The SHOP Model
The SHOP model is the four lanes of an OKR portfolio, Strategic, Health, Operational excellence and Personal, each with its own logic. Only Strategic OKRs ever touch bonuses.
This is chapter 8 of From Trading to Scaling, “The Work”. The book is free and takes about an hour.
"Types of OKRs" is usually answered with a muddle, because most frameworks never separate the fundamentally different jobs a goal can do. The SHOP model does. It sorts an organisation's goals into four lanes, each with its own rules for how it's set, tracked and rewarded, so you stop managing a reliability target the way you manage a moonshot.
S is for Strategic
The breakthrough changes that move the organisation somewhere new, traced to a strategic pillar and a theory of advantage. These are the wildly important bets, cross-functional and few. Strategic OKRs are the only lane that ever touches bonuses, and even then through a moderated gate.
H is for Health
The measures that must stay good for the business to be well: retention, reliability, cash, team health. These are mostly watched on a scorecard, not chased as OKRs, unless a health metric breaks or needs a deliberate step-change, at which point it graduates into an OKR until the new level holds.
O is for Operational excellence
Deliberate step-changes in how well the routine runs: cut cycle time, raise throughput, lower cost-to-serve. Real OKRs, owned at team level, but distinct from strategy: they make the engine better rather than change where it's going.
P is for Personal
Individual growth and development goals. They matter, and they are deliberately kept out of the team performance system so learning stays safe and is never gamed against a bonus.
Why a named taxonomy earns its keep
The lanes prevent the most common portfolio failure: treating everything as one kind of goal, which buries the few strategic bets under operational noise and quietly wires routine metrics to pay. It also answers cleanly what belongs in an OKR at all, the business-as-usual distinction, lane by lane. And it makes the compensation rule unambiguous: only S touches money. The reasoning is in OKRs and compensation.
One line to keep: Strategic, Health, Operational excellence, Personal, each with its own logic, and only Strategic ever touches bonuses.
A team’s goals, sorted: "win the enterprise segment" (S), "keep uptime above 99.9%" (H, scorecard), "cut onboarding time 40%" (O), "learn to run discovery interviews" (P). Four lanes, four sets of rules, one clear portfolio.
What are the four types of OKRs in the SHOP model? +
Strategic (breakthrough bets), Health (must-stay-good measures, mostly on a scorecard), Operational excellence (deliberate step-changes in the routine), and Personal (individual growth). Each has its own logic.
Why should only Strategic OKRs affect bonuses? +
Because tying pay to Health, Operational or Personal goals corrupts them: teams sandbag reliability targets and game learning goals. Restricting money to a moderated gate on the few Strategic OKRs keeps the rest honest.
From the ZOKRI OKR Handbook, the methodology we install and maintain. Written by Matt Roberts.
Matt leads enterprise OKR implementations at ZOKRI with Peter Kerr. Across the team that's 100+ implementations in 15+ enterprise organisations, from banks to car makers, in several countries and rather more time zones. Before ZOKRI he co-founded Linkdex, an enterprise SaaS platform, and sold it. He writes the method behind these notes, most of it learned the hard way in other people's leadership meetings.
A named portfolio taxonomy is only useful if it changes how you run. We install the SHOP lanes, sort your goals into them, and design the bonus gate so only the right lane touches pay.
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