{"Why you can't run a company on KPIs alone"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}55:Tc995, Why you can't run a company on KPIs alone

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

Why you can't run a company on KPIs alone

Key Takeaway: KPIs monitor business as usual. They don't drive change, close strategic gaps, or turn ambition into action. Companies that rely only on KPIs end up optimizing the present while their future quietly slips away. To actually move forward, you need a second type of goal alongside your KPIs: change goals.

If you ask most leadership teams what they use to track performance, the answer is almost always the same: KPIs. Revenue, churn, pipeline, conversion, NPS. A dashboard full of numbers that tells everyone how the business is doing. And for many organizations, that’s where goal-setting begins and ends.

KPIs are the most misunderstood tool in management. Not because people don’t know how to use them, but because they believe KPIs can do far more than they actually can.

KPIs are familiar, easy to set up, and they produce clean dashboards that make leadership feel in control. If revenue is growing, churn is low, and conversion rates look healthy, what more do you really need?

More than you think. And in my experience, this is exactly the kind of decision that seems reasonable in the moment but quietly costs organizations years of progress.

KPIs measure the present, not the future

A KPI is a tracking mechanism. It tells you whether your business as usual is healthy. Is your revenue where it needs to be? Is your NPS holding up? Is your support team responding fast enough? Are you keeping the lights on?

These are important questions. Every organization needs to answer them. But notice what they all have in common: they're backward-looking. A KPI is a report card on what's already happening. It doesn't tell you what to build next, what problem to solve, or how to move from where you are today to where you want to be a year from now.

I sometimes call KPIs "maintenance goals" or "business-as-usual goals" because that's exactly what they do. They help you maintain. They help you run the machine. What they can't do, by design, is change the machine.

And that's where a lot of companies get stuck.

You simply can't run companies anymore the way companies were run 2 or 3 decades ago, before markets moved at the speed they do now. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just slower than the environment you're competing in.

The moment you notice something is broken is usually too late

Say your customer support KPI shows average response time creeping up from 20 minutes to 45 minutes over the quarter. The KPI did its job: it surfaced a problem. But now what?

You need someone to figure out why it's happening. You need to decide what to do about it. You need to commit resources, define a plan, and actually execute that plan. The KPI itself doesn't do any of that. It just waves a red flag.

This is where KPI-only organizations start to break down. They see the red flag, everyone nods seriously, and then... nothing really happens. The team is already busy with their business as usual. Nobody has explicit ownership of fixing the problem. There's no deadline, no success criteria, no structure for coordinating the work. The red flag stays red for months, sometimes quarters, until someone finally gets frustrated enough to push through a fix.

Change goals (what we call OKRs, but you could use other frameworks like 4DX for this as well) exist precisely for this moment. An Objective says "we're going to fix this." Key Results define what success actually looks like. Initiatives map out the projects that will drive the change. And critically, it's all owned by a specific person or team with a specific timeline.

Without that structure, you have a dashboard full of warnings and no system for responding to them.

Goodhart's Law

Here's one of the less obvious problems with running on KPIs alone. Charles Goodhart's law states that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." In other words, the moment you start pushing people to hit a specific KPI number, they start gaming the metric instead of improving the underlying reality.

A Sales team under pressure to hit a "100 calls per day" KPI will start making fast, low-quality calls. A Support team told to hit "median response time under 15 minutes" will send unhelpful 2-line replies just to stop the clock. A Marketing team chasing "leads generated" will flood the pipeline with garbage leads that never convert.

In every case, the KPI looks great. The underlying business gets worse.

OKRs solve this by separating the outcome from the metric. Instead of making "response time" the goal, you set an Objective like "deliver a support experience customers rave about" with multiple Key Results that make it hard to game: CSAT score, first-contact resolution rate, volume of customer praise in surveys. Now the team has to actually improve the experience, not just speed up responses.

KPIs can't create focus

Most companies I've worked with track somewhere between 10 and 40 KPIs. Every department has their dashboard. Every executive has their favorite metrics. And when everything is measured, nothing gets prioritized.

A KPI system, by itself, can't answer the most important question a company needs to answer every quarter: what are the 3 or 4 things we absolutely must improve right now, above everything else?

That's the question OKRs answer. OKRs force you to pick your battles. They force leadership to say "this quarter, customer retention matters more than new sales" or "this quarter, we're going to fix our onboarding before we invest anywhere else." That kind of focus is impossible to achieve through a KPI dashboard alone, because dashboards are democratic. They give equal weight to every number on them.

Focus is a decision. And KPIs, by design, don't make decisions. They just report.

Without change goals, you're slowly losing ground

Here's the part that I think deserves the most attention from anyone considering dropping OKRs.

If you only track KPIs, you will become very good at maintaining the status quo. Your revenue will stay roughly where it was. Your churn will hover in a predictable range. Your team will get efficient at the work they already know how to do. From the outside, you'll look stable.

But while you're busy maintaining, your competitors are changing. They're running experiments. They're launching new products. They're improving processes, entering new markets, and making strategic bets. All of that is work that KPIs, on their own, cannot drive.

A recent industry analysis put this plainly: KPIs show where the business stands, but they don't create change. A company that measures a lot but improves too little will slowly lose ground to one that does both. And the loss is usually invisible quarter to quarter. You don't notice it until 3 years later, when you realize your competitor's product has gotten significantly better while yours has barely moved.

This isn't theoretical. Research on strategy consistently shows that 60 to 90% of strategic plans never fully launch, and while many blame execution, the underlying issue is often that companies never build the structure to translate strategic intent into actual change. KPIs measure the outcome of your strategy. Change goals drive it.

The "we already have KPIs, that's enough" trap

I've heard versions of this conversation many times: "We don't need another goal-setting framework. We already track our numbers, our team is focused, things are working fine."

My follow-up question is always the same. Pick any strategic priority your leadership team has publicly committed to this year. Maybe it's expanding into a new market, improving your product's AI capabilities, or fundamentally changing how you serve customers. Now tell me: which KPI is currently driving that work?

In almost every case, the answer is silence. Because KPIs don't drive strategic work. They measure operational health. Your strategic priorities live somewhere else entirely, usually in a slide deck, an email from the CEO, or a board presentation that people half-remember.

Without change goals tied explicitly to your strategy, your most important priorities are homeless. They have no owner, no timeline, no measurable definition of success. They exist only as intent, and intent doesn't execute itself.

What you actually give up when you drop OKRs

So let me be direct about what's at stake when an organization decides to run on KPIs only:

You lose the mechanism for translating strategy into action.
You lose the ability to focus the organization on a small number of priorities each quarter.
You lose the structure for fixing problems when KPIs turn unhealthy.
You lose the visibility that comes from everyone seeing the same change goals.
You lose the accountability that comes from every priority having a named owner.
You lose the feedback loops that let you course correct mid-quarter instead of mid-year.

That's a lot to give up in exchange for a simpler dashboard.

The good news is you don't have to choose between KPIs and OKRs. In fact, you shouldn't. KPIs tell you how your business is performing. OKRs drive the improvements that make it perform better. One without the other leaves you with half a system.

Running a company is both maintenance and change

Every real organization operates in 2 modes simultaneously. You have to keep the machine running, which is what KPIs help you do. And you have to keep making the machine better, which is what OKRs or any serious change-goal framework exists to do.

Dropping OKRs because "we already have KPIs" is like deciding you don't need a steering wheel because you already have a speedometer. One tells you how fast you're going. The other determines where you end up.

You need both. And if you walked away from OKRs because they felt like more work, my honest suggestion is to look at why the system wasn't working before you conclude the framework itself is the problem. Most of the time, the issue isn't OKRs. It's that OKRs were rolled out without executive buy-in, without clear ownership, or without being embedded into how the company actually operates.

Fix those things, and OKRs stop feeling like overhead and start feeling like the thing that finally makes your strategy happen.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

56:Tccd3,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"How to lift your company into the top 12% of performers"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Henrik van der Pol"}

{"\n"}

{"CEO at "}{"Perdoo"}

{"\n"}

{"If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, "}{"subscribe here."}{""}

{"\n"}

{"How to lift your company into the top 12% of performers"}

{"\n"}

{""}{"Key Takeaway:"}{" Setting specific, ambitious goals lifts an average team to the 80th percentile of performance. Add measurable metrics and regular feedback on progress, and that jumps to the 88th percentile. That's the top 12%! This is one of the most replicated findings in organizational psychology, with over 500 studies behind it. It's also the exact mechanism Perdoo is built on."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"There's a finding from organizational psychology that more business leaders should know about. It's been replicated in over 500 studies over the past 50 years, and it's about as close to a guarantee as you'll find in management research."}

{"\n"}

{"The finding, in plain English: when you replace vague exhortations like \"do your best\", \"improve customer experience\", or \"drive growth\" with specific, ambitious goals, the performance of an average team jumps to the 80th percentile. When you also attach metrics to each goal and provide regular feedback on progress, that performance moves up to the 88th percentile."}

{"\n"}

{"No, that's not a typo. The 88th percentile."}

{"\n"}

{"If you've ever wondered whether the structured goal-setting frameworks (OKRs, KPIs, all of it) actually deliver measurable results, this is the foundation. And it's worth understanding why, because once you do, the case for taking goal-setting seriously stops being a matter of opinion and starts being a matter of evidence."}
{"‍"}

{"\n"}

{"The science behind the claim"}

{"\n"}

{"The original work comes from Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who in 1990 published "}{"A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance"}{". Their core finding was simple but powerful: specific, ambitious goals reliably outperform vague intentions, and they do so across an enormous range of contexts. Office workers, factory workers, sports teams, students, you name it. Locke and Latham's effect sizes ranged from 0.5 to 0.8 standard deviations of task performance, which is large by any reasonable standard in social science."}

{"\n"}

{"A later "}{"meta-analysis on group performance by Kleingeld, van Mierlo, and Arends"}{" (published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2011) found an effect size of 0.8 standard deviations of performance, specifically for teams given specific difficult goals compared with nonspecific ones. Translated into percentiles, that means moving an average team from the middle of the pack to roughly the 80th percentile, just by introducing structured goals."}

{"\n"}

{"But the more striking number comes from a different study. "}{"Pritchard and colleagues, in the Journal of Applied Psychology (2008)"}{", conducted a meta-analysis of 83 field studies of an intervention called ProMES. The intervention had 3 components: setting a handful of objectives, assigning measurable metrics to each objective, and providing regular feedback on progress."}

{"\n"}

{"The result? Teams that adopted this approach improved their performance by 1.16 standard deviations on average, an effect size that "}{"Donald and Charles Sull, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review"}{", describe as moving an average team to the 88th percentile of performance. Not a select group of star performers. Average teams. In settings as varied as the U.S. Air Force, high-tech manufacturing plants, and hospitals."}

{"\n"}

{"We rarely encounter numbers this clean in organizational research. Most management findings are messy, with effect sizes that are statistically real but practically modest. This one isn't, i's one of the most robust effects in the field and it's been holding up since the 1960s."}
{"‍"}

{"\n"}

{"Why goals work this well"}

{"\n"}

{"The five principles Locke and Latham identified explain why the effect is so strong, and why it's so consistent:"}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}{"Clarity"}{"."}{" "}{"Specific goals direct attention toward what matters. Vague goals leave room for interpretation, which leads to drift."}
{"\n"}{"Challenge"}{". Difficult goals mobilize more effort than easy ones, up to the limits of ability. The relationship is linear within that range."}
{"\n"}{"Commitment"}{". People work harder for goals they actually believe in. Forced compliance produces a fraction of the performance lift of genuine buy-in."}
{"\n"}{"Feedback"}{". Without progress feedback, goals lose most of their power. Feedback is what lets people course correct in time to actually hit the target."}
{"\n"}{"Task complexity"}{". For complex tasks, learning goals can outperform pure performance goals, especially in the early stages of new work."}

{"\n"}

{"What you might notice if you've ever worked with "}{"OKRs"}{" is that all five principles are baked directly into how OKRs operate. Objectives are specific and ambitious. Key Results define measurable success criteria. Progress is reviewed continuously, not annually. Ownership is explicit. The entire framework is, more or less, an operationalization of Locke and Latham's research."}

{"\n"}

{"That's not a coincidence. The people who designed and refined OKRs (Andy Grove at Intel, John Doerr who carried it forward) were building something that worked in practice. The fact that it lines up almost perfectly with what 50 years of academic research independently confirmed is one of the strongest endorsements you can ask for."}
{"‍"}

{"\n"}

{"What this means for your team"}

{"\n"}

{"The takeaway for any leadership team is straightforward and the implications are real."}

{"\n"}

{"If you don't have specific, ambitious goals in place across your team or organization, your performance is, statistically, around the 50th percentile. You're average. Not because your people are average, but because the absence of structured goals means effort is diffuse and feedback is sparse."}

{"\n"}

{"If you set specific, ambitious goals (even without metrics or feedback), you move into the 80th percentile range. That's a roughly 30-percentile jump from doing essentially nothing different except telling people what specifically matters."}

{"\n"}

{"If you also attach metrics and provide regular feedback, you reach the 88th percentile. That's another 8-percentile gain on top of the first move, and it comes from the operational discipline of measurement and communication, not from harder work or more talent."}

{"\n"}

{"These aren't small numbers. The difference between an average team and an 88th-percentile team, in any organization I've seen, is the difference between an okay quarter and a category-defining one."}
{"‍"}

{"\n"}

{"What gets in the way"}

{"\n"}

{"Knowing this works and actually doing it are, of course, different things. The most common failures that I see are:"}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}{"Objectives get set but never measured."}{" Without Key Results attached to each Objective, you have intent but no clarity or specificity. You're back at the 50th percentile."}
{"\n"}{"Goals don't have an owner or lead"}{". Without assigning an owner or lead, you lack accountability. Without accountability, you're back at the 50th percentile."}
{"\n"}{"Feedback is annual or quarterly, not regular. "}{"Yearly or quarterly reviews of progress are too late to course correct. The Pritchard meta-analysis specifically isolated regular feedback as a critical component of the 1.16 standard deviation lift."}
{"\n"}{"Goals aren't visible."}{" If your goals live in a spreadsheet or slide deck nobody opens, they may as well not exist. Visibility creates the social context that drives commitment."}
{"\n"}{"Too many goals."}{" Locke and Latham's research is clear that ambition matters, but so does focus. A team chasing 15 goals isn't going to outperform one chasing 3. Goal overload dilutes attention and effort."}
{"\n"}{"No system to support it"}{". Goal-setting that depends on individual willpower fails. It needs to be structural, embedded in how the organization operates day to day."}

{"\n"}

{"This last point is what I think most companies underestimate. The 88th percentile finding isn't about having goals. It's about having a system that makes goals specific, measurable, and continuously reviewed. That's a structural problem, not a motivational one."}
{"‍"}

{"\n"}

{"How Perdoo turns this into your default"}

{"\n"}

{"This is exactly what we built Perdoo to do. Not because we sat down with the academic literature and reverse-engineered a product (though the alignment is striking), but because we kept seeing organizations that had ambitious people, ambitious strategies, but no structure to translate either into results."}

{"\n"}

{"Perdoo gives you that structure. Your strategy, OKRs, and KPIs all live in one platform. Every Objective has a clear owner and lead. Every Key Result has a metric and target. Progress flows in continuously, so feedback is real-time rather than retrospective. 1-on-1s and team meetings happen inside the same context, grounded in actual progress. Reporting to leadership is automated rather than manually compiled."}

{"\n"}

{"In other words, Perdoo makes the 88th percentile setup the path of least resistance, instead of something your team has to maintain through constant effort and discipline."}
{"‍"}

{"\n"}

{"The bottom line"}

{"\n"}

{"If you're a leader weighing whether to invest in structured goal-setting, the honest assessment is this: you're already making a decision, whether you realize it or not. Operating without a clear set of specific, ambitious, measurable, regularly-reviewed goals is a choice to perform around the 50th percentile of teams in your category."}

{"\n"}

{"The research has been clear for half a century. The mechanism is well understood. The tools to operationalize it exist."}

{"\n"}

{"The question isn't whether goal-setting works. It does, with one of the strongest evidence bases in organizational psychology. The question is whether you want your team operating at the 50th percentile, or the 88th."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}57:Tba2b, How to lift your company into the top 12% of performers

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

How to lift your company into the top 12% of performers

Key Takeaway: Setting specific, ambitious goals lifts an average team to the 80th percentile of performance. Add measurable metrics and regular feedback on progress, and that jumps to the 88th percentile. That's the top 12%! This is one of the most replicated findings in organizational psychology, with over 500 studies behind it. It's also the exact mechanism Perdoo is built on.

There's a finding from organizational psychology that more business leaders should know about. It's been replicated in over 500 studies over the past 50 years, and it's about as close to a guarantee as you'll find in management research.

The finding, in plain English: when you replace vague exhortations like "do your best", "improve customer experience", or "drive growth" with specific, ambitious goals, the performance of an average team jumps to the 80th percentile. When you also attach metrics to each goal and provide regular feedback on progress, that performance moves up to the 88th percentile.

No, that's not a typo. The 88th percentile.

If you've ever wondered whether the structured goal-setting frameworks (OKRs, KPIs, all of it) actually deliver measurable results, this is the foundation. And it's worth understanding why, because once you do, the case for taking goal-setting seriously stops being a matter of opinion and starts being a matter of evidence.
‍

The science behind the claim

The original work comes from Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who in 1990 published A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance. Their core finding was simple but powerful: specific, ambitious goals reliably outperform vague intentions, and they do so across an enormous range of contexts. Office workers, factory workers, sports teams, students, you name it. Locke and Latham's effect sizes ranged from 0.5 to 0.8 standard deviations of task performance, which is large by any reasonable standard in social science.

A later meta-analysis on group performance by Kleingeld, van Mierlo, and Arends (published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2011) found an effect size of 0.8 standard deviations of performance, specifically for teams given specific difficult goals compared with nonspecific ones. Translated into percentiles, that means moving an average team from the middle of the pack to roughly the 80th percentile, just by introducing structured goals.

But the more striking number comes from a different study. Pritchard and colleagues, in the Journal of Applied Psychology (2008), conducted a meta-analysis of 83 field studies of an intervention called ProMES. The intervention had 3 components: setting a handful of objectives, assigning measurable metrics to each objective, and providing regular feedback on progress.

The result? Teams that adopted this approach improved their performance by 1.16 standard deviations on average, an effect size that Donald and Charles Sull, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, describe as moving an average team to the 88th percentile of performance. Not a select group of star performers. Average teams. In settings as varied as the U.S. Air Force, high-tech manufacturing plants, and hospitals.

We rarely encounter numbers this clean in organizational research. Most management findings are messy, with effect sizes that are statistically real but practically modest. This one isn't, i's one of the most robust effects in the field and it's been holding up since the 1960s.
‍

Why goals work this well

The five principles Locke and Latham identified explain why the effect is so strong, and why it's so consistent:

Clarity. Specific goals direct attention toward what matters. Vague goals leave room for interpretation, which leads to drift.
Challenge. Difficult goals mobilize more effort than easy ones, up to the limits of ability. The relationship is linear within that range.
Commitment. People work harder for goals they actually believe in. Forced compliance produces a fraction of the performance lift of genuine buy-in.
Feedback. Without progress feedback, goals lose most of their power. Feedback is what lets people course correct in time to actually hit the target.
Task complexity. For complex tasks, learning goals can outperform pure performance goals, especially in the early stages of new work.

What you might notice if you've ever worked with OKRs is that all five principles are baked directly into how OKRs operate. Objectives are specific and ambitious. Key Results define measurable success criteria. Progress is reviewed continuously, not annually. Ownership is explicit. The entire framework is, more or less, an operationalization of Locke and Latham's research.

That's not a coincidence. The people who designed and refined OKRs (Andy Grove at Intel, John Doerr who carried it forward) were building something that worked in practice. The fact that it lines up almost perfectly with what 50 years of academic research independently confirmed is one of the strongest endorsements you can ask for.
‍

What this means for your team

The takeaway for any leadership team is straightforward and the implications are real.

