Coach’s corner: How many OKRs should we have?

Nicole is our Head of Coaching & Customer Success. Once a month, she shares her answers to the most frequently asked questions during Coaching sessions.

Key takeaway: When setting OKRs, less is more. Don't have more than 3-5 OKRs per owner per timeframe, and only include what’s truly critical. Overloading with OKRs can lead to a lack of focus, making it harder to achieve meaningful outcomes. Always consider a team's nature of work, their capacity, the urgency, and the complexity of the work before committing to additional OKRs.

More is not better when it comes to OKR. In fact, it’s the enemy. Since OKR is about creating focus and prioritization, too many OKRs means there are too many priorities. And when you have too many priorities, nothing is a priority. This will quickly sabotage your success with the OKR framework, so it’s important to be intentional about the number of OKRs for your organization. 

With that said, there isn’t a rule for the total number of OKRs for the entire company. Instead it’s best to look at the quantity of OKRs by owner (ie. company or team). Neither the company nor a team should have more than 3-5 OKRs per timeframe. For example, the company should not have more than 5 annual OKRs and a team should not have more than 5 quarterly OKRs. Could you have 6? Sure, that’s possible, but it’s important to validate that you truly need it and that you have the resources to address it. 

It’s important to stress that the guidance of 3-5 OKRs is a maximum and not a quota. It doesn’t mean that all teams should have 3-5 OKRs. It’s appropriate for some teams to only have 1-2 OKRs — or none at all! 

Since OKRs are visible to all, some teams still may feel pressure to have OKRs so that they’re not left out. But creating unnecessary OKRs can complicate the process and produce unwanted overhead. 

To resist this urge, the number of OKRs for a team and how they participate should be determined by the following factors.

‍Nature of the team’s work‍

Some team’s business-as-usual work is critical to the company’s everyday operations. Essentially they’re focused on ensuring the lights stay on. Most (if not all) of this work is best represented by KPIs, rather than OKRs. KPIs represent the day-to-day processes and efforts required to maintain the status quo. OKRs, on the other hand, are about change and breaking the status quo. While these teams may not own their own OKRs since they’re focused on their KPIs, they can often support other teams’ OKRs through Initiatives. 

‍Capacity‍

Evaluate how much time the team has to dedicate to OKRs by determining how much time is leftover from their KPIs. A Product team, for example, typically has KPIs that are more like lag metrics that they monitor in the background rather than actively work on. As such, they have a lot of time to work on OKRs. On the other hand, some teams, like Sales teams, spend most of their time on their KPIs and therefore never have much time to work on OKR. Some teams may also experience seasonal swings where their business-as-usual work temporarily consumes all their time too. This means they may not be able to own an OKR or will have fewer OKRs at that time. That’s ok. It’s important that the team has enough capacity to have the best chances of achieving the OKRs they're responsible for. If you’re consistently finding that a team says that they don’t have the capacity to have any OKRs, but they should have the capacity, then it’s a good opportunity to create an OKR to improve their efficiency. 

What’s most important and urgent

‍When a team has time to own OKRs, it’s important that the number of OKRs truly represents their top priorities. Exclude nice-to-have goals by being able to justify why the OKRs are a top priority for that quarter. If it’s not easy to explain why the OKR is important and urgent, then it’s a nice-to-have goal and shouldn’t qualify as an OKR for the current quarter. This helps the team stay focused on solving the biggest problems and making the biggest impact.

Scope‍

How many OKRs a team can have is also dependent on the scope of these OKRs. Some OKRs are more simple and straightforward, while others are big and complex. If the team’s top priorities are more simple and straightforward, then they can manage having more OKRs. Alternatively if it’s a complicated problem to solve, then it will require a lot of testing and attention, so just that one OKR may be enough to ensure all efforts are focused on it. 

To sum up, less is more when it comes to OKR. Exercise restraint in order to ensure your company is focused on its top priorities.