A Much Much Better Company OKR Example Built Step By Step

To illustrate these concepts, I’ll use a fictional company called ACME Inc. throughout this article. ACME is an imaginary legal tech startup that I have created to demonstrate how OKRs can be applied in a real-world context. While ACME isn’t real, the principles and strategies we’ll discuss are based on real experiences and best practices in OKR implementation.

Before I dive into the details of company OKRs, let’s take a look at ACME Inc.’s strategy to give you some context.

ACME Inc. Strategy Summary

• Mission: To liberate lawyers from the drudgery of document review, allowing them to focus on high-value, strategic work.
• Vision: By 2025, ACME Inc. will become the #1 AI-powered document review solution for in-house legal teams across the United States.

Strategic Focus

• Unmatched Speed: Save lawyers an average of 25 hours per week.
• Pinpoint Accuracy: Achieve industry-leading accuracy in document review.
• Lawyer-Centric Design: Build solutions that seamlessly integrate into existing workflows.

Leaders In These Capabilities 

• AI Enhancement: Continuously refine AI capabilities in natural language processing and machine learning.
• User Experience Mastery: Develop an intuitive platform suitable for even the most tech-averse lawyers.
• Growth Marketing: Dominate the in-house legal team market.

Key Success Metrics

• Time Saved: Increase average time savings per week per lawyer.
• Accuracy Rate: Achieving exceptional accuracy rate in document review and markup.
• User Adoption: Measure the percentage of lawyers in each client organization actively using the platform daily.
• Client Expansion: Double the client base year-over-year for the next three years.

Now that I have laid out ACME’s strategy let’s explore how company OKRs fit into this picture.

Note: When we work with leadership teams on strategy, we create a long-form strategic plan that follows a strategic planning process and has all the workings. We also create a one-page summary with the elements outlined above and, my favourite, the strategic story for employees. The strategic story uses storytelling techniques like rhetoric and iteration to maximize comprehension and recall.

A Good Strategy Guides & Constrains OKR Ideas

One of the most crucial aspects of setting effective company OKRs is ensuring they’re firmly rooted in your strategy. A well-crafted strategy is both a guide and a constraint for your OKR ideas, helping you focus on what truly matters for your company’s success. Let’s see how ACME Inc.’s strategy serves this dual purpose.

Guiding OKR Ideas

ACME’s strategy guides its OKR ideas in several ways:

• Mission & Vision: The mission to “liberate lawyers from the drudgery of document review” and the vision to become the “#1 AI-powered document review solution” provides a clear direction for all OKRs. Any company-level OKR should align with these.
• Strategic Focus: The three areas of strategic focus – Unmatched Speed, Pinpoint Accuracy, and Lawyer-Centric Design – offer clear themes for potential OKRs. For instance, an OKR aimed at reducing document review time would align with the “Unmatched Speed” focus.
• Key Capabilities: The strategy outlines three areas where ACME aims to lead – AI Enhancement, User Experience Mastery, and Growth Marketing. These provide fertile ground for OKRs that push the company to excel in these critical capabilities.
• Success Metrics: The key success metrics in the strategy, such as time saved and accuracy rate, provide ready-made measures for potential Key Results in the OKRs.

Constraining OKR Ideas

Just as importantly, ACME’s strategy acts as a constraint, helping the company avoid pursuing OKRs that, while potentially valuable, don’t align with their core strategic focus:

• Industry Focus: The strategy is focused on the legal industry, specifically in-house legal teams. This would likely rule out OKRs aimed at expanding into other document-heavy industries or other areas of legal tech, even if there might be opportunities there.

There are currently around 130,000 in-house lawyers in the United States. That’s a lot of potential ACME users, right? But here’s where it gets really interesting. Between 2000 and 2022, the ranks of in-house lawyers grew by a whopping 77%. That’s not just growth; that’s an explosion!

This context makes ACME’s strategic focus on in-house legal teams not just smart, but potentially game-changing. It underscores why their OKRs need to be laser-focused on serving this rapidly growing, yet often underserved, segment of the legal profession 

When we talk about ACME’s vision to become the “#1 AI-powered document review solution for in-house legal teams across the United States,” we’re not talking about a niche market. We’re talking about a major force in the legal industry that’s ripe for innovation.