If you don't have specific, ambitious goals in place across your team or organization, your performance is, statistically, around the 50th percentile. You're average. Not because your people are average, but because the absence of structured goals means effort is diffuse and feedback is sparse.

If you set specific, ambitious goals (even without metrics or feedback), you move into the 80th percentile range. That's a roughly 30-percentile jump from doing essentially nothing different except telling people what specifically matters.

If you also attach metrics and provide regular feedback, you reach the 88th percentile. That's another 8-percentile gain on top of the first move, and it comes from the operational discipline of measurement and communication, not from harder work or more talent.

These aren't small numbers. The difference between an average team and an 88th-percentile team, in any organization I've seen, is the difference between an okay quarter and a category-defining one.
‍

What gets in the way

Knowing this works and actually doing it are, of course, different things. The most common failures that I see are:

Objectives get set but never measured. Without Key Results attached to each Objective, you have intent but no clarity or specificity. You're back at the 50th percentile.
Goals don't have an owner or lead. Without assigning an owner or lead, you lack accountability. Without accountability, you're back at the 50th percentile.
Feedback is annual or quarterly, not regular. Yearly or quarterly reviews of progress are too late to course correct. The Pritchard meta-analysis specifically isolated regular feedback as a critical component of the 1.16 standard deviation lift.
Goals aren't visible. If your goals live in a spreadsheet or slide deck nobody opens, they may as well not exist. Visibility creates the social context that drives commitment.
Too many goals. Locke and Latham's research is clear that ambition matters, but so does focus. A team chasing 15 goals isn't going to outperform one chasing 3. Goal overload dilutes attention and effort.
No system to support it. Goal-setting that depends on individual willpower fails. It needs to be structural, embedded in how the organization operates day to day.

This last point is what I think most companies underestimate. The 88th percentile finding isn't about having goals. It's about having a system that makes goals specific, measurable, and continuously reviewed. That's a structural problem, not a motivational one.
‍

How Perdoo turns this into your default

This is exactly what we built Perdoo to do. Not because we sat down with the academic literature and reverse-engineered a product (though the alignment is striking), but because we kept seeing organizations that had ambitious people, ambitious strategies, but no structure to translate either into results.

Perdoo gives you that structure. Your strategy, OKRs, and KPIs all live in one platform. Every Objective has a clear owner and lead. Every Key Result has a metric and target. Progress flows in continuously, so feedback is real-time rather than retrospective. 1-on-1s and team meetings happen inside the same context, grounded in actual progress. Reporting to leadership is automated rather than manually compiled.

In other words, Perdoo makes the 88th percentile setup the path of least resistance, instead of something your team has to maintain through constant effort and discipline.
‍

The bottom line

If you're a leader weighing whether to invest in structured goal-setting, the honest assessment is this: you're already making a decision, whether you realize it or not. Operating without a clear set of specific, ambitious, measurable, regularly-reviewed goals is a choice to perform around the 50th percentile of teams in your category.

The research has been clear for half a century. The mechanism is well understood. The tools to operationalize it exist.

The question isn't whether goal-setting works. It does, with one of the strongest evidence bases in organizational psychology. The question is whether you want your team operating at the 50th percentile, or the 88th.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

58:T138db,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"Perdoo Product Update 📢"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Hi John, 👋"}

{"\n"}

{"We've been working hard to make OKR and strategy execution a seamless experience for your organization. Continue reading to see what's new. "}

{"\n"}

{"Make sure to take a look at "}{"Coming soon"}{" (at the bottom) — we have "}{"a lot of exciting updates"}{" on the way!"}
{""}

{"\n"}

{"NEW: Action Center"}

{"\n"}

{"All the actions that you need to take are now conveniently grouped together in our brand new Action Center. We've also added new reminders for things like creating goals and closing OKRs."}

{"\n"}

{"With everything consolidated into a single "}{"Action Center"}{", staying on top of your work has never been easier."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"Draft progress update comments with AI ✨"}

{"\n"}

{"Our AI Assistant can now draft comments for your progress updates."}

{"\n"}

{"It will analyze the context, progress history, and sub-goals (if any). Then it will draft a brief update to explain what changed, why it changed, and possible next steps."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"MCP Server"}

{"\n"}

{"Use Perdoo's MCP Server to connect your Perdoo account with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any MCP-compatible tool."}

{"\n"}

{"Then ask your AI any question about your Perdoo account."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"Improvements to Explore"}

{"\n"}

{"We've added many "}{"new columns"}{": Closing Notes, Contributors, Created at, Description, End date, Expected progress, Outdated, Start date, Source, Tags, Archived goals, and all the "}{"custom fields"}{" that you may have created."}

{"\n"}

{"We've added "}{"new filters"}{" for all the fields mentioned above. And we've added many "}{"new sorting"}{" options."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{""}

{"\n"}

{"Improved HubSpot integration"}

{"\n"}

{"With our new HubSpot integration you have a lot more flexibility to choose what data you want to connect with your goals in Perdoo. "}

{"\n"}

{"Check out our Release Notes →"}

{"\n"}

{"Customizable metric units"}

{"\n"}

{"Want to measure in EUR, USD, days, minutes, or another unit? You now have full flexibility and can enter any unit for your goals! No need anymore to pick one from the (restricted) dropdown."}

{"\n"}

{""}

{"\n"}

{"\"Easy to Learn and Use, Even for Non‑Tech Users\""}

{"\n"}

{"\"I'm not particularly tech savvy and this has been an easy tool to pick up and use. Customer support is also 10/10."}

{"\n"}

{"Perdoo is an easy way to keep track of all the goals people are working towards.\""}

{"\n"}

{"Verified User in Marketing and Advertising, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)"}

{"\n"}

{"Read full review →"}

{"\n"}

{"AI Chat: "}{"Chat with our AI Assistant from within the app."}
{""}{"Vince (our always-on AI Coach) can not access the data in your Perdoo account, but our AI Assistant can!"}

{"\n"}

{"New goal tracking capabilities"}

{"\n"}

{"Initiatives for KPIs."}
{"Owner/Teams for Key Results and Initiatives."}
{"Align Strategic Pillars to each other."}

{"\n"}

{"Explore > Map: improvements"}

{"\n"}

{""}{"More structure:"}{" Your Ultimate Goal will be displayed at the top, then Strategic Pillars, and then KPIs and OKRs."}
{""}{"New capabilities:"}
{"- Reorder Strategic Pillars."}
{"- Filter out unaligned goals."}
{"- Show a goal's full name on hover."}
{"- Show a Pillar's description on hover."}

{"\n"}

{"Other"}

{"\n"}

{"New Teams integration — allowing you to use the "}{"entire"}{" Perdoo app inside Teams."}
{"Add Saved Views from Explore as a widget on a Custom Dashboard."}
{"Looker integration."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"If you don’t want to receive emails like this, "}{"unsubscribe"}{" from this list."}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}59:T115be, Perdoo Product Update 📢

Hi John, 👋

We've been working hard to make OKR and strategy execution a seamless experience for your organization. Continue reading to see what's new.

Make sure to take a look at Coming soon (at the bottom) — we have a lot of exciting updates on the way!

NEW: Action Center

All the actions that you need to take are now conveniently grouped together in our brand new Action Center. We've also added new reminders for things like creating goals and closing OKRs.

With everything consolidated into a single Action Center, staying on top of your work has never been easier.

Draft progress update comments with AI ✨

Our AI Assistant can now draft comments for your progress updates.

It will analyze the context, progress history, and sub-goals (if any). Then it will draft a brief update to explain what changed, why it changed, and possible next steps.

MCP Server

Use Perdoo's MCP Server to connect your Perdoo account with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any MCP-compatible tool.

Then ask your AI any question about your Perdoo account.

Improvements to Explore

We've added many new columns: Closing Notes, Contributors, Created at, Description, End date, Expected progress, Outdated, Start date, Source, Tags, Archived goals, and all the custom fields that you may have created.

We've added new filters for all the fields mentioned above. And we've added many new sorting options.

Improved HubSpot integration

With our new HubSpot integration you have a lot more flexibility to choose what data you want to connect with your goals in Perdoo.

Check out our Release Notes →

Customizable metric units

Want to measure in EUR, USD, days, minutes, or another unit? You now have full flexibility and can enter any unit for your goals! No need anymore to pick one from the (restricted) dropdown.

"Easy to Learn and Use, Even for Non‑Tech Users"

"I'm not particularly tech savvy and this has been an easy tool to pick up and use. Customer support is also 10/10.

Perdoo is an easy way to keep track of all the goals people are working towards."

Verified User in Marketing and Advertising, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

Read full review →

AI Chat: Chat with our AI Assistant from within the app.
Vince (our always-on AI Coach) can not access the data in your Perdoo account, but our AI Assistant can!

New goal tracking capabilities

Initiatives for KPIs.
Owner/Teams for Key Results and Initiatives.
Align Strategic Pillars to each other.

Explore > Map: improvements

More structure: Your Ultimate Goal will be displayed at the top, then Strategic Pillars, and then KPIs and OKRs.
New capabilities:
- Reorder Strategic Pillars.
- Filter out unaligned goals.
- Show a goal's full name on hover.
- Show a Pillar's description on hover.

Other

New Teams integration — allowing you to use the entire Perdoo app inside Teams.
Add Saved Views from Explore as a widget on a Custom Dashboard.
Looker integration.

If you don’t want to receive emails like this, unsubscribe from this list.

5a:Te96d,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"How to get executive buy-in for OKRs"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Henrik van der Pol"}

{"\n"}

{"CEO at "}{"Perdoo"}

{"\n"}

{"If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, "}{"subscribe here."}{""}

{"\n"}

{"How to get executive buy-in for OKRs"}

{"\n"}

{""}{"Key Takeaway: "}{"Executive buy-in is the single biggest predictor of OKR success. Don't pitch the framework, pitch the problem it solves. Start with a pilot, not a company-wide rollout. And make sure leadership doesn't just endorse OKRs but actually uses them."}

{"\n"}

{"OKRs without executive buy-in don't work. It's that simple."}

{"\n"}

{"You can train your teams, set up the software, write perfect Objectives and Key Results, and run check-ins every week. If leadership isn't actively behind it, the whole thing will unravel within a quarter or 2. I've seen this happen with enough organizations to say it with confidence: executive sponsorship is the single most important factor in whether OKRs succeed or fail."}

{"\n"}

{"Research on OKR adoption"}{" consistently puts committed leadership at the top of the list of critical success factors. Not the quality of the goals, not the choice of software, not the training program. Leadership."}

{"\n"}

{"So if you're the person trying to bring OKRs into your organization and your executives aren't yet convinced, this article is for you. "}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Why executives resist OKRs"}

{"\n"}

{"Before you can get buy-in, it helps to understand what you're up against. In my experience, executive resistance to OKRs usually comes from 1 of 4 places."}

{"\n"}

{"\"We've tried frameworks before.\" This is the most common one. Many leadership teams have been through SMART goals, Balanced Scorecards, 4DX, or some other methodology that started strong and faded within 2 quarters. They're understandably skeptical of the next thing that promises to fix strategy execution. The concern isn't irrational. It's based on experience."}

{"\n"}

{"\"This sounds like more work.\" Executives are already stretched thin. "}{"Research shows"}{" that 85% of executive teams spend less than 1 hour per month discussing strategy, not because they don't care, but because operations consume everything. The last thing they want is another system that adds overhead."}

{"\n"}

{"\"We're not mature enough for this.\" Some leaders believe their organization needs to have its act together before adopting a structured goal-setting framework. As if OKRs are something you graduate into after you've already figured out strategy execution on your own."}

{"\n"}

{"\"We already have a way of doing things.\" Every organization sets goals in some form, whether that's through annual budgets, project plans, or informal priorities. The question \"why change?\" is reasonable, especially when the current approach feels sufficient even if it's not particularly effective."}

{"\n"}

{"Understanding which of these is driving the resistance shapes how you respond."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Don't sell the framework, sell the problem"}

{"\n"}

{"The mistake most people make is walking into the room and pitching OKRs as a methodology. They explain Objectives, Key Results, Initiatives, cadences, and alignment structures. The executive team's eyes glaze over because they're hearing process, not outcomes."}

{"\n"}

{"Flip it. Start with the problem your organization actually has, and let OKRs be the answer rather than the starting point."}

{"\n"}

{"Most leadership teams will recognize at least 1 of these pain points:"}

{"\n"}

{"Teams are working hard but progress on strategic priorities is slow or unclear."}
{"Different departments are pulling in different directions without realizing it."}
{"Goals get set in Q1 and nobody looks at them again until the end of the year."}
{"Leadership can't get a clear picture of how the organization is tracking against its strategy without requesting manual status updates."}
{"People don't understand how their daily work connects to what the company is trying to achieve."}

{"\n"}

{"These aren't abstract problems. They're expensive. "}{"According to HBR"}{", 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. Only 5% of employees understand their company's strategy. A "}{"2025 survey of 250+ leaders"}{" found that 81% of organizations experience delays when accountability is unclear, and 77% report that silos between departments hinder execution."}

{"\n"}

{"When you frame OKRs as the solution to a pain the leadership team already feels, the conversation shifts from \"Why should we adopt another framework?\" to \"How do we fix this?\""}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Speak their language"}

{"\n"}

{"Executives think in outcomes, not frameworks. They want to know what will change, how fast, and at what cost."}

{"\n"}

{"I've found that the most effective way to present OKRs to a leadership team is to connect the framework directly to their existing strategic priorities. Pick 1 strategic goal the company is already pursuing, something the CEO or executive team has publicly committed to, and show how OKRs would structure the execution of that specific goal."}

{"\n"}

{"For example: if the company's strategic priority is improving customer retention, show how that translates into a company-level Objective (Become the vendor our customers can't live without), with measurable Key Results (Reduce churn from 8% to 5%, Increase NPS from 32 to 50, Grow expansion revenue by 25%), owned by specific teams, with Initiatives that represent the actual projects driving those numbers."}

{"\n"}

{"This makes OKRs concrete and immediately relevant instead of theoretical. The executive team isn't evaluating a methodology in the abstract. They're looking at a better way to execute something they already care about"}{"."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Build the business case with data"}

{"\n"}

{"Some executives need evidence before they commit. That's fair. Here are the data points that tend to land:"}

{"\n"}

{"Companies using OKRs report "}{"nearly 60% higher revenue growth"}{" compared to peers, and 76% report improved alignment across teams."}
{"\n"}{"Sears Holdings' controlled study"}{" of 20,000 employees found that regular OKR users were 11.5% more likely to move into a higher performance bracket."}
{"\n"}{"McKinsey's 2024 survey"}{" of 1,000+ employees found that 72% cite goal setting as their #1 motivator for performance."}
{"Organizations with clear accountability see improved results 95% of the time, according to a "}{"2025 survey of 250+ leaders."}{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"‍"}{"You don't need all of these. Pick the 1 or 2 that resonate most with your leadership team's priorities. If they're focused on growth, lead with revenue data. If they're worried about alignment, lead with that. If they care about employee engagement, use the McKinsey finding."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Propose a pilot, not a revolution"}

{"\n"}

{"The fastest way to kill executive buy-in is to propose a company-wide rollout on day 1. Leaders who have been burned by previous framework rollouts will immediately picture the disruption, the training, the resistance, and the inevitable fizzle."}

{"\n"}

{"Instead, propose a pilot. Start with leadership and 1 or 2 teams. Keep it contained: 1 Objective per team, 2 to 3 Key Results each, 1 quarter. This approach de-risks the entire initiative. If it works, you have internal proof. If it doesn't, you've learned something without disrupting the whole organization."}

{"\n"}

{"I've written about this approach in detail in our "}{"OKR pilot program guide"}{", but the key insight is this: the teams that participate in the pilot become your internal champions. They're the ones who will advocate for OKRs from experience rather than theory, and that peer advocacy is far more persuasive to a skeptical executive than any consultant's slide deck."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Get leadership to use OKRs themselves"}

{"\n"}

{"This is the non-negotiable. If the executive team endorses OKRs but doesn't personally use them, the rest of the organization will treat the framework as optional."}

{"\n"}

{"Research on OKR critical success factors"}{" puts \"leadership leads by example\" at the very top. It's not enough for the CEO to say \"we're doing OKRs now.\" The CEO needs to have their own Objectives and Key Results. The executive team needs to review them regularly. When the leadership team talks about OKRs in their meetings, references them in decisions, and updates their progress visibly, the signal to the rest of the organization is unmistakable: this matters."}

{"\n"}

{"In my experience, the moment a CEO starts asking \"how does this connect to our Objectives?\" in a meeting, the culture shifts. People realize this isn't a side project. It's how the company runs."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Address the \"more work\" concern head-on"}

{"\n"}

{"This one deserves special attention because it's the most persistent objection. Executives who are already drowning in operational work see any new system as a threat to their bandwidth."}

{"\n"}

{"The honest answer is that OKRs do require some upfront investment. Setting good Objectives takes thought. Defining measurable Key Results takes discipline. Building the review cadence takes calendar time."}

{"\n"}

{"But the return on that investment comes quickly. OKRs replace the chaos of unclear priorities, misaligned teams, and manual progress reporting with a system that makes all of those things structural. A 15-minute weekly check-in on Key Results replaces the 45-minute status meeting where nobody is sure what anyone is working on. Progress becomes visible without someone having to compile a report. Alignment happens through the system rather than through endless ad-hoc conversations."}

{"\n"}

{"The executives I've worked with who initially resisted OKRs as \"more work\" are often the ones who become the strongest advocates, because they experience firsthand how much clearer and faster decisions become when everyone is working from the same set of priorities."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The bottom line"}

{"\n"}

{"Getting executive buy-in for OKRs isn't about winning an argument. It's about connecting the framework to problems leadership already recognizes, showing evidence that it works, proposing a low-risk starting point, and making sure leaders don't just endorse OKRs but actually use them."}

{"\n"}

{"The organizations that succeed with OKRs are almost always the ones where the executive team went first."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}5b:Td485, How to get executive buy-in for OKRs

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

How to get executive buy-in for OKRs

Key Takeaway: Executive buy-in is the single biggest predictor of OKR success. Don't pitch the framework, pitch the problem it solves. Start with a pilot, not a company-wide rollout. And make sure leadership doesn't just endorse OKRs but actually uses them.

OKRs without executive buy-in don't work. It's that simple.

You can train your teams, set up the software, write perfect Objectives and Key Results, and run check-ins every week. If leadership isn't actively behind it, the whole thing will unravel within a quarter or 2. I've seen this happen with enough organizations to say it with confidence: executive sponsorship is the single most important factor in whether OKRs succeed or fail.

Research on OKR adoption consistently puts committed leadership at the top of the list of critical success factors. Not the quality of the goals, not the choice of software, not the training program. Leadership.

So if you're the person trying to bring OKRs into your organization and your executives aren't yet convinced, this article is for you.

Why executives resist OKRs

Before you can get buy-in, it helps to understand what you're up against. In my experience, executive resistance to OKRs usually comes from 1 of 4 places.

"We've tried frameworks before." This is the most common one. Many leadership teams have been through SMART goals, Balanced Scorecards, 4DX, or some other methodology that started strong and faded within 2 quarters. They're understandably skeptical of the next thing that promises to fix strategy execution. The concern isn't irrational. It's based on experience.

"This sounds like more work." Executives are already stretched thin. Research shows that 85% of executive teams spend less than 1 hour per month discussing strategy, not because they don't care, but because operations consume everything. The last thing they want is another system that adds overhead.

"We're not mature enough for this." Some leaders believe their organization needs to have its act together before adopting a structured goal-setting framework. As if OKRs are something you graduate into after you've already figured out strategy execution on your own.

"We already have a way of doing things." Every organization sets goals in some form, whether that's through annual budgets, project plans, or informal priorities. The question "why change?" is reasonable, especially when the current approach feels sufficient even if it's not particularly effective.

Understanding which of these is driving the resistance shapes how you respond.

Don't sell the framework, sell the problem

The mistake most people make is walking into the room and pitching OKRs as a methodology. They explain Objectives, Key Results, Initiatives, cadences, and alignment structures. The executive team's eyes glaze over because they're hearing process, not outcomes.

