesses but also how often they were misapplied. We first tried them as a team of 15, and they didn’t stick. At 50 people, we brought in a consultant—same result. A few years later, with 200 employees and a brilliant new COO, they still weren’t worth the effort. As I spoke with executive friends, the pattern was clear: most had tried OKRs, only to abandon them or begrudgingly keep them without conviction.

Even John Doerr himself, in his own book says, “You should expect to get it wrong the first 3–4 quarters,” which is an eternity in startup time. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, half-jokingly admitted that OKRs are a complete sham:

Jokes aside, Sundar moved away from the multiple-objective model in 2019 because it was clear that it wasn’t working (more on multiple objectives later).

I’ve spent years trying to figure out why OKRs never lived up to the hype, talking to countless leaders and reading just about every book and article on the subject. Ultimately, I’ve boiled it down to the following six issues:

1. OKRs diffuse energy in too many directions

2. OKRs create silos, politics, and infighting

3. OKRs overemphasize quantitative metrics

4. OKRs costs too much time and money

5. OKRs are overly rigid

6. OKRs are not a substitute for strategy

OKRs diffuse energy in too many directions

“He who chases two cats, catches neither.” — Confucius

OKRs are meant to drive focus, yet their structure often does the opposite. Doerr recommends setting three to five high-level objectives, each with three to five key results. But in practice, companies that spread themselves across multiple objectives tend to achieve only mediocre results.

Focus is a force multiplier. When teams rally around a single objective, expertise compounds, blind spots shrink, and execution becomes sharper. Instead of fragmented efforts and internal friction, alignment amplifies individual contributions, making work more impactful and fulfilling.

One of my clients simplified their approach with a single company-wide goal: Make the product as sticky as possible. For the first time, leadership felt in sync. The result? Zero churn last quarter. By prioritizing durable solutions that increase switching costs, they’re confident this improvement will last.

OKRs, however, encourage teams to divide their attention, diluting impact and creating friction between competing priorities. Cross-departmental dependencies—like budgets—inevitably lead to silos, politics, and infighting, making execution even harder.

OKRs create silos, politics, and infighting

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” — Abraham Lincoln

OKRs are designed to align teams, but too often, they create division instead. I saw this firsthand in my own company—tensions between Technology and Business, Product and Design (who owns user value?), and even within Product when we had two competing product-led initiatives.

This was my fault for not recognizing that multiple “equally important” objectives almost inevitably lead to internal friction. Without a single shared goal, teams turn inward, competing for resources, recognition, and control. Instead of working together, they operate in silos, leading to dysfunction and poor execution.

I see this same dynamic play out repeatedly with my clients. When objectives pull teams in different directions, alignment breaks down, and internal competition takes over. Instead of driving execution, OKRs can end up fueling the very politics they’re meant to prevent.

OKRs are overly quantitative

“The overlap of most valuable things you can do with a product, and for things that happen to be fully quantifiable, it’s like maybe 20% which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who will only look at quantifiable things.” —Tobi Lütke, CEO and Founder of Shopify

For someone who studied applied mathematics and has spent years trying to quantify everything, this might sound surprising—but one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made (and repeated) is over-relying on numbers. And that’s one of the core issues with OKRs: they emphasize quantification at the expense of what truly drives results.

When I was using OKRs, I spent too much time obsessing over the perfect metric and not enough time on the behaviors that actually drive those numbers. But the truth is, behaviors come first. If you hit a number, it’s because someone took the right actions to make it happen. Key Results are trailing indicators—they measure what already happened. While metrics are valuable, they belong lower in the strategic hierarchy (more on that to come in my next essay). What really matters is shaping the actions that lead to meaningful outcomes.

The focus should always be on the core objective, not just on optimizing for what’s easiest to measure. If you have the perfect metric, great—use it. But you don’t always need one. Sometimes, a simple Green-Yellow-Red system is enough. Just because something is measurable doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing to focus on.

A final thought on over-quantification: great leaders rely on sound judgment and taste, not just data. It’s smart to be metrics-driven, but you won’t always have perfect data at hand. The best leaders invest in building strong data infrastructure so that more of the important decisions can be backed by data, but they never let the lack of perfect metrics stop them from making the right call.

OKRs are complex and expensive

“The costs of complexity are hard to see until they’re gone.” —Jim Hackett, former CEO of Ford Motor Company

OKRs promise focus and alignment, but in practice, they often become cumbersome and costly to implement. Managing 3–5 objectives, each with 3–5 key results, means juggling 9 to 25 moving parts every quarter. The time and effort required to define, align, and track each one drains valuable resources. Instead of driving execution, teams get stuck debating wording, securing buy-in, and endlessly tweaking metrics. By the time OKRs are locked in, weeks of productivity are lost.

The complexity doesn’t stop once they’re set. Tracking all these key results demands tools, meetings, and constant oversight, adding layers of bureaucracy. Check-ins, status updates, and endless recalibrations pile up, turning OKRs into a management burden rather than an execution accelerator. And for what? A framework that was meant to help, but too often slows teams down instead.

OKRs are needlessly rigid

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.” —Anonymous

A major flaw of OKRs is their arbitrary timelines. The best time to start working on what matters most isn’t at the beginning of the next quarter—it’s today. Yet, OKRs are typically locked into quarterly cycles, creating an illusion of order that doesn’t reflect reality.

In practice, the most critical initiatives rarely fit neatly into three-month windows. Some projects need more time to deliver meaningful impact, but the OKR structure forces teams to either rush progress or artificially break up long-term efforts. These rigid start and stop dates can disrupt momentum, making it feel like strategy is dictated by the calendar rather than by what’s actually urgent and important.

Instead of providing clarity, OKRs can create unnecessary pressure to conform to timelines that don’t serve the work—leading to forced pivots, unfinished projects, and distractions from real priorities.

OKRs are not a substitute for strategy

One of the biggest pitfalls of OKRs is that they attempt to align an entire company before leadership itself is fully aligned. When leadership lacks clarity on how their company will succeed, introducing OKRs only amplifies confusion, leading to misaligned goals and unfocused execution.

The problem isn’t the framework itself but the mistaken belief that OKRs are strategy or that they can somehow resolve leadership misalignment. In reality, if leadership isn’t clear on the company’s priorities, OKRs won’t fix that—they’ll likely make it worse.

Conclusion

OKRs were meant to bring focus and alignment, but too often, they create complexity, rigidity, and distraction. Instead of streamlining execution, they scatter energy across too many objectives, fuel internal competition, and force teams into artificial timelines. Most critically, they’re often mistaken for strategy when, in reality, they only work if a strong strategy already exists. Without that foundation, OKRs don’t solve problems—they just make them more structured.

So if OKRs fall short, what’s the alternative? In my next essay (coming February 25th), I’ll introduce a framework that actually drives execution—one that aligns teams around what matters most, adapts to real-world challenges, and delivers meaningful results without the overhead and bureaucracy of OKRs.

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Thanks to Sharmin Sultana Isaacs, Yaeir Heber, Zach Postone, Brandon Steel, Sarosh Mawani, and Eliot Jenkins