What are OKRs? A practical guide for Agile teams

OKR (short for objectives and key results) is a scalable goal-setting framework that aligns company, team, and individual goals to measurable outcomes. It helps teams focus on what matters, fosters transparency, and drives continuous progress.

Where did OKRs come from?

While the idea of goal-based performance management can be traced back to Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives, the OKR framework we know today was developed by Andy Grove and introduced at Intel.

OKRs gained broader adoption after venture capitalist John Doerr brought the methodology to Google in 1999. Since then, companies like Atlassian, Amazon, and other agile-forward organizations have embraced OKRs to align strategy and execution.

What are the key components of OKRs?

OKRs consist of two primary elements: objectives and key results that are supported by initiatives, a defined period, a score, and an owner.

1. Objectives

A qualitative statement that answers: What do we want to achieve?

Objectives are meant to inspire and challenge. They are high-level, aspirational, and directional.

Best practices:

• Limit to 3–5 objectives per team.

• Keep objectives qualitative and ambitious.

• If you're just starting out, aim for roofshot goals (challenging but achievable, success means achieving 100% of those goals).

• As your practice matures, try moonshot goals (goals that are beyond what’s deemed possible, where 60-70% achievement is considered success).

2. Key results

Quantitative metrics that indicate whether you’ve achieved your objective.

Best practices:

• Each objective should have 2–5 key results.

• Make key results outcome-focused and measurable.

• Avoid listing tasks or activities, as those should be in initiatives.

Example OKR

Here’s an example of an OKR for a SaaS vendor:

3. Initiatives

The projects or actions your team will take to drive progress on key results.

Best practices:

• You may regard your team’s daily tasks as initiatives. For example, if you manage projects in Jira, then Jira issues are the initiatives.

• Regularly assess whether your initiatives are actually contributing to the key results. If the initiatives aren’t helpful in delivering key results, modify them.

4. Period (or Cadence)

Period is how often you evaluate and grade OKRs during a cycle and create new ones.

Best practices:

• OKR may have dual planning periods: an annual cadence for company goals and a quarterly cadence for team and individual goals.

• Conduct weekly check-in sessions to track goal progress.

• Within less mature organizations, a custom shorter period (for example, two months) is highly recommended.

5. Grade (or Score)

OKRs are usually graded on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the level at which an objective is fully achieved.

Best practices:

• The ideal OKR grade is 60%-70% (or 0.6 to 0.7).

• Consistently scoring lower or higher than the ideal grade means that the objectives are either unclear or not ambitious enough, respectively.

6. Owner

Assign an owner to every key result to foster accountability, transparency, and proper alignment.

Best practices:

• Every OKR must have an owner.

• Though employees can collaborate on OKRs, there’s just one person responsible for reaching the goal.

• Your company’s OKR framework must be owned by someone. This person (also known as the Ambassador) is responsible for its ongoing maintenance and management.

• The Ambassador can be one of the department managers, HR personnel, or even external consultants as long as they’re the OKR Subject Matter Experts.

Why Agile teams should use OKRs

Though there are other methods to measure progress (that is, KPI, SMART, MBO), OKRs could be the right goal-tracking system for your agile teams in Jira, especially if these issues happen frequently:

• Misaligned priorities: Teams operate in silos with no shared direction.

• Persistent blockers: Retrospectives and sprint planning can’t always preempt issues.

• Lack of visibility: Tools like Jira Roadmaps show task progress, not overarching goals.

• Unclear ownership: Jira assignees manage issues, not strategic objectives.

• Poor cross-team collaboration: No shared context for why or how work contributes to larger goals.

• Low motivation: Team members can’t see the impact of their work.

• Disconnected strategy: Company goals live in spreadsheets or Confluence, far from daily work.

What are the benefits of OKRs?

A successful OKR framework delivers benefits through the F.A.C.T.S. model: Focus, Alignment, Commitment, Tracking, and Stretching.

OKRs are more than just a goal-setting framework: they’re a mindset shift. By setting clear, ambitious, and measurable goals, your Agile teams in Jira can move faster, focus better, and align more deeply with the company mission.

Ready to get started? Define your first objective, set measurable key results, and bring purpose to every sprint.