Flip it. Start with the problem your organization actually has, and let OKRs be the answer rather than the starting point.

Most leadership teams will recognize at least 1 of these pain points:

Teams are working hard but progress on strategic priorities is slow or unclear.
Different departments are pulling in different directions without realizing it.
Goals get set in Q1 and nobody looks at them again until the end of the year.
Leadership can't get a clear picture of how the organization is tracking against its strategy without requesting manual status updates.
People don't understand how their daily work connects to what the company is trying to achieve.

These aren't abstract problems. They're expensive. According to HBR, 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. Only 5% of employees understand their company's strategy. A 2025 survey of 250+ leaders found that 81% of organizations experience delays when accountability is unclear, and 77% report that silos between departments hinder execution.

When you frame OKRs as the solution to a pain the leadership team already feels, the conversation shifts from "Why should we adopt another framework?" to "How do we fix this?"

Speak their language

Executives think in outcomes, not frameworks. They want to know what will change, how fast, and at what cost.

I've found that the most effective way to present OKRs to a leadership team is to connect the framework directly to their existing strategic priorities. Pick 1 strategic goal the company is already pursuing, something the CEO or executive team has publicly committed to, and show how OKRs would structure the execution of that specific goal.

For example: if the company's strategic priority is improving customer retention, show how that translates into a company-level Objective (Become the vendor our customers can't live without), with measurable Key Results (Reduce churn from 8% to 5%, Increase NPS from 32 to 50, Grow expansion revenue by 25%), owned by specific teams, with Initiatives that represent the actual projects driving those numbers.

This makes OKRs concrete and immediately relevant instead of theoretical. The executive team isn't evaluating a methodology in the abstract. They're looking at a better way to execute something they already care about.

Build the business case with data

Some executives need evidence before they commit. That's fair. Here are the data points that tend to land:

Companies using OKRs report nearly 60% higher revenue growth compared to peers, and 76% report improved alignment across teams.
Sears Holdings' controlled study of 20,000 employees found that regular OKR users were 11.5% more likely to move into a higher performance bracket.
McKinsey's 2024 survey of 1,000+ employees found that 72% cite goal setting as their #1 motivator for performance.
Organizations with clear accountability see improved results 95% of the time, according to a 2025 survey of 250+ leaders.

‍You don't need all of these. Pick the 1 or 2 that resonate most with your leadership team's priorities. If they're focused on growth, lead with revenue data. If they're worried about alignment, lead with that. If they care about employee engagement, use the McKinsey finding.

Propose a pilot, not a revolution

The fastest way to kill executive buy-in is to propose a company-wide rollout on day 1. Leaders who have been burned by previous framework rollouts will immediately picture the disruption, the training, the resistance, and the inevitable fizzle.

Instead, propose a pilot. Start with leadership and 1 or 2 teams. Keep it contained: 1 Objective per team, 2 to 3 Key Results each, 1 quarter. This approach de-risks the entire initiative. If it works, you have internal proof. If it doesn't, you've learned something without disrupting the whole organization.

I've written about this approach in detail in our OKR pilot program guide, but the key insight is this: the teams that participate in the pilot become your internal champions. They're the ones who will advocate for OKRs from experience rather than theory, and that peer advocacy is far more persuasive to a skeptical executive than any consultant's slide deck.

Get leadership to use OKRs themselves

This is the non-negotiable. If the executive team endorses OKRs but doesn't personally use them, the rest of the organization will treat the framework as optional.

Research on OKR critical success factors puts "leadership leads by example" at the very top. It's not enough for the CEO to say "we're doing OKRs now." The CEO needs to have their own Objectives and Key Results. The executive team needs to review them regularly. When the leadership team talks about OKRs in their meetings, references them in decisions, and updates their progress visibly, the signal to the rest of the organization is unmistakable: this matters.

In my experience, the moment a CEO starts asking "how does this connect to our Objectives?" in a meeting, the culture shifts. People realize this isn't a side project. It's how the company runs.

Address the "more work" concern head-on

This one deserves special attention because it's the most persistent objection. Executives who are already drowning in operational work see any new system as a threat to their bandwidth.

The honest answer is that OKRs do require some upfront investment. Setting good Objectives takes thought. Defining measurable Key Results takes discipline. Building the review cadence takes calendar time.

But the return on that investment comes quickly. OKRs replace the chaos of unclear priorities, misaligned teams, and manual progress reporting with a system that makes all of those things structural. A 15-minute weekly check-in on Key Results replaces the 45-minute status meeting where nobody is sure what anyone is working on. Progress becomes visible without someone having to compile a report. Alignment happens through the system rather than through endless ad-hoc conversations.

The executives I've worked with who initially resisted OKRs as "more work" are often the ones who become the strongest advocates, because they experience firsthand how much clearer and faster decisions become when everyone is working from the same set of priorities.

The bottom line

Getting executive buy-in for OKRs isn't about winning an argument. It's about connecting the framework to problems leadership already recognizes, showing evidence that it works, proposing a low-risk starting point, and making sure leaders don't just endorse OKRs but actually use them.

The organizations that succeed with OKRs are almost always the ones where the executive team went first.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

5c:Tc734,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"The OKR mindset shift: How to lead your team through it"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Henrik van der Pol"}

{"\n"}

{"CEO at "}{"Perdoo"}

{"\n"}

{"If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, "}{"subscribe here."}{""}

{"\n"}

{"The OKR mindset shift: How to lead your team through it"}

{"\n"}

{""}{"Key Takeaway: "}{"OKRs require 5 distinct mindset shifts: output to outcome, individual to team, annual to continuous, perfect plans to learning loops, and \"hit the number\" to \"what did we learn.\" Leaders drive the shift through behavior, not slides. Start this week by replacing the question \"what did you do this week?\" with \"what changed on our Key Results this week, and why?\""}

{"\n"}

{"Most OKR rollouts I've seen fail don't fail because the framework is wrong. They fail because the mindset never changes."}

{"\n"}

{"People keep thinking in tasks, outputs, and individual ambition. OKRs require thinking in outcomes, collective ownership, and shared focus. The framework itself is straightforward. The mental model behind it isn't. And without the mental model, the framework just becomes another reporting layer your team quietly resents."}

{"\n"}

{"In my experience, this is the most underestimated part of any OKR implementation. Leaders invest in training, in software, in templates. They underinvest in the part that actually determines success: helping their team make the cognitive shift from how they've been working to how they need to work."}

{"\n"}

{"This article is about that shift. What it actually looks like, why it's hard, and what leaders can do to drive it."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The 5 mindset shifts your team needs to make"}

{"\n"}

{""}{"1. From output to outcome"}

{"\n"}

{"The hardest shift, especially for high-performers. Most people have spent their careers being rewarded for shipping things. Launching the feature. Closing the deal. Publishing the campaign. Output is visible, measurable, and culturally rewarded."}

{"\n"}

{"OKRs ask a different question. Not \"did you ship the feature?\" but \"did the feature move the metric we said it would?\" The team that launched 12 features and didn't change customer retention is, by OKR logic, less successful than the team that shipped 3 features and lifted retention by 5 percentage points."}

{"\n"}

{"This shift is uncomfortable because it implies a lot of what people are doing might not be moving the right things. But it's also where the entire value of OKRs comes from. Without this shift, your team just becomes a slightly more bureaucratic version of what it was before."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"2. From individual ambition to team accountability"}

{"\n"}

{"Most people instinctively think of goals as personal. My quarterly Objectives. My Performance Review. My career growth. This is how most companies have set goals for decades."}

{"\n"}

{"OKRs are usually owned at the team-level. The shift is from \"what are my goals this quarter?\" to \"what are our goals, and what's my contribution to them?\" The Objective is owned by the team. Key Results are led by individuals, but are in service of the team-level outcome."}

{"\n"}

{"Leaders need to model this constantly. The way you talk about progress signals whether OKRs are a team sport or a personal report card. If your check-in question is \"how are you doing on your KRs?\" you've already reinforced the individual frame. If it's \"how are we doing on our Objective?\" you've reinforced the right one."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"3. From annual planning to continuous rhythm"}

{"\n"}

{"Most organizations are used to a calendar that runs on annual goal-setting, mid-year reviews, and end-of-year evaluations. The cadence is slow. Goals are set in January, occasionally referenced in July, and judged in December."}

{"\n"}

{"OKRs operate on a much shorter loop. Quarterly cycles, weekly or bi-weekly check-ins, continuous progress updates. The mindset shift is treating goals as living things, not contracts. Things that get updated, refined, sometimes dropped mid-cycle when reality shifts."}

{"\n"}

{"This is harder than it sounds for organizations that pride themselves on consistency. Some of your team members will resist this rhythm. They'll see frequent check-ins as micromanagement, or course corrections as evidence that the plan was wrong. The job of the leader is to reframe both. Check-ins aren't surveillance, they're coaching. Adjustments aren't failures, they're learning."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"4. From perfect plans to learning loops"}

{"\n"}

{"The fastest way to stall an OKR rollout is to spend a month perfecting the wording of every Objective and Key Result before anyone can actually use them. Teams will sit in workshops debating semantics, terrified of getting it wrong."}

{"\n"}

{"The truth is that first-draft OKRs are usually mediocre, and that's fine. Quality comes through iteration. Quarter 2 OKRs are sharper than Quarter 1. Quarter 3 sharper than Quarter 2. By year two, your team will write OKRs that genuinely drive performance, and they got there by doing imperfect ones first."}

{"\n"}

{"The mindset shift is from \"we have to get this right\" to \"we have to get started, and then keep improving.\" Leaders set this tone by being visibly willing to ship imperfect OKRs and refine them publicly."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"5. From \"did we hit the number\" to \"what did we learn\""}

{"\n"}

{"This last shift is the most cultural and the most fragile. Most performance cultures punish missed targets. People learn quickly that the safest way to look good is to set easy goals you're confident you'll hit."}

{"\n"}

{"OKRs work differently. Hitting 70% of an ambitious goal often produces more value than hitting 100% of a safe one. But that only holds true if your culture genuinely treats it that way. The moment a manager says \"you only hit 70%, what happened?\" with the same tone they'd use for missing a sales target, the entire system reverts to sandbagging."}

{"\n"}

{"Leaders have to deliberately reinforce a different logic. Hitting an OKR fully means it maybe wasn't ambitious enough. Missing it partially is data, not failure. The conversation shifts from \"what did you achieve?\" to \"what did you learn, and what would you do differently?\""}

{"\n"}

{"I think this is the shift most leadership teams talk about but rarely actually live. It requires sustained behavioral discipline from the top, because the gravitational pull toward judging by results is enormous."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"What gets in the way"}

{"\n"}

{"Even when leaders genuinely buy into all 5 shifts, certain organizational realities tend to drag teams back to the old mindset:"}

{"\n"}

{"Performance Reviews still rewarding output. If your annual review process measures activity, your team will quietly prioritize activity. Get HR and Finance aligned with the OKR philosophy, or the system will undermine itself."}
{"Middle managers translating OKRs back into to-do lists. This is incredibly common. A leader sets an outcome-focused OKR, the team lead receives it, and by the time it reaches individual contributors it's been reformatted as a checklist of tasks. Watch for this and intervene early."}
{"Senior leaders saying the right things but defaulting to task tracking in 1-on-1s. Words matter less than questions. The questions you ask your direct reports tell the whole organization what really gets measured."}
{"Teams treating OKRs as paperwork. If your team is filling in OKRs because they have to, you've lost. The mindset shift starts with leaders making OKRs feel like a tool that helps the team win, not a process they have to complete."}

{"\n"}

{"For more on the cultural prerequisites for OKR success, we've written a "}{"companion piece on the culture needed for OKR to succeed."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"How leaders actually drive the shift"}

{"\n"}

{"The shift isn't driven by training programs or all-hands speeches. It's driven by the daily behavior of leaders. Here's what actually moves the needle:"}

{"\n"}

{"Use OKR language in every leadership conversation, not just in OKR meetings. When you mention an Objective casually in a hallway, a board prep call, or a Slack thread, you're signaling that this is how you actually think."}
{"Celebrate progress on Key Results publicly, even when they're partially hit. Especially when they're partially hit on ambitious goals. This is how you build psychological safety around stretch."}
{"Share your own Objectives openly, including the ones you're behind on. Vulnerability at the top creates permission for it everywhere else."}
{"Ask outcome questions, not activity questions. \"What changed?\" beats \"what did you do?\" every time."}
{"Invest in a few OKR champions inside your team. Peer modeling moves the mindset shift faster than any leader can on their own."}

{"\n"}

{"The compounding effect is real. Every leader-level behavior gets repeated by managers below, which gets repeated by teams below them. Within a few quarters, the right questions start being asked everywhere, and the mindset has shifted."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Start this week"}

{"\n"}

{"Here's one concrete thing you can do at your very next team meeting."}

{"\n"}

{"Replace the standing \"what did you do this week?\" question with \"what changed on our Key Results this week, and why?\""}

{"\n"}

{"That single change forces the whole conversation into outcome territory. People stop reporting activity, because it's no longer the question being asked. They start reporting on the metrics that actually matter. And over time, that shift in language reshapes how the team thinks before any of them have read a single article about OKRs."}

{"\n"}

{"It's a tiny move. But it might be the single highest-leverage thing you can do this week to start the mindset shift."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}5d:Tb4b1, The OKR mindset shift: How to lead your team through it

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

The OKR mindset shift: How to lead your team through it

Key Takeaway: OKRs require 5 distinct mindset shifts: output to outcome, individual to team, annual to continuous, perfect plans to learning loops, and "hit the number" to "what did we learn." Leaders drive the shift through behavior, not slides. Start this week by replacing the question "what did you do this week?" with "what changed on our Key Results this week, and why?"

Most OKR rollouts I've seen fail don't fail because the framework is wrong. They fail because the mindset never changes.

People keep thinking in tasks, outputs, and individual ambition. OKRs require thinking in outcomes, collective ownership, and shared focus. The framework itself is straightforward. The mental model behind it isn't. And without the mental model, the framework just becomes another reporting layer your team quietly resents.

In my experience, this is the most underestimated part of any OKR implementation. Leaders invest in training, in software, in templates. They underinvest in the part that actually determines success: helping their team make the cognitive shift from how they've been working to how they need to work.

This article is about that shift. What it actually looks like, why it's hard, and what leaders can do to drive it.

The 5 mindset shifts your team needs to make

1. From output to outcome

The hardest shift, especially for high-performers. Most people have spent their careers being rewarded for shipping things. Launching the feature. Closing the deal. Publishing the campaign. Output is visible, measurable, and culturally rewarded.

OKRs ask a different question. Not "did you ship the feature?" but "did the feature move the metric we said it would?" The team that launched 12 features and didn't change customer retention is, by OKR logic, less successful than the team that shipped 3 features and lifted retention by 5 percentage points.

This shift is uncomfortable because it implies a lot of what people are doing might not be moving the right things. But it's also where the entire value of OKRs comes from. Without this shift, your team just becomes a slightly more bureaucratic version of what it was before.

2. From individual ambition to team accountability

Most people instinctively think of goals as personal. My quarterly Objectives. My Performance Review. My career growth. This is how most companies have set goals for decades.

OKRs are usually owned at the team-level. The shift is from "what are my goals this quarter?" to "what are our goals, and what's my contribution to them?" The Objective is owned by the team. Key Results are led by individuals, but are in service of the team-level outcome.

Leaders need to model this constantly. The way you talk about progress signals whether OKRs are a team sport or a personal report card. If your check-in question is "how are you doing on your KRs?" you've already reinforced the individual frame. If it's "how are we doing on our Objective?" you've reinforced the right one.

3. From annual planning to continuous rhythm

Most organizations are used to a calendar that runs on annual goal-setting, mid-year reviews, and end-of-year evaluations. The cadence is slow. Goals are set in January, occasionally referenced in July, and judged in December.

OKRs operate on a much shorter loop. Quarterly cycles, weekly or bi-weekly check-ins, continuous progress updates. The mindset shift is treating goals as living things, not contracts. Things that get updated, refined, sometimes dropped mid-cycle when reality shifts.

This is harder than it sounds for organizations that pride themselves on consistency. Some of your team members will resist this rhythm. They'll see frequent check-ins as micromanagement, or course corrections as evidence that the plan was wrong. The job of the leader is to reframe both. Check-ins aren't surveillance, they're coaching. Adjustments aren't failures, they're learning.

4. From perfect plans to learning loops

The fastest way to stall an OKR rollout is to spend a month perfecting the wording of every Objective and Key Result before anyone can actually use them. Teams will sit in workshops debating semantics, terrified of getting it wrong.

The truth is that first-draft OKRs are usually mediocre, and that's fine. Quality comes through iteration. Quarter 2 OKRs are sharper than Quarter 1. Quarter 3 sharper than Quarter 2. By year two, your team will write OKRs that genuinely drive performance, and they got there by doing imperfect ones first.

The mindset shift is from "we have to get this right" to "we have to get started, and then keep improving." Leaders set this tone by being visibly willing to ship imperfect OKRs and refine them publicly.

5. From "did we hit the number" to "what did we learn"

This last shift is the most cultural and the most fragile. Most performance cultures punish missed targets. People learn quickly that the safest way to look good is to set easy goals you're confident you'll hit.

OKRs work differently. Hitting 70% of an ambitious goal often produces more value than hitting 100% of a safe one. But that only holds true if your culture genuinely treats it that way. The moment a manager says "you only hit 70%, what happened?" with the same tone they'd use for missing a sales target, the entire system reverts to sandbagging.

Leaders have to deliberately reinforce a different logic. Hitting an OKR fully means it maybe wasn't ambitious enough. Missing it partially is data, not failure. The conversation shifts from "what did you achieve?" to "what did you learn, and what would you do differently?"

I think this is the shift most leadership teams talk about but rarely actually live. It requires sustained behavioral discipline from the top, because the gravitational pull toward judging by results is enormous.

What gets in the way

Even when leaders genuinely buy into all 5 shifts, certain organizational realities tend to drag teams back to the old mindset:

Performance Reviews still rewarding output. If your annual review process measures activity, your team will quietly prioritize activity. Get HR and Finance aligned with the OKR philosophy, or the system will undermine itself.
Middle managers translating OKRs back into to-do lists. This is incredibly common. A leader sets an outcome-focused OKR, the team lead receives it, and by the time it reaches individual contributors it's been reformatted as a checklist of tasks. Watch for this and intervene early.
Senior leaders saying the right things but defaulting to task tracking in 1-on-1s. Words matter less than questions. The questions you ask your direct reports tell the whole organization what really gets measured.
Teams treating OKRs as paperwork. If your team is filling in OKRs because they have to, you've lost. The mindset shift starts with leaders making OKRs feel like a tool that helps the team win, not a process they have to complete.

For more on the cultural prerequisites for OKR success, we've written a companion piece on the culture needed for OKR to succeed.

How leaders actually drive the shift

The shift isn't driven by training programs or all-hands speeches. It's driven by the daily behavior of leaders. Here's what actually moves the needle:

Use OKR language in every leadership conversation, not just in OKR meetings. When you mention an Objective casually in a hallway, a board prep call, or a Slack thread, you're signaling that this is how you actually think.
Celebrate progress on Key Results publicly, even when they're partially hit. Especially when they're partially hit on ambitious goals. This is how you build psychological safety around stretch.
Share your own Objectives openly, including the ones you're behind on. Vulnerability at the top creates permission for it everywhere else.
Ask outcome questions, not activity questions. "What changed?" beats "what did you do?" every time.
Invest in a few OKR champions inside your team. Peer modeling moves the mindset shift faster than any leader can on their own.

The compounding effect is real. Every leader-level behavior gets repeated by managers below, which gets repeated by teams below them. Within a few quarters, the right questions start being asked everywhere, and the mindset has shifted.

Start this week

Here's one concrete thing you can do at your very next team meeting.

Replace the standing "what did you do this week?" question with "what changed on our Key Results this week, and why?"