• Target Market: ACME is initially focusing on in-house legal teams. Given their strategic roadmap, OKRs aimed at aggressively pursuing law firms or government clients would be premature.
  Geographical Constraint: The vision mentions becoming the leader in the United States. OKRs focused on rapid international expansion might be set aside for now.
• Capability Boundaries: While the strategy emphasizes leading in AI, user experience, and growth marketing for document review, it doesn’t mention expanding into adjacent legal tech areas. OKRs venturing into related but off-strategy capabilities would be misaligned. For example:
  • Developing AI for legal research (instead of document review)
  • Creating a platform for automated contract drafting
  • Building a litigation prediction tool

While still within the legal tech sphere and utilizing AI, these capabilities fall outside ACME’s strategic focus on document review. OKRs aimed at developing these capabilities would be off-strategy despite their potential value in the broader legal tech market.

Constraints Are Strengths Not Weaknesses

It’s worth noting that these constraints are a strength, not a weakness. By clearly defining what ACME will and won’t do, the strategy allows the company to focus its resources and efforts where they can have the most impact.

For example, imagine someone at ACME suggested an OKR focused on developing an AI tool for predicting court outcomes. While this could be a valuable product in the legal tech space, it doesn’t align with ACME’s current strategic focus on document review. The strategy allows leadership to confidently set this idea aside, ensuring the company remains focused on its core mission.

The Role Of KPIs/Metrics

Now, let’s discuss how ACME Inc. connects its high-level strategy to OKRs and day-to-day operations through a comprehensive KPI/metric tree. 

KPI trees are not just fancy charts—they’re powerful tools that help everyone in the company understand how their work contributes to ACME’s overall success.

At the top of ACME’s metric tree, we have the standard SaaS (Software as a Service) metrics that any investor would recognize:

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• Customer Churn Rate.

But here’s where it gets interesting. ACME’s leadership team has done a fantastic job of cascading these high-level metrics down to their four strategic KPIs. We call this a ‘Data Model’.

A Bit About Data Models

While the KPI/metric tree provides a visual representation of how different metrics relate to each other, ACME takes this concept a step further by developing a comprehensive data model. 

This data model is a more sophisticated and dynamic version of the KPI/metric tree. It not only shows the relationships between metrics but also quantifies the strength and certainty of these relationships. Let’s dive deeper into what this means for ACME.

Benefits of a Data Model

Let’s see how these benefits apply to ACME:

• Understanding levers: ACME’s data model shows that improving the ‘Time to first successful document review’ metric has a strong influence on overall ‘User Adoption’. This insight helps them prioritize enhancing their onboarding process.
  Setting OKRs: Knowing that ‘Feature Discovery Rate’ significantly impacts ‘User Adoption’, ACME might set an OKR focused on increasing the percentage of users who try each core feature.
• Creating value: The model visually demonstrates how AI accuracy improvements lead to time savings for lawyers, clearly showing ACME’s value proposition.
• Stating hypotheses: When proposing a new feature, ACME teams can refer to the model to hypothesize its impact. For instance, ‘We believe improving our collaboration tools will increase the average number of lawyers working on each document, which our model suggests will boost overall user engagement.’
• Analytics foundation: The model helps ACME predict which customers might be at risk of churning based on their usage patterns, allowing for proactive intervention.

Now let’s dive another layer deeper into the data model using a KPI/metric tree, focusing on one of the strategic success metrics –  User Adoption. 

Examples of the metrics that influence this metric that the team came up with are:

• Onboarding Completion Rate: The percentage of users who complete the full onboarding process.
• Time-to-Value: Time to first successful document review.
• Team Penetration: % of Lawyers Per Customer Org. that are users.
• Work Essential: Percentage of new users who use the platform daily over a rolling  day period.
• Weekly Average Logins: Average number of platform logins per lawyer per week.
  Review completion rate: Percentage of started document reviews that are completed.
• Feature Discovery Rate: The percentage of users who have tried each core feature at least once.   
• Customization Utilization: The percentage of users who have personalized their workflow.
• Document Collaborators: The average number of lawyers collaborating on a single.

