OKRs: Measuring True Impact Beyond Output and Activity

The hidden cost of "doing OKRs right" is the fear of actually failing to deliver value. This compilation of insights from Hugo Froes, Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden, and Anish Bhimani reveals that the common trap isn't a lack of frameworks, but a resistance to measuring true impact. By dissecting the nuances of discovery, build, and outcome OKRs, and insisting that key results must reflect behavior change, these leaders offer a path to genuine strategic alignment. This analysis is crucial for product leaders, engineers, and anyone tasked with driving business results, providing a strategic advantage by highlighting how to avoid common pitfalls and focus on what truly moves the needle, rather than just ticking boxes.

The Illusion of Progress: Why "Shipping" Isn't Shipping Value

The common narrative around OKRs often centers on setting ambitious goals. However, the deeper, less comfortable truth revealed in this discussion is that OKRs frequently become a shield, allowing teams to appear busy and aligned without actually achieving meaningful outcomes. Hugo Froes highlights a critical flaw: waiting an entire quarter to see if an outcome-based OKR has moved the needle. This temporal disconnect breeds a desire for more immediate, tangible progress, leading to the insidious creep of output-based "key results."

Froes's solution--splitting OKRs into discovery, build, and outcome types--is a pragmatic acknowledgment of real-world product development. It creates a necessary "triple track" where teams can simultaneously explore new ideas, build foundational elements, and launch initiatives, all while maintaining a connection to eventual impact. This approach tackles the inherent tension between long-term vision and the immediate need to deliver something. Without this structure, the pressure to show progress can easily lead to renaming existing roadmap items as OKRs, a practice Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden explicitly call out as fundamentally flawed.

"If you have an output like a feature, right? We want to make the, we'll be the easiest, the easiest way for first-time home buyers to get a mortgage is our objective. And our key result is mobile mortgage application by Friday. Yeah, exactly, exactly, by Friday, exactly, right? We've changed nothing. We accept the name of the goal. The goal is now called OKR, but all we've done is fixed time, fixed scope initiative, right? Same thing we've always been doing."

-- Jeff Gothelf

This highlights a core system dynamic: the system incentivizes visible activity over actual impact. When teams are rewarded for "shipping" features, regardless of their adoption or effect, the incentive structure is misaligned. The consequence is a perpetual cycle of building things that don't necessarily solve customer problems, masked by the illusion of progress through completed tasks. This approach fails because it doesn't measure value creation; it measures effort. The true competitive advantage lies in resisting this urge to equate activity with achievement, a discipline that requires a deliberate focus on outcomes.

The Critical Thinking Gap: Cascading OKRs as Copy-Paste

A significant systemic failure in OKR implementation is the misinterpretation of cascading goals. Gothelf and Seiden emphasize that this process should be a "critical thinking exercise," not a mechanical "copy-paste operation." The danger lies in taking the key results of a higher-level objective and simply assigning them as objectives to a lower-level team. This bypasses the essential strategic work of understanding how a team's specific efforts contribute to the broader organizational goals.

When key results become mere assignments rather than strategic inputs, the system breaks down. Teams lose the agency to define their unique contribution and the understanding of why their work matters. Anish Bhimani's experience at JPMorgan Chase vividly illustrates this breakdown. Faced with 341 key results, the organization was drowning in metrics, with less than half having defined targets or being actively measured. This isn't alignment; it's noise. The sheer volume indicates a lack of focus and a failure to connect granular tasks to overarching business objectives.

"What I see people do is literally copy and paste it, which is, which is wrong. So I want to just point that out that if you were doing that, that's wrong. But I like the way that you're describing it."

-- Josh Seiden

The downstream effect of this "copy-paste" cascading is a diffusion of responsibility and a lack of genuine strategic ownership. If a team's objective is simply to execute a pre-defined key result from above, they are less likely to question its validity or explore more effective paths to achieving the ultimate outcome. This creates a brittle system, vulnerable to market shifts and customer needs, because the feedback loops for strategic adjustment are broken. The advantage here is for those who understand that true alignment requires thoughtful decomposition, not just replication.

The Uncomfortable Truth: Accountability and the Fear of Failure

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of truly outcome-oriented OKRs is the direct link to accountability. As Anish Bhimani points out, outcomes are hard to escape. Unlike delivering a feature on time, which can be presented as a success regardless of customer adoption, an outcome measure directly reflects whether the customer benefited and, by extension, whether the business succeeded. This is where many organizations falter.

The resistance to outcome-based measures stems from a deep-seated fear of failure and a human tendency to "fall in love with the solution, not the problem." When teams focus on building a specific feature (the solution), they can control the execution and claim success upon delivery. When they focus on solving a customer problem (the outcome), success is contingent on external factors--customer behavior--over which they have less direct control. This uncertainty is uncomfortable, especially in environments that punish failure.

"The challenge with outcomes is you can't escape accountability. So it's not, there's a lot of sort of human nature that says, 'Well, wait a minute, I did my part, my project was green, I delivered this thing. The fact that we didn't get the outcome for the customer, it's not my fault.' I was like, 'Well, wait a minute, that's why we're here, right?'"

-- Anish Bhimani

Bhimani's experience with reducing 341 key results to a more manageable ~40 "difference makers" demonstrates the power of ruthless prioritization. The insight that operational efficiency often follows a superior customer experience, rather than leading it, is a prime example of mapping consequences. By focusing on customer onboarding time (a customer experience outcome), the organization naturally drove improvements in automation and process re-engineering (operational efficiencies). This inversion of conventional wisdom--leading with customer experience, not operational metrics--creates a durable competitive advantage. It requires a willingness to embrace the discomfort of measuring true impact and to accept that sometimes, the most valuable work involves discovering that a proposed solution was, in fact, the wrong problem to solve.

Key Action Items

• Immediate Action (Next Quarter): Audit your current OKRs. For each objective, list its key results. Can you rename your existing roadmap as OKRs without changing anything? If yes, re-evaluate those key results to ensure they measure behavior change or quantifiable customer impact, not just output.
• Immediate Action (Next Quarter): Introduce "discovery" and "build" OKR types alongside outcome OKRs for any new initiatives. This acknowledges the reality of product development cycles and provides visibility into progress before long-term outcomes are measurable.
• Immediate Action (Next Quarter): When cascading OKRs, explicitly facilitate a "critical thinking session" where teams define how their work contributes to higher-level objectives, rather than simply assigning them. Avoid copy-pasting key results as objectives.
• Short-Term Investment (Next 1-2 Quarters): Identify the "difference makers" within your organization. Ruthlessly prune the number of key results to a handful that, if achieved, would substantially move the needle on core business objectives.
• Short-Term Investment (Next 1-2 Quarters): Prioritize customer experience outcomes (e.g., improved onboarding, reduced friction) over internal operational efficiency metrics as primary drivers for new initiatives. Operational gains should be seen as a consequence, not the lead metric.
• Longer-Term Investment (6-12 Months): Foster a culture where "falling in love with the problem, not the solution" is actively encouraged. This means dedicating time and resources to customer discovery and validating problem-solution fit before committing to build.
• Longer-Term Investment (12-18 Months): Establish clear feedback loops to measure the actual impact of delivered features or initiatives against their intended outcome OKRs. Be prepared to iterate or pivot based on these results, accepting that not all efforts will yield the desired outcome, and that this learning is valuable.