That single change forces the whole conversation into outcome territory. People stop reporting activity, because it's no longer the question being asked. They start reporting on the metrics that actually matter. And over time, that shift in language reshapes how the team thinks before any of them have read a single article about OKRs.

It's a tiny move. But it might be the single highest-leverage thing you can do this week to start the mindset shift.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

5e:Td2a2,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"Most companies are too busy running the machine to ever improve it"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Henrik van der Pol"}

{"\n"}

{"CEO at "}{"Perdoo"}

{"\n"}

{"If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, "}{"subscribe here."}{""}

{"\n"}

{"Most companies are too busy running the machine to ever improve it"}

{"\n"}

{"‍ "}
{""}{"Key Takeaway: "}{"Organizations spend almost all their time running operations and almost none improving them. That imbalance kills strategy execution. OKRs, KPIs, and a dedicated platform like Perdoo can fix it by making improvement visible, owned, and measurable."}

{"\n"}

{"Every company operates in 2 modes at the same time."}

{"\n"}

{"There's running the machine: processing orders, closing deals, shipping features, handling tickets. The day-to-day work that keeps the business alive. And then there's improving the machine: redesigning how that work gets done, fixing broken processes, building better systems, removing friction."}

{"\n"}

{"In theory, organizations do both. In practice, almost all the time goes to running the machine. Improving it gets pushed to \"next quarter\" indefinitely."}

{"\n"}

{"James March, a Stanford professor, "}{"described this dynamic back in 1991"}{" as the tension between exploitation and exploration. His argument was precise: exploitation returns are faster and more certain, so rational actors consistently choose them over exploration. Not because they're lazy, but because incentive structures reward delivery over improvement. He called the long-term consequence the \"success trap.\" Organizations get very good at doing what they've always done, right up until that capability is no longer what the market needs."}

{"\n"}

{"I think most companies I've worked with live in this trap without realizing it. They're not bad at their jobs. They're just never given the time to make their jobs better."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The 95/5 problem"}

{"\n"}

{"If you asked your team leads how they spent their time last month, my guess is the split would be something like 95% running operations and 5% (at best) improving them. And that 5% probably wasn't planned. It was a frustrated employee who stayed late to fix something that had been broken for months."}

{"\n"}

{"Toyota understood this problem decades ago"}{" and built a structural escape. Their production system separates improvement time (kaizen) from production time, with its own allocation, its own metrics, its own reporting. "}{"Workers at Toyota submit on average 15 improvement suggestions per employee per year"}{". Most are tiny. Shaving 3 seconds off a process, moving a tool 6 inches closer. But those tiny changes compound into the most efficient manufacturing operation in history."}

{"\n"}

{"The lesson isn't about manufacturing. It's about structure. Toyota didn't improve faster because their people were more creative. They improved faster because improvement was built into how the company operates. It wasn't optional. It wasn't \"when things calm down.\" It was scheduled, measured, and protected."}

{"\n"}

{"Most companies do the opposite. They treat improvement as something that happens in the margins, during hackathons, or after a crisis forces their hand."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"What this has to do with strategy execution"}

{"\n"}

{"Here's where this connects to what we do at Perdoo."}

{"\n"}

{"Most organizations have a strategy. They've defined where they want to go. But the work of getting there, the actual execution, gets swallowed by running the machine. Teams are so busy processing the day-to-day that strategic priorities quietly slide off the agenda. Not because anyone decided to abandon them, but because urgency always beats importance when there's no structure protecting the important stuff."}

{"\n"}

{"In my experience, this is the single biggest reason strategies fail. Not bad strategy. Not incompetent teams. Just an organization that's too consumed by running operations to ever improve them."}

{"\n"}

{"OKRs"}{" are designed to fix exactly this. They create a structure where improving the machine isn't something you do in the margins. It's explicit, owned, and measurable."}

{"\n"}

{"Your "}{"KPIs"}{" tell you how well the machine is running right now. Revenue, churn, NPS, conversion rates. These are your \"run the machine\" metrics. They keep the lights on."}

{"\n"}

{"Your Objectives and Key Results tell you how you're improving the machine. \"Reduce customer onboarding time from 14 days to 5\" isn't running the machine. It's making the machine better. \"Increase the percentage of deals closed within 30 days from 40% to 65%\" isn't business as usual. It's a deliberate improvement."}

{"\n"}

{"When both live in the same system, side by side, leadership can actually see the balance. Are we only running the machine? Or are we also investing in making it better?"}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"AI is about to force the issue"}

{"\n"}

{"There's another reason this matters right now. AI is rapidly changing what \"running the machine\" looks like, and companies that haven't been investing in improving their operations are about to feel it."}

{"\n"}

{"McKinsey's 2025 State of AI report"}{" found that AI high performers are "}{"2.8x more likely to have fundamentally redesigned their workflows"}{" than everyone else. That's the key finding. The companies getting the most value from AI aren't just bolting it onto existing processes. They're rethinking how the work gets done."}

{"\n"}

{"Deloitte's 2025 research"}{" reinforces this. 59% of organizations take a tech-focused approach to AI (buy the tool, plug it in), and those companies are 1.6x more likely to report that their AI investments aren't meeting expectations. Only 16% have actually redesigned their roles, processes, and operating models to integrate AI. The rest are automating broken processes, which just gives you faster broken processes."}

{"\n"}

{"BCG reports"}{" that 50-55% of US jobs will be reshaped by AI in the next 2 to 3 years. Not eliminated. Reshaped. Which means how the work gets done is changing whether you plan for it or not."}

{"\n"}

{"This is why improving the machine can't wait. AI gives you the opportunity to fundamentally rethink your operations, but only if you have the habit, the structure, and the discipline to do so. Companies that have been running the machine at 95/5 for years are going to struggle. They have no muscle for process improvement. No rhythm for it. No system to make it happen."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"How Perdoo makes improving the machine a habit"}

{"\n"}

{"The reason improvement keeps losing to operations is that improvement is invisible. Nobody gets credit for a process they redesigned. Nobody sees the meeting that didn't happen because someone streamlined a workflow. Running the machine produces visible output. Improving it produces invisible leverage."}

{"\n"}

{"Perdoo makes the invisible visible."}

{"\n"}

{"Your strategy, OKRs, and KPIs all live in 1 place. Leadership can see, at any moment, the balance between running the machine (KPIs tracking operational health) and improving it (Objectives and Key Results driving strategic change). When that balance skews too far toward operations, it's obvious. You can course correct before the quarter is gone."}

{"\n"}

{"Beyond visibility, Perdoo also helps protect improvement time in practice. Run your 1-on-1s in Perdoo, and the conversation naturally covers both: how are your KPIs trending, and where are you on your Objectives? Use your team meetings to check in on Key Results, and improvement stops being \"that thing we'll get to later.\" Progress reporting flows automatically as people update their goals, so nobody has to spend Friday afternoon compiling slides for leadership."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Stop running. Start improving."}

{"\n"}

{"Every company talks about wanting to improve. Almost none of them build the structure to make it happen. They rely on individual initiative, which gets outcompeted by organizational urgency every single time."}

{"\n"}

{"If you want to shift from 95/5 to something healthier, you need 3 things: a way to define what improving the machine looks like (Objectives and Key Results), a way to track whether the machine is running well (KPIs), and a system that makes both visible, owned, and part of how the company operates every day."}

{"\n"}

{"That's what Perdoo does. Not as an extra layer of work, but as the operating system that connects your strategy to what your teams are actually doing, and that makes sure improving the machine gets the same attention as running it."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}5f:Tbff7, Most companies are too busy running the machine to ever improve it

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

Most companies are too busy running the machine to ever improve it

‍
Key Takeaway: Organizations spend almost all their time running operations and almost none improving them. That imbalance kills strategy execution. OKRs, KPIs, and a dedicated platform like Perdoo can fix it by making improvement visible, owned, and measurable.

Every company operates in 2 modes at the same time.

There's running the machine: processing orders, closing deals, shipping features, handling tickets. The day-to-day work that keeps the business alive. And then there's improving the machine: redesigning how that work gets done, fixing broken processes, building better systems, removing friction.

In theory, organizations do both. In practice, almost all the time goes to running the machine. Improving it gets pushed to "next quarter" indefinitely.

James March, a Stanford professor, described this dynamic back in 1991 as the tension between exploitation and exploration. His argument was precise: exploitation returns are faster and more certain, so rational actors consistently choose them over exploration. Not because they're lazy, but because incentive structures reward delivery over improvement. He called the long-term consequence the "success trap." Organizations get very good at doing what they've always done, right up until that capability is no longer what the market needs.

I think most companies I've worked with live in this trap without realizing it. They're not bad at their jobs. They're just never given the time to make their jobs better.

The 95/5 problem

If you asked your team leads how they spent their time last month, my guess is the split would be something like 95% running operations and 5% (at best) improving them. And that 5% probably wasn't planned. It was a frustrated employee who stayed late to fix something that had been broken for months.

Toyota understood this problem decades ago and built a structural escape. Their production system separates improvement time (kaizen) from production time, with its own allocation, its own metrics, its own reporting. Workers at Toyota submit on average 15 improvement suggestions per employee per year. Most are tiny. Shaving 3 seconds off a process, moving a tool 6 inches closer. But those tiny changes compound into the most efficient manufacturing operation in history.

The lesson isn't about manufacturing. It's about structure. Toyota didn't improve faster because their people were more creative. They improved faster because improvement was built into how the company operates. It wasn't optional. It wasn't "when things calm down." It was scheduled, measured, and protected.

Most companies do the opposite. They treat improvement as something that happens in the margins, during hackathons, or after a crisis forces their hand.

What this has to do with strategy execution

Here's where this connects to what we do at Perdoo.

Most organizations have a strategy. They've defined where they want to go. But the work of getting there, the actual execution, gets swallowed by running the machine. Teams are so busy processing the day-to-day that strategic priorities quietly slide off the agenda. Not because anyone decided to abandon them, but because urgency always beats importance when there's no structure protecting the important stuff.

In my experience, this is the single biggest reason strategies fail. Not bad strategy. Not incompetent teams. Just an organization that's too consumed by running operations to ever improve them.

OKRs are designed to fix exactly this. They create a structure where improving the machine isn't something you do in the margins. It's explicit, owned, and measurable.

Your KPIs tell you how well the machine is running right now. Revenue, churn, NPS, conversion rates. These are your "run the machine" metrics. They keep the lights on.

Your Objectives and Key Results tell you how you're improving the machine. "Reduce customer onboarding time from 14 days to 5" isn't running the machine. It's making the machine better. "Increase the percentage of deals closed within 30 days from 40% to 65%" isn't business as usual. It's a deliberate improvement.

When both live in the same system, side by side, leadership can actually see the balance. Are we only running the machine? Or are we also investing in making it better?

AI is about to force the issue

There's another reason this matters right now. AI is rapidly changing what "running the machine" looks like, and companies that haven't been investing in improving their operations are about to feel it.

McKinsey's 2025 State of AI report found that AI high performers are 2.8x more likely to have fundamentally redesigned their workflows than everyone else. That's the key finding. The companies getting the most value from AI aren't just bolting it onto existing processes. They're rethinking how the work gets done.

Deloitte's 2025 research reinforces this. 59% of organizations take a tech-focused approach to AI (buy the tool, plug it in), and those companies are 1.6x more likely to report that their AI investments aren't meeting expectations. Only 16% have actually redesigned their roles, processes, and operating models to integrate AI. The rest are automating broken processes, which just gives you faster broken processes.

BCG reports that 50-55% of US jobs will be reshaped by AI in the next 2 to 3 years. Not eliminated. Reshaped. Which means how the work gets done is changing whether you plan for it or not.

This is why improving the machine can't wait. AI gives you the opportunity to fundamentally rethink your operations, but only if you have the habit, the structure, and the discipline to do so. Companies that have been running the machine at 95/5 for years are going to struggle. They have no muscle for process improvement. No rhythm for it. No system to make it happen.

How Perdoo makes improving the machine a habit

The reason improvement keeps losing to operations is that improvement is invisible. Nobody gets credit for a process they redesigned. Nobody sees the meeting that didn't happen because someone streamlined a workflow. Running the machine produces visible output. Improving it produces invisible leverage.

Perdoo makes the invisible visible.

Your strategy, OKRs, and KPIs all live in 1 place. Leadership can see, at any moment, the balance between running the machine (KPIs tracking operational health) and improving it (Objectives and Key Results driving strategic change). When that balance skews too far toward operations, it's obvious. You can course correct before the quarter is gone.

Beyond visibility, Perdoo also helps protect improvement time in practice. Run your 1-on-1s in Perdoo, and the conversation naturally covers both: how are your KPIs trending, and where are you on your Objectives? Use your team meetings to check in on Key Results, and improvement stops being "that thing we'll get to later." Progress reporting flows automatically as people update their goals, so nobody has to spend Friday afternoon compiling slides for leadership.

Stop running. Start improving.

Every company talks about wanting to improve. Almost none of them build the structure to make it happen. They rely on individual initiative, which gets outcompeted by organizational urgency every single time.

If you want to shift from 95/5 to something healthier, you need 3 things: a way to define what improving the machine looks like (Objectives and Key Results), a way to track whether the machine is running well (KPIs), and a system that makes both visible, owned, and part of how the company operates every day.

That's what Perdoo does. Not as an extra layer of work, but as the operating system that connects your strategy to what your teams are actually doing, and that makes sure improving the machine gets the same attention as running it.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

60:Te366,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"The 5 stages of OKR maturity (and where most companies get stuck)"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Henrik van der Pol"}

{"\n"}

{"CEO at "}{"Perdoo"}

{"\n"}

{"If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, "}{"subscribe here."}{""}

{"\n"}

{"The 5 stages of OKR maturity (and where most companies get stuck)"}

{"\n"}

{"‍"}
{""}{"Key Takeaway: "}{"OKR maturity moves through 5 stages: Exploring, Piloting, Mastering, Embedding, and Strategizing. Most companies never make it past Piloting, where they try OKRs but never become the boss of the framework. To move up, stop asking \"did we update our OKRs this week?\" and start asking \"what did our last cycle teach us about how we run the company?\" Do that at your next leadership meeting and the rest of the journey gets clearer fast."}

{"\n"}

{"Most companies that say they \"use "}{"OKRs"}{"\" are doing one specific thing: they're tracking goals. They set Objectives at the start of the quarter, attach some Key Results, update progress every week or two, and call it OKR. From the outside, it looks like the framework is in place."}

{"\n"}

{"But goal tracking and "}{"strategy execution"}{" are not the same thing. They're not even close. Goal tracking is the first stop on the OKR journey, not the destination. And in my experience, most companies don't realize they've gotten stuck there until they've already spent a year or two wondering why the framework hasn't delivered the impact they expected."}

{"\n"}

{"This is the maturity problem with OKRs. Buying software, training your team, and running quarterly cycles doesn't actually mean you've adopted OKRs. It means you've started. What you do over the next 2 to 3 years determines whether OKRs become the operating system of how you run the company, or just another administrative layer your team quietly resents."}

{"\n"}

{"Here's how I'd map the journey, and how to know which stage you're actually in."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The 5 stages of OKR maturity"}

{"\n"}

{"Different consultants and software vendors describe this in slightly different ways, but the underlying progression is consistent. Most maturity models share roughly the same arc, and here's how I'd map it based on what we see with hundreds of organizations."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Stage 1: Exploring"}

{"\n"}

{"You've heard about OKRs from a podcast, a book, or another founder. Maybe one team has started experimenting on their own. There's no consistent methodology. No company-wide framework. Just interest and a sense that you should probably be doing something more structured than what you're doing now."}

{"\n"}

{"This stage is fine. It's where every company starts. The risk is staying here too long because nobody owns the rollout, or because leadership keeps debating whether OKRs are right for them without ever testing it."}

{"\n"}

{"Signal you've moved past this stage: A clear sponsor has committed to running an OKR pilot or rollout, and there's a defined start date."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Stage 2: Piloting"}

{"\n"}

{"This is the make-or-break stage, and where most companies quietly stall."}

{"\n"}

{"In the Piloting stage, you have OKRs. People set them quarterly. Some teams update them weekly. There's probably a tool. There are reports. But OKRs are still essentially decoupled from how the company actually runs. The "}{"strategy"}{" gets set somewhere else. The roadmap gets set somewhere else. The day-to-day priorities get set somewhere else. OKRs sit alongside the real work, instead of shaping it."}

{"\n"}

{"The telltale sign of being stuck at Piloting: your leadership team can describe what OKRs you have, but couldn't say with confidence how the company would be different if you didn't have them. The framework is running you, not the other way around. People are doing what the OKR process tells them to do (set quarterly Objectives, update weekly, hold check-ins), but nobody is using the framework to make different choices than they would have made anyway."}

{"\n"}

{"Signal you've moved past this stage: Leaders start adjusting how OKRs work for their specific context. They drop practices that aren't serving them. They tailor the cadence, the format, and the rituals to what actually fits the company."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Stage 3: Mastering"}

{"\n"}

{"This is where OKRs start doing real work, and where a lot of companies never arrive."}

{"\n"}

{"Mastering is what happens when you stop following the OKR playbook and start being the boss of it. You've learned the ins and outs of the framework well enough to know which parts matter and which don't. You've tailored the methodology to fit your company, your culture, and your stage. You write better Objectives because you've written many bad ones. You set Key Results that actually move the business because you've set Key Results that didn't. You've earned the right to make the framework your own."}

{"\n"}

{"This is the stage where companies start seeing the "}{"actual ROI of OKRs"}{". Decisions get made faster, because everyone is working from the same priorities. Cross-team friction drops, because dependencies become visible. Performance conversations get sharper, because there's a shared standard for what \"done\" means."}

{"\n"}

{"The difference between Piloting and Mastering is the difference between a team that says \"this is how OKRs are supposed to work\" and a team that says \"this is how OKRs work for us.\" Both have OKRs. Only one is actually getting value from them."}

{"\n"}

{"Signal you've moved past this stage: OKRs are no longer \"set and then run\" each quarter. They're being created, reviewed, adjusted, and used as inputs to operational decisions throughout the cycle."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Stage 4: Embedding"}

{"\n"}

{"In the Embedding stage, OKRs stop being a separate process and become part of how the company operates day to day. The 1-on-1s naturally cover Key Result progress. The team meetings naturally orient around what needs to move. The performance reviews naturally incorporate outcomes, not just activity. The annual planning naturally builds on what last year's OKRs taught the company."}

{"\n"}

{"This is also when KPIs and OKRs start working together properly. "}{"KPIs handle the maintenance side"}{" — the metrics that need to stay healthy day to day. OKRs handle the change side — the metrics that need to move because the company has decided they matter most this cycle. The 2 systems reinforce each other instead of competing for attention."}

{"\n"}

{"What changes most at this stage is that OKRs become invisible. They stop feeling like a process anyone is \"doing.\" They feel like just how things work."}

{"\n"}

{"Signal you've moved past this stage: Leadership starts asking strategic questions through the lens of OKRs. \"What would our OKRs need to look like in 2 quarters if we want to enter that market?\" replaces \"what features should we ship?\""}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Stage 5: Strategizing"}

{"\n"}

{"At the Strategizing stage, OKRs become the engine of how the company sets and executes strategy. Not a downstream artifact of strategy, but the system through which strategy actually happens."}

{"\n"}

{"This is the stage where the framework most lives up to the promise. Strategy gets made faster, because the company has a clear system for testing whether priorities are working. Pivots become easier, because the team has muscle memory for reframing OKRs when conditions change. Investments in AI, new markets, or new product lines get measured cleanly, because the company has a habit of attaching outcomes to ambition."}

{"\n"}

{"Very few companies actually reach this stage. The ones that do tend to be the ones that win their categories over the long term, because they've turned execution itself into a competitive advantage."}

{"\n"}

{"Signal you've arrived: External observers describe you as a \"well-run company\" without being able to articulate why. The reason is usually that the OKR-driven operating rhythm is invisible from the outside, but it's the thing producing the visible results."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Why most companies get stuck at Piloting"}