This Data Model isn’t static, either. As ACME learns more about its business and market, they refine these connections. Maybe they discover that feature utilization rate is a stronger predictor of User Adoption than they initially thought. Or perhaps they find that the user onboarding completion rate has a surprising impact on the Accuracy Rate, as well-trained users make better use of the AI’s capabilities.

By maintaining and evolving this KPI/metric tree, ACME ensures that everyone in the company is rowing in the same direction. It provides clarity on what to measure, what to prioritize, and how different aspects of the business interconnect.

And here’s the kicker – this metric tree becomes a powerful tool when setting OKRs. It helps ACME identify which levers are most important to pull at any given time, ensuring that their OKRs are always aligned with the metrics that truly drive their business success.

Turning A Strategy & Data Model To Company OKRs

Of course, strategies can and should evolve over time based on market conditions, technological advancements, and company growth. As the strategy evolves, so too should the focus of the company’s OKRs.

For instance, if ACME successfully dominates the in-house legal team market, their strategy might expand to explicitly target law firms. At that point, we would expect to see company OKRs shift to reflect this new strategic priority.

By using their strategy as both a guide and a constraint for OKR ideas, ACME ensures that their ambitious quarterly goals are always pushing them in the right direction – towards becoming the #1 AI-powered document review solution for in-house legal teams across the United States.

What Are Company OKRs, Really?

Company OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results are a laser-focused way to execute your company’s strategy. Think of them as your organization’s “Wildly Important Goals” – the goals that will truly move the needle on your strategy.

OKRs are about change, improvement, and strategic execution. They’re the specific, measurable steps you’re taking to bring your strategy to life. For ACME Inc., their OKRs need to directly contribute to their mission of revolutionizing legal work through AI.

Company OKR 1

Here’s an example of a Company OKR that follows our training and coaching best practices. The same best-practices and examples relevant to you and your employees would be in the OKR handbook we create for you.

In the case of Acme Inc, it’s ONE of THREE Company Level OKRs that were chosen from an initial SIX candidates via a process of proposal, facilitated debate, reflection and consensus building.

Objective

Accelerate user engagement and collaboration among in-house legal teams.

Narrative

Our strategy focuses on becoming the #1 AI-powered document review solution for in-house legal teams in the US. 

To achieve this, we need to dramatically increase user engagement and foster collaboration within our client organizations. 

This OKR aims to create a network effect where increased usage naturally encourages further adoption and collaboration. 

By improving our collaboration features, implementing a referral system, and leveraging internal champions, we believe we can significantly boost our user engagement and collaboration rates. 

This will not only increase our revenue but also entrench our solution deeper within client organizations, making us an indispensable part of their workflow.

Key Results 1

Increase the Team Penetration from 40% to 80%.

Connection Key Results To The Objective

This Key Result directly measures user engagement, which is a core component of our objective to “Accelerate user engagement and collaboration among in-house legal teams.” By doubling the percentage of active lawyers, we’re ensuring that our solution becomes an integral part of each customer organization’s workflow.

Hypothesis

We believe that increased active usage across an organization will naturally lead to more collaboration and create a network effect, driving further adoption. As more lawyers within an organization use our platform regularly, it will become the de facto standard for document review, leading to increased collaboration.

Success & Failure Scenarios

• Significant Success: Achieving 90% or higher active lawyer percentage. This would indicate near-universal adoption within our customer organizations, suggesting our solution has become indispensable.
• Failure: Achieving less than 50% active lawyer percentage. This would indicate that we’ve failed to significantly increase engagement, suggesting our initiatives aren’t resonating with users or providing sufficient value.
• Potential Pivot Triggers: If we see rapid initial adoption followed by a drop-off in usage, we might need to focus more on user retention strategies. If certain departments within organizations show significantly higher adoption rates, we might pivot to tailor our solution more specifically to those use cases and then expand.

