Five SMART example OKRs in each of seven areas, each with a short explanation of what the area measures and the words you will meet. Use them as a starting point, not a copy. Need the basics first? Read How to set OKRs.
The Objective sets the direction in plain words. The Key Results underneath are written to be SMART. Here is where each letter shows up on a card:
Before you borrow one: the numbers are made up to show the shape. Replace every starting number with your own real one, choose targets your team believes in, and pick no more than 3 Objectives for a quarter. Cards marked committed must reach 100%, usually because of a legal or audit deadline.
Staying compliant day to day is a KPI. It becomes an OKR when you need to reach a new state: pass an audit, earn a certification, clear a backlog of findings, or make a risk smaller. Some of these goals are "committed": they must hit 1.0, because the alternative is a fine or a failed audit.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Audit finding | Something an auditor found that does not meet the rules. It needs an owner and a fix. |
| Non-conformity | A formal finding that you are not meeting a standard such as ISO 27001. "Major" ones can block certification. |
| Control | A safeguard that reduces a risk, such as "leavers lose access within 24 hours". |
| Risk register | The list of known risks, each with a likelihood, an impact, an owner and a plan. |
Customer happiness is hard to see, so teams put a number on it by asking customers directly. The two most common ways are CSAT and NPS. They sound alike but measure different things, so it is worth knowing both well before you put either in a Key Result.
The question: "How satisfied were you with [this support chat / your delivery / this visit]?" Customers answer from 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied), usually right after the moment happens.
The score: the percentage of people who answered 4 or 5.
The question: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" Customers answer from 0 to 10. It is usually asked every few months, not after every interaction.
The score: answers fall into three groups. NPS = % Promoters − % Detractors. Passives count towards the total but are not added or taken away. The result ranges from −100 to +100. It is a plain number, not a percentage.
| CSAT | NPS | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | One moment or interaction | The overall relationship and loyalty |
| Question | "How satisfied were you with …?" | "How likely are you to recommend us?" |
| Scale | 1 to 5 | 0 to 10 |
| Score | % of 4s and 5s (0% to 100%) | % promoters − % detractors (−100 to +100) |
| When to ask | Right after the interaction | Every few months |
| Moves | Fast, within weeks | Slowly, over months |
| Best for | Fixing a specific experience | Tracking whether customers would back you |
It depends a lot on your industry and your customers, so your own trend matters most. As a rough guide:
Why use both? CSAT moves quickly, so it tells you within weeks if a change is working. NPS moves slowly but shows whether those changes add up to loyalty. A rising CSAT with a flat NPS often means you fixed the small things but not the big one.
Acquisition is how many new customers you win. Loyalty is how many of them stay and come back. Winning customers who leave a month later is like filling a leaking bucket, so good OKRs in this area usually measure both: the tap and the leak.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Conversion rate | The share of people who move from one step to the next, for example from free trial to paying. |
| CAC (customer acquisition cost) | Sales and marketing spend ÷ new customers won. $8,800 ÷ 40 = $220 per customer. |
| Retention rate | Customers still with you at the end of a period ÷ customers at the start. 950 of 1,000 = 95%. |
| Churn | The opposite of retention: the share who left. 50 of 1,000 = 5% monthly churn. |
| Repeat purchase rate | The share of customers who buy again within a set time, such as 60 days. |
| LTV (lifetime value) | The total a typical customer pays you before they leave. A healthy rule of thumb is LTV at least 3 times CAC. |
Delivery speed is how quickly a change goes from "someone wrote it" to "a customer can use it". Software teams often use the DORA measures, from Google's DevOps Research and Assessment programme. Two of them are about speed: how often you deploy, and how long a change takes to reach production. The other two are about stability, and they are in the reliability section below.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Deployment frequency | How often you release to production. Elite teams deploy many times a day. |
| Lead time for changes | Time from a change being committed to it running in production. |
| Cycle time | Time from starting work on an item to finishing it. |
| Batch size | How much change goes out in one release. Smaller batches are faster and safer. |
Reliability is whether the product works when customers need it. The key idea is to agree, in numbers, how reliable is reliable enough. That target is the SLO. Going below it hurts customers. Going far above it usually costs more than it is worth.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| SLI (service level indicator) | What you measure, for example "the share of checkout requests that succeed in under 2 seconds". |
| SLO (service level objective) | The target for that measure, for example 99.9% over 30 days. |
| Error budget | The failure the SLO allows. 99.9% leaves 0.1%, about 43 minutes a month. If it is used up, you slow releases and fix stability. |
| MTTR (mean time to restore) | Average time from an incident starting to the service working again. |
| Change failure rate | The share of releases that cause a problem in production. One of the DORA measures. |
Most customers would rather fix a simple problem themselves than wait for a reply. Good self-service means they can: through a help centre, in-app guidance, or account settings that just work. Measure whether they succeed, not only whether they stop contacting you. If people give up, that is not self-service.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Self-service rate | Of customers who needed help, the share who solved it without contacting a person. |
| Deflection | A support contact that did not happen because self-service answered it first. |
| CES (customer effort score) | "How easy was it to …?", answered from 1 (very hard) to 7 (very easy). The average is the score. |
| Time to first value | How long a new customer takes to get their first real benefit from the product. |
These OKRs are about the team itself: how much of its time goes on what it planned, how predictable it is, and whether people can do good work without burning out. A common one is unplanned work, meaning anything that arrives mid-Sprint and was not in the plan: urgent requests, production bugs and favours. Some is normal. A lot means the plan is fiction.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Unplanned work % | Time spent on work that was not in the Sprint plan ÷ total time. Many teams aim for 10% to 20%, and keep a little slack for it. |
| Sprint Goal hit rate | The share of Sprints that achieve their Sprint Goal. A measure of predictability. |
| Carry-over | Items unfinished at the end of a Sprint that roll into the next one. |
| Flow efficiency | Time actively worked on an item ÷ its total time from start to finish. 15% to 20% is common, and the rest is waiting. |
| WIP | Work in progress: items started but not finished. See WIP limits. |
A team's quarter usually combines areas. For example, a product team might take one customer OKR, one reliability OKR and one ways-of-working OKR, and use the others as guardrails.