{"\n"}

{"In my experience, the Piloting-to-Mastering jump is by far the hardest. It's where 80% of companies plateau, and where most OKR programs quietly die."}

{"\n"}

{"There are a few reasons for this:"}

{"\n"}

{"Piloting feels like progress. The reports get generated. The dashboards look healthy. Leadership sees activity, mistakes it for impact, and stops pushing for more."}

{"\n"}

{"The framework is being treated as the goal. Companies confuse \"we have OKRs\" with \"we're executing well.\" These are different things."}

{"\n"}

{"There's no forcing function to evolve. Once Piloting is working in a basic way, there's no obvious next step. Without leadership specifically driving the evolution, the system stays where it is."}

{"\n"}

{"Companies don't tailor the framework. They keep following the textbook version of OKRs even when parts of it clearly aren't working for them. To master OKRs, you have to be willing to adapt them."}

{"\n"}

{"The right tools aren't in place. Spreadsheets and standalone OKR apps can support the Piloting stage. They start to break down at Mastering and almost completely fail at Embedding, where you need OKRs, KPIs, strategy, meetings, and progress reporting all working together in one system."}

{"\n"}

{"The first 4 are organizational and require leadership behavior to fix. The last one is structural, and it's where a dedicated platform makes a real difference."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"What it takes to move up a stage"}

{"\n"}

{"The transition between stages isn't automatic, and it doesn't happen with one big training session. It happens with deliberate leadership investment in the practices that compound over time."}

{"\n"}

{"To move from Exploring to Piloting, you need an executive sponsor and a clear pilot."}

{"\n"}

{"To move from Piloting to Mastering, you need to stop being a passive user of the framework and start being its owner. Learn the ins and outs deeply, then make deliberate choices about which parts to keep, which to adapt, and which to drop. The companies that make this jump treat OKRs as something to wrestle with, not something to follow."}

{"\n"}

{"To move from Mastering to Embedding, you need to consolidate. If your strategy, OKRs, KPIs, and meetings live in separate places, the friction will quietly pull you back to lower stages. Bringing everything into one system is what unlocks the day-to-day rhythm that defines Embedding."}

{"\n"}

{"To move from Embedding to Strategizing, you need leadership to actively use OKRs as the input to strategic decisions, not just the output of them. This is the most cultural shift of all, and it usually takes 2 to 3 years to fully take hold."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Start with one question"}

{"\n"}

{"Here's the concrete move you can make this week, no matter what stage you're currently in."}

{"\n"}

{"At your next leadership meeting, ask one question: \"What did our last OKR cycle teach us about how we run the company?\""}

{"\n"}

{"Not \"did we hit our Key Results.\" Not \"what should next quarter's Objectives be.\" Something different. Something that forces the leadership team to treat OKRs as a learning system, not just a goal-tracking system."}

{"\n"}

{"The answers you get will tell you everything you need to know about which stage you're in. If the room goes quiet, you're at Piloting. If you get reports on what was hit and missed, you're between Piloting and Mastering. If you get insights about strategy itself, about what the cycle revealed about your assumptions, about what you'd change in how the company operates, you're closer to Embedding than you realized."}

{"\n"}

{"Either way, the question is what starts moving you up."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}61:Tce7c, The 5 stages of OKR maturity (and where most companies get stuck)

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

The 5 stages of OKR maturity (and where most companies get stuck)

‍
Key Takeaway: OKR maturity moves through 5 stages: Exploring, Piloting, Mastering, Embedding, and Strategizing. Most companies never make it past Piloting, where they try OKRs but never become the boss of the framework. To move up, stop asking "did we update our OKRs this week?" and start asking "what did our last cycle teach us about how we run the company?" Do that at your next leadership meeting and the rest of the journey gets clearer fast.

Most companies that say they "use OKRs" are doing one specific thing: they're tracking goals. They set Objectives at the start of the quarter, attach some Key Results, update progress every week or two, and call it OKR. From the outside, it looks like the framework is in place.

But goal tracking and strategy execution are not the same thing. They're not even close. Goal tracking is the first stop on the OKR journey, not the destination. And in my experience, most companies don't realize they've gotten stuck there until they've already spent a year or two wondering why the framework hasn't delivered the impact they expected.

This is the maturity problem with OKRs. Buying software, training your team, and running quarterly cycles doesn't actually mean you've adopted OKRs. It means you've started. What you do over the next 2 to 3 years determines whether OKRs become the operating system of how you run the company, or just another administrative layer your team quietly resents.

Here's how I'd map the journey, and how to know which stage you're actually in.

The 5 stages of OKR maturity

Different consultants and software vendors describe this in slightly different ways, but the underlying progression is consistent. Most maturity models share roughly the same arc, and here's how I'd map it based on what we see with hundreds of organizations.

Stage 1: Exploring

You've heard about OKRs from a podcast, a book, or another founder. Maybe one team has started experimenting on their own. There's no consistent methodology. No company-wide framework. Just interest and a sense that you should probably be doing something more structured than what you're doing now.

This stage is fine. It's where every company starts. The risk is staying here too long because nobody owns the rollout, or because leadership keeps debating whether OKRs are right for them without ever testing it.

Signal you've moved past this stage: A clear sponsor has committed to running an OKR pilot or rollout, and there's a defined start date.

Stage 2: Piloting

This is the make-or-break stage, and where most companies quietly stall.

In the Piloting stage, you have OKRs. People set them quarterly. Some teams update them weekly. There's probably a tool. There are reports. But OKRs are still essentially decoupled from how the company actually runs. The strategy gets set somewhere else. The roadmap gets set somewhere else. The day-to-day priorities get set somewhere else. OKRs sit alongside the real work, instead of shaping it.

The telltale sign of being stuck at Piloting: your leadership team can describe what OKRs you have, but couldn't say with confidence how the company would be different if you didn't have them. The framework is running you, not the other way around. People are doing what the OKR process tells them to do (set quarterly Objectives, update weekly, hold check-ins), but nobody is using the framework to make different choices than they would have made anyway.

Signal you've moved past this stage: Leaders start adjusting how OKRs work for their specific context. They drop practices that aren't serving them. They tailor the cadence, the format, and the rituals to what actually fits the company.

Stage 3: Mastering

This is where OKRs start doing real work, and where a lot of companies never arrive.

Mastering is what happens when you stop following the OKR playbook and start being the boss of it. You've learned the ins and outs of the framework well enough to know which parts matter and which don't. You've tailored the methodology to fit your company, your culture, and your stage. You write better Objectives because you've written many bad ones. You set Key Results that actually move the business because you've set Key Results that didn't. You've earned the right to make the framework your own.

This is the stage where companies start seeing the actual ROI of OKRs. Decisions get made faster, because everyone is working from the same priorities. Cross-team friction drops, because dependencies become visible. Performance conversations get sharper, because there's a shared standard for what "done" means.

The difference between Piloting and Mastering is the difference between a team that says "this is how OKRs are supposed to work" and a team that says "this is how OKRs work for us." Both have OKRs. Only one is actually getting value from them.

Signal you've moved past this stage: OKRs are no longer "set and then run" each quarter. They're being created, reviewed, adjusted, and used as inputs to operational decisions throughout the cycle.

Stage 4: Embedding

In the Embedding stage, OKRs stop being a separate process and become part of how the company operates day to day. The 1-on-1s naturally cover Key Result progress. The team meetings naturally orient around what needs to move. The performance reviews naturally incorporate outcomes, not just activity. The annual planning naturally builds on what last year's OKRs taught the company.

This is also when KPIs and OKRs start working together properly. KPIs handle the maintenance side — the metrics that need to stay healthy day to day. OKRs handle the change side — the metrics that need to move because the company has decided they matter most this cycle. The 2 systems reinforce each other instead of competing for attention.

What changes most at this stage is that OKRs become invisible. They stop feeling like a process anyone is "doing." They feel like just how things work.

Signal you've moved past this stage: Leadership starts asking strategic questions through the lens of OKRs. "What would our OKRs need to look like in 2 quarters if we want to enter that market?" replaces "what features should we ship?"

Stage 5: Strategizing

At the Strategizing stage, OKRs become the engine of how the company sets and executes strategy. Not a downstream artifact of strategy, but the system through which strategy actually happens.

This is the stage where the framework most lives up to the promise. Strategy gets made faster, because the company has a clear system for testing whether priorities are working. Pivots become easier, because the team has muscle memory for reframing OKRs when conditions change. Investments in AI, new markets, or new product lines get measured cleanly, because the company has a habit of attaching outcomes to ambition.

Very few companies actually reach this stage. The ones that do tend to be the ones that win their categories over the long term, because they've turned execution itself into a competitive advantage.

Signal you've arrived: External observers describe you as a "well-run company" without being able to articulate why. The reason is usually that the OKR-driven operating rhythm is invisible from the outside, but it's the thing producing the visible results.

Why most companies get stuck at Piloting

In my experience, the Piloting-to-Mastering jump is by far the hardest. It's where 80% of companies plateau, and where most OKR programs quietly die.

There are a few reasons for this:

Piloting feels like progress. The reports get generated. The dashboards look healthy. Leadership sees activity, mistakes it for impact, and stops pushing for more.

The framework is being treated as the goal. Companies confuse "we have OKRs" with "we're executing well." These are different things.

There's no forcing function to evolve. Once Piloting is working in a basic way, there's no obvious next step. Without leadership specifically driving the evolution, the system stays where it is.

Companies don't tailor the framework. They keep following the textbook version of OKRs even when parts of it clearly aren't working for them. To master OKRs, you have to be willing to adapt them.

The right tools aren't in place. Spreadsheets and standalone OKR apps can support the Piloting stage. They start to break down at Mastering and almost completely fail at Embedding, where you need OKRs, KPIs, strategy, meetings, and progress reporting all working together in one system.

The first 4 are organizational and require leadership behavior to fix. The last one is structural, and it's where a dedicated platform makes a real difference.

What it takes to move up a stage

The transition between stages isn't automatic, and it doesn't happen with one big training session. It happens with deliberate leadership investment in the practices that compound over time.

To move from Exploring to Piloting, you need an executive sponsor and a clear pilot.

To move from Piloting to Mastering, you need to stop being a passive user of the framework and start being its owner. Learn the ins and outs deeply, then make deliberate choices about which parts to keep, which to adapt, and which to drop. The companies that make this jump treat OKRs as something to wrestle with, not something to follow.

To move from Mastering to Embedding, you need to consolidate. If your strategy, OKRs, KPIs, and meetings live in separate places, the friction will quietly pull you back to lower stages. Bringing everything into one system is what unlocks the day-to-day rhythm that defines Embedding.

To move from Embedding to Strategizing, you need leadership to actively use OKRs as the input to strategic decisions, not just the output of them. This is the most cultural shift of all, and it usually takes 2 to 3 years to fully take hold.

Start with one question

Here's the concrete move you can make this week, no matter what stage you're currently in.

At your next leadership meeting, ask one question: "What did our last OKR cycle teach us about how we run the company?"

Not "did we hit our Key Results." Not "what should next quarter's Objectives be." Something different. Something that forces the leadership team to treat OKRs as a learning system, not just a goal-tracking system.

The answers you get will tell you everything you need to know about which stage you're in. If the room goes quiet, you're at Piloting. If you get reports on what was hit and missed, you're between Piloting and Mastering. If you get insights about strategy itself, about what the cycle revealed about your assumptions, about what you'd change in how the company operates, you're closer to Embedding than you realized.

Either way, the question is what starts moving you up.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

62:Te145,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"What Uber's $1,500 AI cap teaches us about goal-setting"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Henrik van der Pol"}

{"\n"}

{"CEO at "}{"Perdoo"}

{"\n"}

{"If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, "}{"subscribe here."}{""}

{"\n"}

{"What Uber's $1,500 AI cap teaches us about goal-setting"}

{"\n"}

{""}{"Key Takeaway: "}{"The mistake leaders keep making is setting goals on outputs (activities, things you "}{"do"}{") instead of outcomes (results, things that "}{"happen as a consequence"}{"). Uber put 5,000 engineers on uncapped AI tooling, ranked teams by tokens burned, watched usage shoot from 32% to 84%, and then their COO had to admit he couldn't draw a line between any of that spend and a single consumer improvement. Token usage is an output. The product getting better is an outcome. When you make the output the goal, teams optimize the output. The number goes up. The thing you actually wanted barely moves. This isn't an AI problem. It's a goal-setting problem, and it happens every time leaders measure how busy the team is instead of what the team delivered."}

{"\n"}

{"Uber's AI mandate is going to end up in goal-setting textbooks, and not in a good way. The story goes like this. Leadership put around 5,000 engineers on enterprise AI tooling with metered, uncapped billing on top of the seat fee. They built an internal leaderboard ranking teams by how many tokens they burned. Adoption of agentic coding shot from 32% in February to 84% in March. By month four, the year's budget was gone. The CTO had spent $1,200 in a two-hour demo. Average engineers were running $150 to $250 a month. Heavy users were running $500 to $2,000."}

{"\n"}

{"Then their COO, Andrew Macdonald, said the quiet part out loud in an interview: it was \"very hard to draw a line between the token spend and actual consumer improvements.\" Uber eventually capped engineers at $1,500 a month per tool. The leaderboard had done its job, just not the job leadership thought it was doing."}

{"\n"}

{"Uber's AI rollout is now the most expensive recent illustration of why it's important to "}{"differentiate between outputs and outcomes"}{". And why business goals should focus on results instead of activities."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Outputs vs outcomes, in one minute"}

{"\n"}

{"The cleanest definition I know is this: an output is something you do, an outcome is something that happens as a consequence of what you do."}

{"\n"}

{"A few examples to make it concrete:"}

{"\n"}

{"Output: I had a demo with a prospect. Outcome: I closed a customer."}
{"Output: We ran a €200K AdWords campaign. Outcome: We generated 1,000 qualified leads."}
{"Output: The Sales team made 1,000 outbound calls this week. Outcome: The Sales team booked 40 qualified meetings."}
{"Output: Engineering deployed Claude Code to all 5,000 developers. Outcome: Cycle time from ticket to shipped PR dropped from 9 days to 4 days."}

{"\n"}

{"In every pair, the output is the activity, the work, the thing the team did. The outcome is the result, the consequence, the thing the business actually wanted in the first place."}

{"\n"}

{"Outputs are easy to measure. They're countable, they update in real time, they look impressive in a deck. Outcomes are harder. They lag the work by days, weeks, or months. They depend on multiple variables. They're harder to attribute. So under pressure, leaders default to measuring the output, even when they know the outcome is what they actually care about."}

{"\n"}

{"That's the trap. And once you've set the goal on the output, the team optimizes the output. They'd be irrational not to. You told them that's what success looks like."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Uber's AI rollout, translated"}

{"\n"}

{"Look at Uber's setup through this lens and the failure is obvious in retrospect."}

{"\n"}

{"The goal they communicated was usage. The success metric was tokens burned. The reinforcement was a leaderboard ranking teams by that metric. Everything in the system pointed at the output, which was \"use AI a lot.\" Nothing in the system pointed at any outcome, which would have been something like \"ship features faster,\" \"reduce defect rate,\" \"cut support load,\" or \"lower engineer-hours per shipped feature.\""}

{"\n"}

{"So the teams did exactly what the goal told them to do. They used AI a lot. Adoption tripled in 30 days. Token spend exploded. The leaderboard turned green. The CTO ran up a $1,200 tab in two hours. By every metric Uber had defined, the program was a runaway success."}

{"\n"}

{"Then someone asked the awkward question, which is what every leader eventually has to ask: did any of this actually help the product? And the honest answer was: we don't know, and we can't tell. Macdonald's quote about not being able to draw a line between spend and consumer improvements is the polite version of \"we measured the output and forgot to measure the outcome.\""}

{"\n"}

{"The cap that followed wasn't really about cost control. It was about the realization that the goal had been set on the wrong thing. Capping engineers at $1,500 was a way of saying \"stop optimizing the metric we accidentally made important.\""}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The pattern is everywhere, not just Uber"}

{"\n"}

{"Uber is the high-profile case, but it's not the only one."}

{"\n"}

{"At Meta, an employee built an internal leaderboard called Claudeonomics that ranked roughly 85,000 workers by token consumption. The dashboard logged 60 trillion tokens in 30 days. Leadership publicly cheered the numbers as a productivity signal. When the dashboard leaked outside the company, it was pulled within two days."}

{"\n"}

{"At Amazon, an internal usage leaderboard came with an explicit promise that token stats would not count toward performance reviews. Employees gamed it anyway, because nobody believed the promise."}

{"\n"}

{"At Duolingo, leadership tied performance evaluations to AI adoption directly. They reversed the policy after staff pointed out it was rewarding tool usage instead of actual results."}

{"\n"}

{"And there's the now-famous Garry Tan anecdote from Y Combinator: a developer shipped 37,000 lines of code a day across 5 projects for a 72-day streak. A while later, another developer reported finding 78,400 lines of AI-generated slop in production. Two numbers, both impressive on a leaderboard, both telling you almost nothing about whether the product actually improved."}

{"\n"}

{"Each company made the same mistake. The metric they cheered was an output. The thing they actually wanted was an outcome. In none of these cases did the activity number tell anyone whether the business got better."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Why output-based goals quietly destroy progress"}

{"\n"}

{"When you set a goal on an output and that output happens to move, you get a false impression of progress. Token spend goes up, lines of code go up, demos delivered goes up, adoption percentage goes up. Everything on the dashboard looks great. Leadership tells the board the AI rollout is working. The board tells investors the AI rollout is working. Everybody believes the story because the numbers all moved."}

{"\n"}

{"Meanwhile, the actual business may or may not have moved at all. And here's the worst part: you can't tell, because you weren't measuring the outcome. You were measuring the output. By the time you notice, you've burned the budget, exhausted the team, and lost a year you can't get back."}

{"\n"}

{"There's a second, more insidious problem. Output-based goals quietly tell teams "}{"how"}{" to do their job. \"Use AI more\" is a how. \"Make 100 outbound calls a day\" is a how. \"Ship 24 blog posts a quarter\" is a how. The team stops thinking about whether the "}{"how"}{" is actually working, because the "}{"how"}{" is the goal now. They lose the ability to learn, to swap out a tactic that isn't paying off, to try a different approach. Output-based goals turn knowledge workers into operators of a fixed playbook, even when the playbook is wrong."}

{"\n"}

{"Outcome-based goals do the opposite. \"Generate 1,000 qualified leads\" lets the team figure out the right mix of channels. \"Reduce cycle time by 30%\" lets engineering decide whether AI tooling, better PR review, smaller batch sizes, or something else is the right lever. The goal stays fixed on the result. The team retains the autonomy to figure out the means."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Goodhart's law shows up every single time"}

{"\n"}

{"There's a name for the deeper mechanism, and it's worth knowing: Goodhart's law. We've covered it in "}{"why you can't run a company on KPIs alone"}{". The short version is that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The moment Uber turned token spend into a leaderboard ranking, it stopped being a useful signal of adoption and became a thing teams optimized. Same with Meta's Claudeonomics. Same with Amazon's usage dashboard. Same with the developer who shipped 37,000 lines a day."}

{"\n"}

{"This is why output-based goals are particularly dangerous. Outputs are easy to count, which makes them easy to game. The team finds the cheapest way to move the output, and the cheapest way is almost never the way that produces the outcome you wanted."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"What good goal-setting looks like instead"}

{"\n"}

{"If you're heading into a planning round and someone proposes \"drive AI adoption\" or \"increase tool usage\" or \"ship more code\" as a goal, here's what to do."}

{"\n"}

{"Ask: what's the outcome we actually want?"}

{"\n"}

{"Not the activity. The result. For an AI rollout, the candidate outcomes are mostly obvious:"}

{"\n"}

{"Reduce cycle time from ticket to shipped PR"}
{"Reduce engineer-hours per shipped feature"}
{"Lower defect rate or reduce rollback incidents"}
{"Cut code review turnaround time"}
{"Reduce support load on engineers"}
{"Ship more features per quarter without adding headcount"}

{"\n"}

{"Pick the one or two that matter most to the business. Set the goal on those. The team will figure out whether AI tooling is the right way to get there, or whether it's some combination of AI and other changes."}

{"\n"}

{"Pressure-test every proposed goal with one question."}

{"\n"}

{"\"If we hit this number perfectly and nothing else changed, would the business actually be better off?\""}

{"\n"}

{"If the answer is yes, you've got an outcome. If the answer is no, you've got an output, and you need to keep digging until you find the outcome it was supposed to produce. \"Use AI a lot\" fails this test instantly. The business isn't better off just because token spend went up. The business is better off only if something downstream of that spend actually moved."}

{"\n"}

{"Make the activity an Initiative, not the goal."}

{"\n"}

{"\"Roll out Claude Code to all engineers\" is real work, and it deserves a place in the plan. But that's an Initiative, the "}{"how"}{", not the "}{"what"}{". It belongs underneath the outcome goal, as one of several possible ways to move that outcome. Sales orgs don't make \"1,000 outbound calls\" the goal; they make it part of the playbook that supports the actual goal, which is closed revenue. Engineering should do the same with AI tooling."}

{"\n"}

{"Watch for the leaderboard instinct."}

{"\n"}

{"If you find yourself drafting a dashboard that ranks teams by activity (usage, calls made, lines of code, demos run), you've recreated Uber's setup. Rank by the outcome instead. Better yet, don't rank at all and let teams report on what's working."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The lesson"}

{"\n"}

{"The Uber story has a satisfying narrative arc because it ended in a cap, an apology, and a budget post-mortem. Most of the time, this mistake doesn't end so cleanly. Most of the time, the team just quietly hits the activity metric, the activity metric quietly fails to deliver any actual outcome, and the leadership team quietly moves on to the next initiative without learning anything. The output number wins, and the company loses."}

{"\n"}

{"Don't let that happen at your next planning round. Set goals on outcomes, not outputs. Let the team figure out the activities. Measure the results."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"How Perdoo helps you keep goals outcome-focused"}

{"\n"}

{"Perdoo is built around the distinction this article is about. Objectives and Key Results live at the outcome layer in Perdoo, while Initiatives live underneath them as the activities, projects, and tasks meant to move those outcomes. The software structurally separates the two, so a tool rollout, a campaign, or a call quota can never accidentally become the goal itself. It sits where it belongs, as the work in service of the result."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}63:Tccc4, What Uber's $1,500 AI cap teaches us about goal-setting

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

What Uber's $1,500 AI cap teaches us about goal-setting

Key Takeaway: The mistake leaders keep making is setting goals on outputs (activities, things you do) instead of outcomes (results, things that happen as a consequence). Uber put 5,000 engineers on uncapped AI tooling, ranked teams by tokens burned, watched usage shoot from 32% to 84%, and then their COO had to admit he couldn't draw a line between any of that spend and a single consumer improvement. Token usage is an output. The product getting better is an outcome. When you make the output the goal, teams optimize the output. The number goes up. The thing you actually wanted barely moves. This isn't an AI problem. It's a goal-setting problem, and it happens every time leaders measure how busy the team is instead of what the team delivered.