Key Result 2

Boost the average number of lawyers collaborating on a single document from 2 to 4.

Connection to Objective

This Key Result directly measures the collaboration aspect of our objective. By doubling the number of lawyers collaborating on each document, we’re promoting cross-functional teamwork and increasing the value of our platform.

Hypothesis

We believe that increasing collaboration on individual documents will lead to better outcomes for our clients, increased reliance on our platform, and ultimately, higher user engagement. As more lawyers collaborate on each document, the perceived value of our solution will increase, driving further adoption.

Success and Failure Scenarios

• Significant Success: Achieving an average of 5 or more lawyers collaborating per document. This would indicate that our solution has become central to team-based work, suggesting we’ve exceeded expectations in fostering collaboration.
• Failure: Achieving less than 3 lawyers collaborating per document on average. This would suggest that our collaboration features aren’t providing sufficient value or ease of use to change existing work patterns significantly.
• Potential Pivot Triggers: If we see increased collaboration but decreased overall productivity, we might need to pivot to focus on streamlining the collaboration process. If certain types of documents consistently show higher collaboration rates, we might pivot to optimize our features for those specific document types and promote those use cases.

For Both Key Results

What might make us pivot overall:

1. If we achieve high active usage (KR1) but low collaboration (KR2), we might need to pivot our strategy to focus more on the benefits and features of collaboration.
2. If we see high collaboration (KR2) but it’s concentrated among a small percentage of users (low KR1), we might need to pivot to understand why some users are highly engaged while others aren’t, and adjust our onboarding or feature set accordingly.
3. If both metrics improve but we don’t see a corresponding increase in customer satisfaction or retention, we might need to pivot to ensure that increased usage and collaboration are actually delivering value to our clients.

These Key Results, when viewed together, provide a comprehensive picture of how well we’re achieving our objective of accelerating user engagement and collaboration. They are complementary, with success in one likely to positively influence the other, creating a virtuous cycle of adoption and collaboration.

Activities/Experiments

Note: The engine of OKR progress lies in the activities and experiments conducted to achieve these objectives. By nesting hypothesis-driven activities within our Company OKRs, you create a dynamic system that drives progress, encourages learning, and allows for rapid adaptation. 

Implement a real-time co-editing feature.

• Hypothesis: Enabling real-time collaboration will increase the number of lawyers working on a single document.
• Success Criteria: We will know we’re successful when we see 50% of documents are edited by multiple users within a week of launch.
• Pivot Point: We will reconsider our approach if less than 20% of documents have multiple editors after two weeks of launch.

Develop an in-app referral system with tracking

• Hypothesis: I believe that making referrals easy and trackable will increase internal adoption rates.
• Success Criteria: We will know we’re successful when 30% of new user activations come through the in-app referral system within the first month.
• Pivot Point: We will reconsider our approach if less than 10% of new activations come from referrals after the first month.

Create a formalized champion program with exclusive features

• Hypothesis: I believe that empowering and incentivizing internal champions will drive adoption across their organizations.
• Success Criteria: We will know we’re successful when organizations with active champions show 20% higher adoption rates than those without.
• Pivot Point: We will reconsider our approach if there’s no significant difference in adoption rates between organizations with and without champions after two months.

Skills Required

Product Manager (100%) – Sarah Chen

Sarah will oversee the entire OKR, coordinate teams, and manage the overall progress. She’ll be particularly involved in the champion program and ensuring all activities align with the key results.

UX Designer (100%) – Miguel Rodriguez

Miguel will design intuitive interfaces for the real-time co-editing feature and the in-app referral system. He’ll also work on improving the overall user experience to boost engagement.

Full-stack Developer (200% – 2 people)

Aisha and Thomas will work together to implement the real-time co-editing feature and the in-app referral system. They’ll also be responsible for any necessary infrastructure updates to support these new features.

• Frontend Specialist – Aisha Patel (100%)
• Backend Specialist – Thomas Nguyen (100%)

AI/Machine Learning Engineer (50%) – Dr. Elena Volkov

Elena will focus on optimizing the AI suggestions for document collaboration and improving the overall AI capabilities of the platform to support increased user engagement.