Uber's AI mandate is going to end up in goal-setting textbooks, and not in a good way. The story goes like this. Leadership put around 5,000 engineers on enterprise AI tooling with metered, uncapped billing on top of the seat fee. They built an internal leaderboard ranking teams by how many tokens they burned. Adoption of agentic coding shot from 32% in February to 84% in March. By month four, the year's budget was gone. The CTO had spent $1,200 in a two-hour demo. Average engineers were running $150 to $250 a month. Heavy users were running $500 to $2,000.

Then their COO, Andrew Macdonald, said the quiet part out loud in an interview: it was "very hard to draw a line between the token spend and actual consumer improvements." Uber eventually capped engineers at $1,500 a month per tool. The leaderboard had done its job, just not the job leadership thought it was doing.

Uber's AI rollout is now the most expensive recent illustration of why it's important to differentiate between outputs and outcomes. And why business goals should focus on results instead of activities.

Outputs vs outcomes, in one minute

The cleanest definition I know is this: an output is something you do, an outcome is something that happens as a consequence of what you do.

A few examples to make it concrete:

Output: I had a demo with a prospect. Outcome: I closed a customer.
Output: We ran a €200K AdWords campaign. Outcome: We generated 1,000 qualified leads.
Output: The Sales team made 1,000 outbound calls this week. Outcome: The Sales team booked 40 qualified meetings.
Output: Engineering deployed Claude Code to all 5,000 developers. Outcome: Cycle time from ticket to shipped PR dropped from 9 days to 4 days.

In every pair, the output is the activity, the work, the thing the team did. The outcome is the result, the consequence, the thing the business actually wanted in the first place.

Outputs are easy to measure. They're countable, they update in real time, they look impressive in a deck. Outcomes are harder. They lag the work by days, weeks, or months. They depend on multiple variables. They're harder to attribute. So under pressure, leaders default to measuring the output, even when they know the outcome is what they actually care about.

That's the trap. And once you've set the goal on the output, the team optimizes the output. They'd be irrational not to. You told them that's what success looks like.

Uber's AI rollout, translated

Look at Uber's setup through this lens and the failure is obvious in retrospect.

The goal they communicated was usage. The success metric was tokens burned. The reinforcement was a leaderboard ranking teams by that metric. Everything in the system pointed at the output, which was "use AI a lot." Nothing in the system pointed at any outcome, which would have been something like "ship features faster," "reduce defect rate," "cut support load," or "lower engineer-hours per shipped feature."

So the teams did exactly what the goal told them to do. They used AI a lot. Adoption tripled in 30 days. Token spend exploded. The leaderboard turned green. The CTO ran up a $1,200 tab in two hours. By every metric Uber had defined, the program was a runaway success.

Then someone asked the awkward question, which is what every leader eventually has to ask: did any of this actually help the product? And the honest answer was: we don't know, and we can't tell. Macdonald's quote about not being able to draw a line between spend and consumer improvements is the polite version of "we measured the output and forgot to measure the outcome."

The cap that followed wasn't really about cost control. It was about the realization that the goal had been set on the wrong thing. Capping engineers at $1,500 was a way of saying "stop optimizing the metric we accidentally made important."

The pattern is everywhere, not just Uber

Uber is the high-profile case, but it's not the only one.

At Meta, an employee built an internal leaderboard called Claudeonomics that ranked roughly 85,000 workers by token consumption. The dashboard logged 60 trillion tokens in 30 days. Leadership publicly cheered the numbers as a productivity signal. When the dashboard leaked outside the company, it was pulled within two days.

At Amazon, an internal usage leaderboard came with an explicit promise that token stats would not count toward performance reviews. Employees gamed it anyway, because nobody believed the promise.

At Duolingo, leadership tied performance evaluations to AI adoption directly. They reversed the policy after staff pointed out it was rewarding tool usage instead of actual results.

And there's the now-famous Garry Tan anecdote from Y Combinator: a developer shipped 37,000 lines of code a day across 5 projects for a 72-day streak. A while later, another developer reported finding 78,400 lines of AI-generated slop in production. Two numbers, both impressive on a leaderboard, both telling you almost nothing about whether the product actually improved.

Each company made the same mistake. The metric they cheered was an output. The thing they actually wanted was an outcome. In none of these cases did the activity number tell anyone whether the business got better.

Why output-based goals quietly destroy progress

When you set a goal on an output and that output happens to move, you get a false impression of progress. Token spend goes up, lines of code go up, demos delivered goes up, adoption percentage goes up. Everything on the dashboard looks great. Leadership tells the board the AI rollout is working. The board tells investors the AI rollout is working. Everybody believes the story because the numbers all moved.

Meanwhile, the actual business may or may not have moved at all. And here's the worst part: you can't tell, because you weren't measuring the outcome. You were measuring the output. By the time you notice, you've burned the budget, exhausted the team, and lost a year you can't get back.

There's a second, more insidious problem. Output-based goals quietly tell teams how to do their job. "Use AI more" is a how. "Make 100 outbound calls a day" is a how. "Ship 24 blog posts a quarter" is a how. The team stops thinking about whether the how is actually working, because the how is the goal now. They lose the ability to learn, to swap out a tactic that isn't paying off, to try a different approach. Output-based goals turn knowledge workers into operators of a fixed playbook, even when the playbook is wrong.

Outcome-based goals do the opposite. "Generate 1,000 qualified leads" lets the team figure out the right mix of channels. "Reduce cycle time by 30%" lets engineering decide whether AI tooling, better PR review, smaller batch sizes, or something else is the right lever. The goal stays fixed on the result. The team retains the autonomy to figure out the means.

Goodhart's law shows up every single time

There's a name for the deeper mechanism, and it's worth knowing: Goodhart's law. We've covered it in why you can't run a company on KPIs alone. The short version is that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The moment Uber turned token spend into a leaderboard ranking, it stopped being a useful signal of adoption and became a thing teams optimized. Same with Meta's Claudeonomics. Same with Amazon's usage dashboard. Same with the developer who shipped 37,000 lines a day.

This is why output-based goals are particularly dangerous. Outputs are easy to count, which makes them easy to game. The team finds the cheapest way to move the output, and the cheapest way is almost never the way that produces the outcome you wanted.

What good goal-setting looks like instead

If you're heading into a planning round and someone proposes "drive AI adoption" or "increase tool usage" or "ship more code" as a goal, here's what to do.

Ask: what's the outcome we actually want?

Not the activity. The result. For an AI rollout, the candidate outcomes are mostly obvious:

Reduce cycle time from ticket to shipped PR
Reduce engineer-hours per shipped feature
Lower defect rate or reduce rollback incidents
Cut code review turnaround time
Reduce support load on engineers
Ship more features per quarter without adding headcount

Pick the one or two that matter most to the business. Set the goal on those. The team will figure out whether AI tooling is the right way to get there, or whether it's some combination of AI and other changes.

Pressure-test every proposed goal with one question.

"If we hit this number perfectly and nothing else changed, would the business actually be better off?"

If the answer is yes, you've got an outcome. If the answer is no, you've got an output, and you need to keep digging until you find the outcome it was supposed to produce. "Use AI a lot" fails this test instantly. The business isn't better off just because token spend went up. The business is better off only if something downstream of that spend actually moved.

Make the activity an Initiative, not the goal.

"Roll out Claude Code to all engineers" is real work, and it deserves a place in the plan. But that's an Initiative, the how, not the what. It belongs underneath the outcome goal, as one of several possible ways to move that outcome. Sales orgs don't make "1,000 outbound calls" the goal; they make it part of the playbook that supports the actual goal, which is closed revenue. Engineering should do the same with AI tooling.

Watch for the leaderboard instinct.

If you find yourself drafting a dashboard that ranks teams by activity (usage, calls made, lines of code, demos run), you've recreated Uber's setup. Rank by the outcome instead. Better yet, don't rank at all and let teams report on what's working.

The lesson

The Uber story has a satisfying narrative arc because it ended in a cap, an apology, and a budget post-mortem. Most of the time, this mistake doesn't end so cleanly. Most of the time, the team just quietly hits the activity metric, the activity metric quietly fails to deliver any actual outcome, and the leadership team quietly moves on to the next initiative without learning anything. The output number wins, and the company loses.

Don't let that happen at your next planning round. Set goals on outcomes, not outputs. Let the team figure out the activities. Measure the results.

How Perdoo helps you keep goals outcome-focused

Perdoo is built around the distinction this article is about. Objectives and Key Results live at the outcome layer in Perdoo, while Initiatives live underneath them as the activities, projects, and tasks meant to move those outcomes. The software structurally separates the two, so a tool rollout, a campaign, or a call quota can never accidentally become the goal itself. It sits where it belongs, as the work in service of the result.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

64:T116ad,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"Your strategy is failing, and it's not the strategy's fault"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Henrik van der Pol"}

{"\n"}

{"CEO at "}{"Perdoo"}

{"\n"}

{"If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, "}{"subscribe here."}{""}

{"\n"}

{"Your strategy is failing, and it's not the strategy's fault"}

{"\n"}

{"‍ "}
{"Key Takeaway:"}{" Your strategy probably isn't the problem. The problem is that the strategy never made it past the executive floor. Donald Sull's research at MIT Sloan, based on surveys of 7,600 managers across 262 companies, found that even when middle managers are given five chances to list their company's top five strategic priorities, only 55% can name even one of them. The share plummets to 16% among frontline supervisors and team leaders, the people closest to the actual work. Kaplan and Norton's earlier research found similar gaps: at one major Mobil division, only 20% of employees understood the strategy before a Balanced Scorecard rollout. McKinsey's 2024-2025 strategy survey of executives shows the situation getting worse, not better, with only 21% of executives reporting their strategies pass the basic quality bar (down from 35% in 2010). If your OKR rollout has stalled at the leadership layer, your strategy has stalled with it. The cost isn't just that 80% of execution is missing. It’s also that the 20% of execution you do have is unsupported, miscoordinated, and quietly being undermined by the rest of the org. Rolling out tools like OKR and Perdoo to the entire company isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between strategy that runs the business and strategy that decorates the boardroom."}

{"\n"}

{"Most companies don't have a strategy execution problem in the way they think they do."}

{"\n"}

{"What they have is a strategy understanding problem, on a scale that's genuinely shocking once you see the numbers. Strategy doesn't fail because the strategy was wrong. It fails because the strategy never made it past the top floor."}

{"\n"}

{"I want to walk you through what the research actually shows, because the data here is stronger than most leadership teams realize, and the implications for how you roll out OKR (and a tool like Perdoo) are direct. This is also why we've argued that "}{"strategy comes first, OKR second"}{": without a clear strategy that everyone can articulate, you're using OKRs to operationalize a vacuum."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The Sull finding: only 55% of middle managers can name one strategic priority"}

{"\n"}

{"The cleanest piece of research on this comes from "}{"Donald Sull and his colleagues at MIT Sloan"}{". Over more than five years, they surveyed 7,600 managers across 262 companies in 30 industries. The survey was specifically designed to test how well strategy was actually understood inside organizations, not just whether leadership said the strategy was clear."}

{"\n"}

{"The headline finding, published in "}{"Harvard Business Review in 2015"}{", is uncomfortable. Sull's team asked managers to list their company's top 5 strategic priorities. They didn't have to get them in order. They didn't have to phrase them perfectly. They just had to name them. They were given 5 chances."}

{"\n"}

{"The authors put it bluntly: \"Only 55% of the middle managers we have surveyed can name even one of their company's top five priorities. In other words, when the leaders charged with explaining strategy to the troops are given five chances to list their company's strategic objectives, nearly half fail to get even one right.\""}

{"\n"}

{"It gets worse as you go down the org chart. The same study found that \"fewer than one-third of senior executives' direct reports clearly understand the connections between corporate priorities, and the share plummets to 16% for frontline supervisors and team leaders.\""}

{"\n"}

{"Read those numbers again. The managers in the survey were not random employees. They were named by the CEO as the people responsible for executing the strategy. Given 5 attempts, nearly half of middle managers couldn't name a single one of the company's top 5 priorities. Less than a third of senior executives' direct reports understood how their work connected to those priorities. Among frontline supervisors and team leaders, the people closest to the actual work, only 16% understood the connections."}

{"\n"}

{"Sull's team is direct about how leadership reacts when they see this data: \"Senior executives are often shocked to see how poorly their company's strategy is understood throughout the organization.\" "}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The Kaplan and Norton finding: 20% of employees understand the strategy"}

{"\n"}

{"Sull's research is the most recent large-sample study, but it's confirming a pattern that Robert Kaplan and David Norton documented decades earlier in their work on the Balanced Scorecard. In "}{"The Strategy-Focused Organization"}{" (2000), they describe the Mobil North America Marketing and Refining transformation. Before the Balanced Scorecard rollout in 1994, annual employee surveys showed that only 20% of the workforce understood Mobil's strategy. By 1998, after a structured effort to align the entire organization to the strategy, awareness had risen to 80%."}

{"\n"}

{"The two interesting things about Mobil's number aren't the before or after. They're: (1) Mobil was already a sophisticated company with a clear strategy, and only 1 in 5 employees understood it; (2) the gap closed only when leadership explicitly built a system to translate strategy into measurable, owned objectives for every team."}

{"\n"}

{"That's not a coincidence. It's the central finding across decades of strategy execution research. Strategy doesn't propagate by itself. It propagates only when the organization actively builds the system to make it propagate. Without that system, the default state is the Sull finding: most managers don't know the strategy, and most frontline supervisors don't see how their work connects to it."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The McKinsey finding: the situation is getting worse"}

{"\n"}

{"If you assumed that 30 years of management thinking on strategy execution would have improved the picture, the most recent research disagrees."}

{"\n"}

{"McKinsey's 2024-2025 strategy survey"}{" asked executives whether their strategies passed 4 or more of McKinsey's Ten Tests of Strategy. These are basic quality checks: is the strategy real, is it specific enough to act on, does it allocate resources, does it confront the actual competitive reality, and so on."}

{"\n"}

{"In 2010, 35% of executives said their strategies passed 4 or more of the tests. In 2024-2025, that number had dropped to 21%. That's a 40% decline in basic strategy quality, in the same window where the business environment got more complex and the cost of misalignment got higher."}

{"\n"}

{"McKinsey's interpretation: companies are getting worse at strategy not because they're trying less, but because complexity has outrun the management systems they're using to handle it. The strategy decks keep getting longer. The execution stays at the top."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"What partial execution actually looks like"}

{"\n"}

{"Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough. When a strategy is understood by 100% of the leadership team and only 20% of the rest of the company, the result isn't \"the strategy gets 20% executed.\" It's something worse."}

{"\n"}

{"When the leadership team is executing and the rest of the org isn't, three things happen, and all three are quietly destructive."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Cross-team work breaks at the seams"}

{"\n"}

{"‍Teams that have OKRs are measuring outcomes. Teams that don't are still measuring activities. When those teams need to collaborate (which is almost always, in any non-trivial company), the two sides are speaking different languages. The team with OKRs is asking \"what's the result we're trying to produce together?\" The team without is asking \"what's on my plate this week?\" The work gets done, slowly, with friction, and nobody can tell why everything seems to take longer than it should."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The strategy can't self-correct"}

{"\n"}

{"A strategy that's running through the whole organization produces information. Each team's check-ins, each Key Result that lands at 40% progress, each KPI that drifts off target — all of that is data the leadership team can use to adjust the strategy in flight. When 80% of the company is operating outside the OKR system, that data simply doesn't exist. The leadership team is flying with the instruments of the executive suite turned on and the instruments of the rest of the airplane turned off. They can't tell if the strategy is working until the year is over and revenue tells them."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The story the leadership team is telling itself gets less and l ess true"}

{"\n"}

{"‍This is the most insidious one. Because the leadership team is the part of the org genuinely executing the strategy, they see daily evidence that \"the strategy is working.\" Meanwhile, the rest of the company is running on the same patterns it ran on before the strategy was set. By month 6, leadership believes the company is aligned around the new direction. The rest of the company hasn't actually changed direction at all. Sull's research documented this directly: the leaders running the strategy are routinely the most surprised when they finally see the data on how poorly it's understood lower down the org chart. We've covered the deeper version of this disconnect in "}{"why OKR programs fail"}{": when leadership stops experiencing what the rest of the company experiences, the program drifts."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Why this isn't a comms problem"}

{"\n"}

{"The most common response to these numbers is to assume the issue is communication. If only 16% of frontline supervisors understand the corporate strategy, the obvious answer is to communicate more. More all-hands. More emails from the CEO. Posters in the kitchen."}

{"\n"}

{"Sull's research directly tested this hypothesis, and the answer is: communication volume is not the problem. In the survey, nearly 90% of middle managers said top leaders communicate the strategy frequently enough. When managers were asked why the strategy wasn't well understood, communication clarity wasn't even the top complaint. The top complaint was that the company had too many strategic priorities and initiatives stacked on top of each other, making it impossible to know what actually mattered most."}

{"\n"}

{"The deeper issue is structural. Communication tells people what the strategy is. It doesn't tell them how their team's work translates that strategy into action this quarter. That translation is what's missing in most companies. And translation isn't a comms problem. It's a goal-setting problem."}

{"\n"}

{"This is exactly the gap a "}{"well-designed OKR system"}{" is built to close. Every team's Objectives translate the corporate strategy into the specific changes that team is driving this cycle. Every Key Result is the team's commitment to a measurable outcome. Every check-in is the team telling itself, and leadership, whether the work is connecting to the result. Without that system, communication just becomes noise that the org learns to tune out."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"What changes when the whole company is in"}

{"\n"}

{"There's also research on what happens when the gap closes. The Sull team identified, across 69 different factors they tested in their survey, the single strongest predictor of strategic alignment: how consistently managers at every level explained their team's goals in terms of both the team's mission and the company's strategy."}

{"\n"}

{"That's it. The single biggest lever in their data wasn't strategy clarity at the top. It wasn't communication frequency. It wasn't even strategy quality. It was the discipline, at every layer of the company, of every manager being able to say: here's what we're working on, here's why it matters to our team, here's how it connects to the company strategy."}

{"\n"}

{"When that discipline is in place across the entire organization, alignment improves dramatically. When it's only in place at the top, alignment stays low no matter how many all-hands you run."}

{"\n"}

{"The Kaplan and Norton work points to the same conclusion. The Mobil division didn't move from 20% to 80% understanding by communicating harder. They moved by building a system that required every team to translate the corporate strategy into their own measurable objectives, then made those objectives visible to everyone else."}

{"\n"}

{"That's the bar. Not \"leadership has OKRs.\" Not \"the pilot team has OKRs.\" Every team. Same system. Same cadence. Same visibility."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The bar to hit"}

{"\n"}

{"\"Company-wide\" doesn't necessarily mean every employee writes individual OKRs from day one. That's overreach in most companies and creates more administrative cost than value. The actual bar to hit is simpler, and it follows directly from the research."}

{"\n"}

{"Every team has at least one OKR that explicitly ties to a Strategic Pillar or a Company OKR. Not a department-level OKR that nobody owns. A team-level OKR with a name attached. The basic mechanics of "}{"how to set OKRs with your team"}{" apply here, but the discipline has to be the same for every team in the company."}

{"\n"}

{"Every employee can name their team's current Objectives. Not memorize them. Articulate them in their own words."}

{"\n"}

{"Every employee can name the company's current top priorities. Sull's 55% number is the floor you need to climb above. If your number isn't well over 80%, your rollout isn't complete."}

{"\n"}

{"Every team runs the same check-in cadence on the same rhythm. Weekly, bi-weekly, whatever you've chosen, but the same across the company. Cadence is what builds the muscle."}

{"\n"}

{"The strategy is visible to everyone, by default. This is where a tool like Perdoo (or any equivalent system of record) earns its keep. If knowing the strategy requires asking your manager who asked their VP who asked their EVP, the system has failed before it started."}

{"\n"}

{"If you hit those five things, you've crossed the line from \"leadership has a strategy\" to \"the company is executing a strategy.\" Below that bar, you have a leadership exercise. Above it, you have a company."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The cost of staying partial"}

{"\n"}

{"Most companies don't realize how expensive partial execution actually is. Here's where I think the dollar and time costs really are, based on what the research implies plus what we see across customer rollouts."}

{"\n"}

{"You burn a year. Most strategies are 2 to 3-year horizons. When the first year is spent with only the top layer of the company genuinely executing, you're 33-50% of the way through the strategic window before the rest of the org even starts. By the time everyone is aligned, the market has moved."}

{"\n"}

{"You hire to compensate. A common pattern: the strategy isn't moving fast enough, so leadership concludes they need more senior talent. They hire VPs, restructure functions, bring in consultants. None of it addresses the actual issue, which is that the strategy never made it past the executive suite. The new hires walk into the same broken translation problem."}

{"\n"}

{"You blame the wrong thing at the end of the year. The strategy didn't work, so leadership concludes the strategy was wrong. They go back to the drawing board, build a new strategy, communicate it widely, and pilot the OKRs again with the leadership team. The cycle restarts. The actual problem (that the rest of the company was never brought into execution) never gets named."}

{"\n"}

{"McKinsey's data on the declining quality of corporate strategies is consistent with this pattern. Strategies are getting worse over time, not because the people writing them are getting worse, but because the systems that should be testing strategies through real execution data are absent in most companies. Bad strategies survive because the org has no way to find out they're bad until it's too late."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"What to do this week"}

{"\n"}

{"If you're reading this and your OKR rollout has been quietly stuck at \"leadership and one pilot team\" for several months, here's the concrete step."}

{"\n"}

{"Audit your rollout. What percentage of teams have current Objectives, not stale ones from 6 months ago? What percentage of employees can name their team's Objectives without looking them up? What percentage can name the company's top 3 strategic priorities?"}

{"\n"}

{"If your numbers are anything like the industry baseline (and they probably are), the answer is significantly worse than you think. Sull's 16% number for frontline supervisors is the baseline. If your rollout hasn't moved you well above that, your rollout hasn't actually rolled out."}

{"\n"}

{"Then put a date on the company-wide expansion. Not \"soon.\" Not \"next quarter.\" A specific date, with a name, communicated publicly. The executive sponsor's name on the document. We've written about "}{"how to make this transition"}{" without losing momentum, and the 90-day plan to go from pilot to company-wide is its own playbook."}

{"\n"}

{"The hardest thing about strategy execution isn't writing the strategy. It's making the decision to bring the whole organization into executing it. Most companies never make that decision explicitly. They drift past it, leaving the strategy as a leadership artifact and wondering, a year later, why nothing changed."}

{"\n"}

{"Don't drift past the decision. Make it on purpose. Our "}{"5 stages of OKR maturity"}{" framework calls the place where most companies stall \"stuck at Piloting,\" and the fix is exactly the explicit, dated, named commitment described above."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"How Perdoo helps you go company-wide"}

{"\n"}

{"The research shows the bar that has to be cleared: every team translating the strategy into measurable OKRs and KPIs, every employee able to name their team's priorities and the company's priorities, every team running the same cadence on the same rhythm, all of it visible by default. Perdoo is built specifically to make that bar reachable without a heroic effort from the OKR Champion. The product gives every team a structured place to write their OKRs with explicit parent links to a Strategic Pillar, KPI, or Company OKR, so the translation Sull's research identifies as the biggest lever happens by design rather than by accident. Every employee can see the strategy and how their work connects to it, the moment they log in."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}65:Tff34, Your strategy is failing, and it's not the strategy's fault

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

Your strategy is failing, and it's not the strategy's fault

‍
Key Takeaway: Your strategy probably isn't the problem. The problem is that the strategy never made it past the executive floor. Donald Sull's research at MIT Sloan, based on surveys of 7,600 managers across 262 companies, found that even when middle managers are given five chances to list their company's top five strategic priorities, only 55% can name even one of them. The share plummets to 16% among frontline supervisors and team leaders, the people closest to the actual work. Kaplan and Norton's earlier research found similar gaps: at one major Mobil division, only 20% of employees understood the strategy before a Balanced Scorecard rollout. McKinsey's 2024-2025 strategy survey of executives shows the situation getting worse, not better, with only 21% of executives reporting their strategies pass the basic quality bar (down from 35% in 2010). If your OKR rollout has stalled at the leadership layer, your strategy has stalled with it. The cost isn't just that 80% of execution is missing. It’s also that the 20% of execution you do have is unsupported, miscoordinated, and quietly being undermined by the rest of the org. Rolling out tools like OKR and Perdoo to the entire company isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between strategy that runs the business and strategy that decorates the boardroom.

Most companies don't have a strategy execution problem in the way they think they do.

What they have is a strategy understanding problem, on a scale that's genuinely shocking once you see the numbers. Strategy doesn't fail because the strategy was wrong. It fails because the strategy never made it past the top floor.

I want to walk you through what the research actually shows, because the data here is stronger than most leadership teams realize, and the implications for how you roll out OKR (and a tool like Perdoo) are direct. This is also why we've argued that strategy comes first, OKR second: without a clear strategy that everyone can articulate, you're using OKRs to operationalize a vacuum.

The Sull finding: only 55% of middle managers can name one strategic priority

The cleanest piece of research on this comes from Donald Sull and his colleagues at MIT Sloan. Over more than five years, they surveyed 7,600 managers across 262 companies in 30 industries. The survey was specifically designed to test how well strategy was actually understood inside organizations, not just whether leadership said the strategy was clear.

The headline finding, published in Harvard Business Review in 2015, is uncomfortable. Sull's team asked managers to list their company's top 5 strategic priorities. They didn't have to get them in order. They didn't have to phrase them perfectly. They just had to name them. They were given 5 chances.

The authors put it bluntly: "Only 55% of the middle managers we have surveyed can name even one of their company's top five priorities. In other words, when the leaders charged with explaining strategy to the troops are given five chances to list their company's strategic objectives, nearly half fail to get even one right."

It gets worse as you go down the org chart. The same study found that "fewer than one-third of senior executives' direct reports clearly understand the connections between corporate priorities, and the share plummets to 16% for frontline supervisors and team leaders."

Read those numbers again. The managers in the survey were not random employees. They were named by the CEO as the people responsible for executing the strategy. Given 5 attempts, nearly half of middle managers couldn't name a single one of the company's top 5 priorities. Less than a third of senior executives' direct reports understood how their work connected to those priorities. Among frontline supervisors and team leaders, the people closest to the actual work, only 16% understood the connections.

Sull's team is direct about how leadership reacts when they see this data: "Senior executives are often shocked to see how poorly their company's strategy is understood throughout the organization."

The Kaplan and Norton finding: 20% of employees understand the strategy

Sull's research is the most recent large-sample study, but it's confirming a pattern that Robert Kaplan and David Norton documented decades earlier in their work on the Balanced Scorecard. In The Strategy-Focused Organization (2000), they describe the Mobil North America Marketing and Refining transformation. Before the Balanced Scorecard rollout in 1994, annual employee surveys showed that only 20% of the workforce understood Mobil's strategy. By 1998, after a structured effort to align the entire organization to the strategy, awareness had risen to 80%.

The two interesting things about Mobil's number aren't the before or after. They're: (1) Mobil was already a sophisticated company with a clear strategy, and only 1 in 5 employees understood it; (2) the gap closed only when leadership explicitly built a system to translate strategy into measurable, owned objectives for every team.

That's not a coincidence. It's the central finding across decades of strategy execution research. Strategy doesn't propagate by itself. It propagates only when the organization actively builds the system to make it propagate. Without that system, the default state is the Sull finding: most managers don't know the strategy, and most frontline supervisors don't see how their work connects to it.

The McKinsey finding: the situation is getting worse

If you assumed that 30 years of management thinking on strategy execution would have improved the picture, the most recent research disagrees.

McKinsey's 2024-2025 strategy survey asked executives whether their strategies passed 4 or more of McKinsey's Ten Tests of Strategy. These are basic quality checks: is the strategy real, is it specific enough to act on, does it allocate resources, does it confront the actual competitive reality, and so on.

In 2010, 35% of executives said their strategies passed 4 or more of the tests. In 2024-2025, that number had dropped to 21%. That's a 40% decline in basic strategy quality, in the same window where the business environment got more complex and the cost of misalignment got higher.

McKinsey's interpretation: companies are getting worse at strategy not because they're trying less, but because complexity has outrun the management systems they're using to handle it. The strategy decks keep getting longer. The execution stays at the top.

What partial execution actually looks like

Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough. When a strategy is understood by 100% of the leadership team and only 20% of the rest of the company, the result isn't "the strategy gets 20% executed." It's something worse.

When the leadership team is executing and the rest of the org isn't, three things happen, and all three are quietly destructive.

Cross-team work breaks at the seams

‍Teams that have OKRs are measuring outcomes. Teams that don't are still measuring activities. When those teams need to collaborate (which is almost always, in any non-trivial company), the two sides are speaking different languages. The team with OKRs is asking "what's the result we're trying to produce together?" The team without is asking "what's on my plate this week?" The work gets done, slowly, with friction, and nobody can tell why everything seems to take longer than it should.

The strategy can't self-correct

A strategy that's running through the whole organization produces information. Each team's check-ins, each Key Result that lands at 40% progress, each KPI that drifts off target — all of that is data the leadership team can use to adjust the strategy in flight. When 80% of the company is operating outside the OKR system, that data simply doesn't exist. The leadership team is flying with the instruments of the executive suite turned on and the instruments of the rest of the airplane turned off. They can't tell if the strategy is working until the year is over and revenue tells them.

The story the leadership team is telling itself gets less and l ess true

‍This is the most insidious one. Because the leadership team is the part of the org genuinely executing the strategy, they see daily evidence that "the strategy is working." Meanwhile, the rest of the company is running on the same patterns it ran on before the strategy was set. By month 6, leadership believes the company is aligned around the new direction. The rest of the company hasn't actually changed direction at all. Sull's research documented this directly: the leaders running the strategy are routinely the most surprised when they finally see the data on how poorly it's understood lower down the org chart. We've covered the deeper version of this disconnect in why OKR programs fail: when leadership stops experiencing what the rest of the company experiences, the program drifts.

Why this isn't a comms problem

The most common response to these numbers is to assume the issue is communication. If only 16% of frontline supervisors understand the corporate strategy, the obvious answer is to communicate more. More all-hands. More emails from the CEO. Posters in the kitchen.

Sull's research directly tested this hypothesis, and the answer is: communication volume is not the problem. In the survey, nearly 90% of middle managers said top leaders communicate the strategy frequently enough. When managers were asked why the strategy wasn't well understood, communication clarity wasn't even the top complaint. The top complaint was that the company had too many strategic priorities and initiatives stacked on top of each other, making it impossible to know what actually mattered most.

The deeper issue is structural. Communication tells people what the strategy is. It doesn't tell them how their team's work translates that strategy into action this quarter. That translation is what's missing in most companies. And translation isn't a comms problem. It's a goal-setting problem.

This is exactly the gap a well-designed OKR system is built to close. Every team's Objectives translate the corporate strategy into the specific changes that team is driving this cycle. Every Key Result is the team's commitment to a measurable outcome. Every check-in is the team telling itself, and leadership, whether the work is connecting to the result. Without that system, communication just becomes noise that the org learns to tune out.

What changes when the whole company is in

There's also research on what happens when the gap closes. The Sull team identified, across 69 different factors they tested in their survey, the single strongest predictor of strategic alignment: how consistently managers at every level explained their team's goals in terms of both the team's mission and the company's strategy.

That's it. The single biggest lever in their data wasn't strategy clarity at the top. It wasn't communication frequency. It wasn't even strategy quality. It was the discipline, at every layer of the company, of every manager being able to say: here's what we're working on, here's why it matters to our team, here's how it connects to the company strategy.

When that discipline is in place across the entire organization, alignment improves dramatically. When it's only in place at the top, alignment stays low no matter how many all-hands you run.

The Kaplan and Norton work points to the same conclusion. The Mobil division didn't move from 20% to 80% understanding by communicating harder. They moved by building a system that required every team to translate the corporate strategy into their own measurable objectives, then made those objectives visible to everyone else.

That's the bar. Not "leadership has OKRs." Not "the pilot team has OKRs." Every team. Same system. Same cadence. Same visibility.

The bar to hit

"Company-wide" doesn't necessarily mean every employee writes individual OKRs from day one. That's overreach in most companies and creates more administrative cost than value. The actual bar to hit is simpler, and it follows directly from the research.

Every team has at least one OKR that explicitly ties to a Strategic Pillar or a Company OKR. Not a department-level OKR that nobody owns. A team-level OKR with a name attached. The basic mechanics of how to set OKRs with your team apply here, but the discipline has to be the same for every team in the company.

Every employee can name their team's current Objectives. Not memorize them. Articulate them in their own words.

Every employee can name the company's current top priorities. Sull's 55% number is the floor you need to climb above. If your number isn't well over 80%, your rollout isn't complete.

Every team runs the same check-in cadence on the same rhythm. Weekly, bi-weekly, whatever you've chosen, but the same across the company. Cadence is what builds the muscle.

The strategy is visible to everyone, by default. This is where a tool like Perdoo (or any equivalent system of record) earns its keep. If knowing the strategy requires asking your manager who asked their VP who asked their EVP, the system has failed before it started.

If you hit those five things, you've crossed the line from "leadership has a strategy" to "the company is executing a strategy." Below that bar, you have a leadership exercise. Above it, you have a company.

The cost of staying partial

Most companies don't realize how expensive partial execution actually is. Here's where I think the dollar and time costs really are, based on what the research implies plus what we see across customer rollouts.

You burn a year. Most strategies are 2 to 3-year horizons. When the first year is spent with only the top layer of the company genuinely executing, you're 33-50% of the way through the strategic window before the rest of the org even starts. By the time everyone is aligned, the market has moved.

You hire to compensate. A common pattern: the strategy isn't moving fast enough, so leadership concludes they need more senior talent. They hire VPs, restructure functions, bring in consultants. None of it addresses the actual issue, which is that the strategy never made it past the executive suite. The new hires walk into the same broken translation problem.

You blame the wrong thing at the end of the year. The strategy didn't work, so leadership concludes the strategy was wrong. They go back to the drawing board, build a new strategy, communicate it widely, and pilot the OKRs again with the leadership team. The cycle restarts. The actual problem (that the rest of the company was never brought into execution) never gets named.

McKinsey's data on the declining quality of corporate strategies is consistent with this pattern. Strategies are getting worse over time, not because the people writing them are getting worse, but because the systems that should be testing strategies through real execution data are absent in most companies. Bad strategies survive because the org has no way to find out they're bad until it's too late.

What to do this week

If you're reading this and your OKR rollout has been quietly stuck at "leadership and one pilot team" for several months, here's the concrete step.

Audit your rollout. What percentage of teams have current Objectives, not stale ones from 6 months ago? What percentage of employees can name their team's Objectives without looking them up? What percentage can name the company's top 3 strategic priorities?

If your numbers are anything like the industry baseline (and they probably are), the answer is significantly worse than you think. Sull's 16% number for frontline supervisors is the baseline. If your rollout hasn't moved you well above that, your rollout hasn't actually rolled out.

Then put a date on the company-wide expansion. Not "soon." Not "next quarter." A specific date, with a name, communicated publicly. The executive sponsor's name on the document. We've written about how to make this transition without losing momentum, and the 90-day plan to go from pilot to company-wide is its own playbook.

The hardest thing about strategy execution isn't writing the strategy. It's making the decision to bring the whole organization into executing it. Most companies never make that decision explicitly. They drift past it, leaving the strategy as a leadership artifact and wondering, a year later, why nothing changed.

Don't drift past the decision. Make it on purpose. Our 5 stages of OKR maturity framework calls the place where most companies stall "stuck at Piloting," and the fix is exactly the explicit, dated, named commitment described above.