Data Analyst (25%) – Frank Morris

Frank will be crucial in tracking metrics for both key results and providing insights on the effectiveness of all initiatives. He’ll also help set up tracking for the new referral system.

Customer Success Manager 25%) – Olivia Thompson

Olivia will work closely with customers to drive adoption, gather feedback, and manage the champion program. She’ll be key in ensuring the success of the champion program activity.

QA Engineer (25%) – Raj Patel

Raj will ensure the quality and reliability of the new features, particularly the real-time co-editing and referral system. He’ll also be involved in testing the champion program exclusive features.

Technical Writer 25%) – Grace Kim

Grace will create documentation for the new features, the champion program, and update existing user guides to reflect new collaboration capabilities.

Marketing Specialist (25%) – Lucas Ferreira

Lucas will develop and execute internal marketing strategies for the referral program and champion program, creating materials to drive adoption within client organizations.

Project Coordinator (25%) – Zoe Bennett

Zoe will assist Sarah in managing the day-to-day aspects of the OKR, coordinating between teams, and ensuring all activities stay on schedule.

This team composition provides the skills necessary to execute the OKR and its associated activities/experiments. The percentages reflect the estimated time commitment needed over the 90-day period to achieve the objectives. 

The Role Of OKR Trainers & Consultants In Shaping Corporate OKRs

Over many years of working as an OKR trainer and consultant, I’ve learned that my team and I’s role goes far beyond teaching the basic structure and format of OKRs. Our value is facilitating critical thinking, challenging assumptions, and guiding teams toward more effective goal-setting and execution.

When we work with a company, we see ourselves as catalysts for deeper strategic discussions. Our job is to:

• Challenge Assumptions: Ask probing questions that encourage teams to examine their underlying assumptions about their business, market, and capabilities. It’s amazing how often this process uncovers blind spots and leads to more robust OKRs.
• Navigate Biases: We have seen teams fall prey to cognitive biases like overconfidence, confirmation bias, or groupthink. Part of my role is to help identify these biases and guide teams in mitigating their impact on goal-setting.
• Elevate Ambition: Many teams, especially those new to OKRs, tend to set conservative goals. I push them to think bigger and set truly inspiring objectives that drive significant progress.
• Align with Strategy: We ensure that company OKRs aren’t just good goals, but are strategically aligned and focused on the most impactful areas for the business.
• Foster Cross-Functional Thinking: By facilitating discussions across different departments, I help break down silos and encourage more holistic, company-wide objectives.
• Improve Measurement: We guide teams in selecting the most meaningful key results that genuinely indicate progress towards the objective rather than settling for easily available but less relevant metrics.
• Anticipate Challenges: Drawing from our experience with numerous companies, we help teams foresee potential obstacles and build contingencies into their OKR planning.

Remember, our goal isn’t just to help you create OKRs but to transform how your organization thinks about and pursues its most critical goals. We see myself as a partner in this transformative process, helping to instil a culture of ambitious goal-setting, continuous learning, and strategic alignment.

In the end, the most rewarding part of our job is seeing teams master the OKR format and elevate their strategic thinking and execution. That’s when we know I’ve made a real difference.

Last Bit Of Advice

Setting Company OKRs requires a deep understanding of your strategy, a willingness to focus on what’s truly important, and the courage to set ambitious, cross-functional goals.

Remember, your company OKRs are not your KPI scorecard or to-do list. They’re your strategy in action, your big bets, and your game-changers. When done right, they align your entire organization with your most crucial strategic objectives.

So, take a page from our fictional ACME Inc.’s book. Define your strategy clearly, identify your wildly important goals, set ambitious and measurable OKRs, resource them properly, and commit to the process. The results might just revolutionize your business, just like ACME aims to revolutionize legal work through AI.

While ACME Inc. is a fictional company, the principles and practices we’ve discussed are very real and have been proven effective in numerous real-world companies. Whether you’re a startup looking to disrupt an industry or an established company seeking to navigate change, OKRs can provide the focus and alignment you need to execute your strategy successfully.