How Perdoo helps you go company-wide

The research shows the bar that has to be cleared: every team translating the strategy into measurable OKRs and KPIs, every employee able to name their team's priorities and the company's priorities, every team running the same cadence on the same rhythm, all of it visible by default. Perdoo is built specifically to make that bar reachable without a heroic effort from the OKR Champion. The product gives every team a structured place to write their OKRs with explicit parent links to a Strategic Pillar, KPI, or Company OKR, so the translation Sull's research identifies as the biggest lever happens by design rather than by accident. Every employee can see the strategy and how their work connects to it, the moment they log in.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

66:T1039d,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"10 OKR dogmas you should ignore"}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Henrik van der Pol"}

{"\n"}

{"CEO at Perdoo"}

{"\n"}

{"If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, "}{"subscribe here."}{""}

{"\n"}

{"10 OKR dogmas you should ignore"}

{"\n"}

{""}{"Key Takeaway: "}{"Many of the \"rules\" of OKRs are not rules. They are conventions, mostly invented at Google, that hardened into dogma as the framework spread. Common dogmas to ignore include: Every team and every employee needs OKRs, Key Results must be stretch targets, OKRs can't be changed mid-cycle, and hitting 100% progress means the bar was too low. Experienced practitioners ignore these when they don't fit the company and culture. So should you."}

{"\n"}

{"For a better experience, "}{"continue reading on the web"}

{"\n"}

{"When OKR first crossed over from being Google's internal management method to being a thing every other company tried to copy, a lot of useful guidance came with it. Some of that guidance is genuinely durable. Most of it isn't. We've covered the full framework in detail in the Ultimate Guide to OKR; this article is about the rules within that framework that you should feel free to ignore."}

{"\n"}

{"What's happened over the past decade is that a set of perfectly reasonable Google-era conventions (\"our Objectives have 3 to 5 Key Results,\" \"we score on a 0 (0%) to 1 (100%) scale where 0.7 (70%) is considered a success,\" \"we set OKRs quarterly\") got globalized into laws. Consultants taught them as rules. Books printed them as rules. Tools enforced them as rules. By the time most companies sat down to adopt OKRs, they were inheriting a body of dogma that bore little resemblance to the flexible, opinionated practice that actually existed inside Google."}

{"\n"}

{"This is the source of an enormous amount of OKR friction. Teams sit in their first OKR planning session and discover they \"have to\" produce 3 Key Results per Objective, even when 2 would be sharper. Programs collapse because the leadership team can't change a mid-cycle OKR even though the market has moved underneath them. Employees sandbag their OKRs because someone connected the scoring system to their bonus. None of these are framework problems. They're dogma problems."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"The 10 OKR dogmas"}

{"\n"}

{"Here are the 10 dogmas I see most often in customer conversations, and what to do instead. Most of these have been on "}{"Perdoo's blog"}{" in scattered form for years. This is the consolidated version."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"1. Every team and every employee needs OKRs"}

{"\n"}

{"The dogma says that for OKRs to \"really work,\" they have to cover the whole organization down to the individual contributor. Every team needs OKRs. Every employee needs OKRs. Anyone left out is a gap in the system."}

{"\n"}

{"This is wrong for two reasons. First, some teams' work is captured better by KPIs than by OKRs. A team that operates entirely on maintenance metrics (a payroll team, a security operations team, a finance closing team in non-quarter-end months) may not need any OKRs in a given quarter. Forcing them to invent one only creates administrative overhead."}

{"\n"}

{"Second, individual OKRs are often a mistake. Most companies that adopt them discover within two cycles that the administrative weight outpaces the value. The Objectives at the individual level either duplicate the team's Objectives, fragment the team's focus, or become a backdoor performance-review mechanism. We've covered the broader version of this in "}{"how many OKRs should you have"}{": coverage is not the goal. Clarity and accountability are the goal. Sometimes those are best served by fewer OKRs at fewer levels."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"2. Key Results must always be stretch targets"}

{"\n"}

{"Here is the rule, exactly as it gets stated: \"If you hit 100% of your Key Results, your bar was too low.\" It traces directly back to Google, where OKRs were always meant to be aspirational, and 0.7 was considered the success threshold."}

{"\n"}

{"It's a reasonable convention. It's also culturally dependent, not universal, which is why I argued long time ago to "}{"abandon stretch goals"}{". In a committed-OKR culture, 100% is the target, not 70%. The team is held to the number they signed up for."}

{"\n"}

{"Some companies thrive on aspirational stretch goals. Many don't. If your culture is one where ambitious goals routinely produce 60% to 70% progress and that's considered a win, stretch OKRs are working for you. If your culture is one where missing a target signals a real problem, committed OKRs at 100% are probably the right model. The dogma is the assumption that stretch is better for everyone. It isn't."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"3. OKRs must follow a quarterly cadence"}

{"\n"}

{"Quarterly cadence is a Google convention. Spotify uses a 6-month cadence with 6-week reviews. Many organizations run on 4-month cycles. Some run on 6-week cycles."}

{"\n"}

{"OKR Coach Felipe Castro has covered this thoroughly in his guest piece on "}{"how to find the right OKR cadence"}{". His framing is that you need at least three cadences running in parallel: a strategic cadence (longer), a tactical cadence (shorter), and a review cadence. Different functions inside the same company can use different rhythms. Engineering may run on the same 6-week cycle as its sprints. Sales may run quarterly to match the commercial calendar. Strategy may run annually with a half-year refresh."}

{"\n"}

{"The dogma is \"OKRs are quarterly.\" The reality is that OKRs are "}{"cyclical"}{", and the right cycle length is whatever matches the natural rhythm of the work."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"4. Every Objective needs 3 or more Key Results"}

{"\n"}

{"The original guidance was \"an Objective should have a few Key Results, typically up to 5.\" Somewhere along the way, \"up to 5\" became \"at least 3,\" and then \"at least 3\" became \"must have 3.\""}

{"\n"}

{"In practice, 3+ is a ceiling, not a quota. We've written that the right number of OKRs is whatever your context demands, and the same goes for Key Results within an Objective. If 2 sharp Key Results capture what success looks like, adding a third manufactured one just adds noise. The team's attention is now split across three numbers instead of two, and the third one is almost certainly less meaningful than the first two."}

{"\n"}

{"We've covered this directly in "}{"how to use OKRs to measure what matters"}{": the 3 to 5 figure was always meant as a maximum, not a minimum. Some Objectives are best served by a single Key Result. Some teams in some quarters have correctly produced zero OKRs because their KPIs consumed all their time. The rule isn't \"always 3+ Key Results.\" The rule is \"however many Key Results actually measure whether the Objective succeeded.\" If that answer is one, let it be."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"5. OKRs can't be changed or cancelled mid-cycle"}

{"\n"}

{"This one is genuinely destructive. The dogma says you set your OKRs at the start of the cycle, run them for 12 weeks, and only then evaluate them. If reality changes between week 1 and week 12, you're supposed to grimly keep tracking the original goals anyway."}

{"\n"}

{"That's nonsense, and we said so directly in "}{"how to close OKRs properly"}{". If you hit an Objective in week 6, close it then. If an Objective becomes irrelevant in week 4 because the strategy shifted, kill it. If a Key Result needs to be replaced because you learned new information, replace it. The OKR system exists to keep the company focused on the right things; if the right things have changed, the OKRs need to follow."}

{"\n"}

{"The reason this dogma persists is that mid-cycle changes feel undisciplined. They aren't, if you have the discipline of explicitly closing OKRs and documenting why. Closing an OKR mid-cycle because it's irrelevant is a sign of a healthy program. Forcing the team to slog through it is a sign of a dead one."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"6. Hitting 100% progress means the bar was too low"}

{"\n"}

{"This is the 0.7 (or 70%) rule, the second-cousin of the stretch-goals dogma. It says that if you consistently hit 100% of your Key Results, your OKRs weren't ambitious enough, and you should set bolder targets next time."}

{"\n"}

{"Like the stretch goals dogma, this only makes sense in a stretch-OKR culture. In a committed-OKR culture, 1 or 100% is exactly the desired outcome. The team committed to a number, the team hit the number, the system worked. 70% progress in a committed culture isn't a feature, it's a miss."}

{"\n"}

{"This dogma is particularly destructive because it pressures teams to inflate their targets to avoid hitting them. The result is a system that punishes accuracy and rewards posturing. If your team consistently achieves 100% progress on committed OKRs that are actually moving the business, you don't have a bar-too-low problem. You have a working system."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"7. Key Results must always be quantitative metrics"}

{"\n"}

{"The Google-era guidance was that Key Results should be measurable. Over time, \"measurable\" got narrowed to \"expressed as a number,\" and now most OKR templates assume every Key Result is a metric like \"increase X from Y to Z.\""}

{"\n"}

{"In reality, Key Results come in three legitimate forms: metric-based, milestone-based, and binary. We covered each in detail in "}{"different types of Key Results and when to use them"}{". A milestone like \"Launch the new pricing by end of Q2\" or a binary goal like \"Achieve ISO 27001 certification\" can be perfectly valid Key Results when they are considered a measurement of success for the Objective."}

{"\n"}

{"The discipline isn't \"all Key Results must be metrics\" or \"all KRs must be numbers.\" What disqualifies a KR isn't its format, it's whether it actually measures the result you wanted."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"8. OKRs should be tied to compensation and performance reviews"}

{"\n"}

{"This is the single most destructive OKR dogma, and the one most likely to kill a program quietly within a year. The logic seems intuitive: if OKRs measure what matters, and people are evaluated on what matters, OKRs should be tied to comp."}

{"\n"}

{"In practice, the moment you tie OKR scores to bonuses, you create overwhelming pressure to sandbag. Employees set targets they know they can (easily) beat. The OKR conversation stops being about what the team is trying to drive and becomes a negotiation about what targets will protect each person's review."}

{"\n"}

{"We've covered this in detail in "}{"4 reasons why you shouldn't combine OKR and performance reviews"}{". Google itself explicitly separates the two. So should you. OKRs and performance reviews can coexist in the same company, but they have to live in different conversations, with different rhythms, owned by different processes."}

{"\n"}

{"If your culture has already entangled the two, untangling them is one of the most leveraged moves you can make on an OKR program. The ambition that disappeared the day you tied OKRs to comp will come back."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"9. OKRs cascade strictly top-down"}

{"\n"}

{"The dogma is that the Company Objective produces Company Key Results, each of which becomes a Department Objective, with its own Key Results that become Team Objectives, and so on down the org chart. Every layer's Key Results turn into the next layer's Objectives. The result is a clean, fully cascaded tree."}

{"\n"}

{"It's also a tree that almost nobody can actually build, because "}{"the math breaks"}{". A Company Key Result like \"increase ARR from $20M to $30M\" is also not an Objective for any single team. It's an outcome that depends on Sales, Marketing, Product, and Customer Success all doing different things in concert. Forcing one team to inherit it as their Objective just makes that team accountable for something they can't move alone."}

{"\n"}

{"The better approach is directional alignment. Teams see the Company OKRs and write their own OKRs that explicitly tie to a parent (a Strategic Pillar, a Company OKR, or a KPI). The team's OKRs are theirs to define. The alignment is on the Objective-to-parent link, not on the KR-to-Objective link."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"10. OKRs replace KPIs"}

{"\n"}

{"\"We're moving to OKRs, so we don't need our KPI dashboard anymore.\" Or its inverse: \"We have KPIs, so OKRs would be redundant.\""}

{"\n"}

{"Both miss what the two things actually are. OKRs and KPIs are not substitutes. They are complements that serve different purposes. OKRs are change goals, measuring something you want to change. KPIs are maintenance goals, for ongoing business-as-usual, measuring something you want to maintain. The car analogy from our "}{"OKRs vs KPIs article"}{" still holds: KPIs are the dashboard that tells you if the car is running well. OKRs are the GPS pointing you to a new destination."}

{"\n"}

{"You need both. A company running only on KPIs has no mechanism for driving change. A company running only on OKRs has no mechanism for keeping the engine healthy between quarters. The dogma that one replaces the other has killed more KPI dashboards (and more OKR programs) than almost any other misconception in this list."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"Why these dogmas persist"}

{"\n"}

{"The reason all 10 of these have stuck around long after the people who invented them moved on is that dogmas feel safer than judgment. Telling a leadership team \"always have 3 Key Results\" is easier than telling them \"use as many Key Results as your Objective actually needs.\" Telling a team \"stretch your goals\" is easier than telling them \"decide whether your culture is built for stretch or commitment, then act accordingly.\""}

{"\n"}

{"Dogma is what consultants sell when they don't trust their clients to think. Dogma is what frameworks default to when they're being adopted by teams that don't yet have the muscle to deviate. None of these dogmas are crazy. They were all reasonable defaults at some point. They just stopped being defaults and became rules."}

{"\n"}

{"The way out is the same as it ever was. Adopt the OKR framework, then experiment with it inside your own company. Notice which conventions actually serve you and which ones you're following out of habit. Break the ones that don't fit. The framework is robust enough to survive that. The dogma isn't."}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"How Perdoo supports flexible OKRs"}

{"\n"}

{"Perdoo is built so that none of these dogmas are baked into the product. You can have an Objective with one Key Result or with five. You can close an Objective mid-cycle when it's done or no longer relevant. You can use stretch OKRs or committed OKRs, whichever fits your culture. You can run different cadences for different teams. Your Key Results can be metric-based, milestone-based, or binary. You can track OKRs alongside your KPIs and strategy."}

{"\n"}

{"You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}67:Ted25, 10 OKR dogmas you should ignore

Henrik van der Pol

CEO at Perdoo

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here.

10 OKR dogmas you should ignore

Key Takeaway: Many of the "rules" of OKRs are not rules. They are conventions, mostly invented at Google, that hardened into dogma as the framework spread. Common dogmas to ignore include: Every team and every employee needs OKRs, Key Results must be stretch targets, OKRs can't be changed mid-cycle, and hitting 100% progress means the bar was too low. Experienced practitioners ignore these when they don't fit the company and culture. So should you.

For a better experience, continue reading on the web

When OKR first crossed over from being Google's internal management method to being a thing every other company tried to copy, a lot of useful guidance came with it. Some of that guidance is genuinely durable. Most of it isn't. We've covered the full framework in detail in the Ultimate Guide to OKR; this article is about the rules within that framework that you should feel free to ignore.

What's happened over the past decade is that a set of perfectly reasonable Google-era conventions ("our Objectives have 3 to 5 Key Results," "we score on a 0 (0%) to 1 (100%) scale where 0.7 (70%) is considered a success," "we set OKRs quarterly") got globalized into laws. Consultants taught them as rules. Books printed them as rules. Tools enforced them as rules. By the time most companies sat down to adopt OKRs, they were inheriting a body of dogma that bore little resemblance to the flexible, opinionated practice that actually existed inside Google.

This is the source of an enormous amount of OKR friction. Teams sit in their first OKR planning session and discover they "have to" produce 3 Key Results per Objective, even when 2 would be sharper. Programs collapse because the leadership team can't change a mid-cycle OKR even though the market has moved underneath them. Employees sandbag their OKRs because someone connected the scoring system to their bonus. None of these are framework problems. They're dogma problems.

The 10 OKR dogmas

Here are the 10 dogmas I see most often in customer conversations, and what to do instead. Most of these have been on Perdoo's blog in scattered form for years. This is the consolidated version.

1. Every team and every employee needs OKRs

The dogma says that for OKRs to "really work," they have to cover the whole organization down to the individual contributor. Every team needs OKRs. Every employee needs OKRs. Anyone left out is a gap in the system.

This is wrong for two reasons. First, some teams' work is captured better by KPIs than by OKRs. A team that operates entirely on maintenance metrics (a payroll team, a security operations team, a finance closing team in non-quarter-end months) may not need any OKRs in a given quarter. Forcing them to invent one only creates administrative overhead.

Second, individual OKRs are often a mistake. Most companies that adopt them discover within two cycles that the administrative weight outpaces the value. The Objectives at the individual level either duplicate the team's Objectives, fragment the team's focus, or become a backdoor performance-review mechanism. We've covered the broader version of this in how many OKRs should you have: coverage is not the goal. Clarity and accountability are the goal. Sometimes those are best served by fewer OKRs at fewer levels.

2. Key Results must always be stretch targets

Here is the rule, exactly as it gets stated: "If you hit 100% of your Key Results, your bar was too low." It traces directly back to Google, where OKRs were always meant to be aspirational, and 0.7 was considered the success threshold.

It's a reasonable convention. It's also culturally dependent, not universal, which is why I argued long time ago to abandon stretch goals. In a committed-OKR culture, 100% is the target, not 70%. The team is held to the number they signed up for.

Some companies thrive on aspirational stretch goals. Many don't. If your culture is one where ambitious goals routinely produce 60% to 70% progress and that's considered a win, stretch OKRs are working for you. If your culture is one where missing a target signals a real problem, committed OKRs at 100% are probably the right model. The dogma is the assumption that stretch is better for everyone. It isn't.

3. OKRs must follow a quarterly cadence

Quarterly cadence is a Google convention. Spotify uses a 6-month cadence with 6-week reviews. Many organizations run on 4-month cycles. Some run on 6-week cycles.

OKR Coach Felipe Castro has covered this thoroughly in his guest piece on how to find the right OKR cadence. His framing is that you need at least three cadences running in parallel: a strategic cadence (longer), a tactical cadence (shorter), and a review cadence. Different functions inside the same company can use different rhythms. Engineering may run on the same 6-week cycle as its sprints. Sales may run quarterly to match the commercial calendar. Strategy may run annually with a half-year refresh.

The dogma is "OKRs are quarterly." The reality is that OKRs are cyclical, and the right cycle length is whatever matches the natural rhythm of the work.

4. Every Objective needs 3 or more Key Results

The original guidance was "an Objective should have a few Key Results, typically up to 5." Somewhere along the way, "up to 5" became "at least 3," and then "at least 3" became "must have 3."

In practice, 3+ is a ceiling, not a quota. We've written that the right number of OKRs is whatever your context demands, and the same goes for Key Results within an Objective. If 2 sharp Key Results capture what success looks like, adding a third manufactured one just adds noise. The team's attention is now split across three numbers instead of two, and the third one is almost certainly less meaningful than the first two.

We've covered this directly in how to use OKRs to measure what matters: the 3 to 5 figure was always meant as a maximum, not a minimum. Some Objectives are best served by a single Key Result. Some teams in some quarters have correctly produced zero OKRs because their KPIs consumed all their time. The rule isn't "always 3+ Key Results." The rule is "however many Key Results actually measure whether the Objective succeeded." If that answer is one, let it be.

5. OKRs can't be changed or cancelled mid-cycle

This one is genuinely destructive. The dogma says you set your OKRs at the start of the cycle, run them for 12 weeks, and only then evaluate them. If reality changes between week 1 and week 12, you're supposed to grimly keep tracking the original goals anyway.

That's nonsense, and we said so directly in how to close OKRs properly. If you hit an Objective in week 6, close it then. If an Objective becomes irrelevant in week 4 because the strategy shifted, kill it. If a Key Result needs to be replaced because you learned new information, replace it. The OKR system exists to keep the company focused on the right things; if the right things have changed, the OKRs need to follow.

The reason this dogma persists is that mid-cycle changes feel undisciplined. They aren't, if you have the discipline of explicitly closing OKRs and documenting why. Closing an OKR mid-cycle because it's irrelevant is a sign of a healthy program. Forcing the team to slog through it is a sign of a dead one.

6. Hitting 100% progress means the bar was too low

This is the 0.7 (or 70%) rule, the second-cousin of the stretch-goals dogma. It says that if you consistently hit 100% of your Key Results, your OKRs weren't ambitious enough, and you should set bolder targets next time.

Like the stretch goals dogma, this only makes sense in a stretch-OKR culture. In a committed-OKR culture, 1 or 100% is exactly the desired outcome. The team committed to a number, the team hit the number, the system worked. 70% progress in a committed culture isn't a feature, it's a miss.

This dogma is particularly destructive because it pressures teams to inflate their targets to avoid hitting them. The result is a system that punishes accuracy and rewards posturing. If your team consistently achieves 100% progress on committed OKRs that are actually moving the business, you don't have a bar-too-low problem. You have a working system.

7. Key Results must always be quantitative metrics

The Google-era guidance was that Key Results should be measurable. Over time, "measurable" got narrowed to "expressed as a number," and now most OKR templates assume every Key Result is a metric like "increase X from Y to Z."

In reality, Key Results come in three legitimate forms: metric-based, milestone-based, and binary. We covered each in detail in different types of Key Results and when to use them. A milestone like "Launch the new pricing by end of Q2" or a binary goal like "Achieve ISO 27001 certification" can be perfectly valid Key Results when they are considered a measurement of success for the Objective.

The discipline isn't "all Key Results must be metrics" or "all KRs must be numbers." What disqualifies a KR isn't its format, it's whether it actually measures the result you wanted.

8. OKRs should be tied to compensation and performance reviews

This is the single most destructive OKR dogma, and the one most likely to kill a program quietly within a year. The logic seems intuitive: if OKRs measure what matters, and people are evaluated on what matters, OKRs should be tied to comp.

In practice, the moment you tie OKR scores to bonuses, you create overwhelming pressure to sandbag. Employees set targets they know they can (easily) beat. The OKR conversation stops being about what the team is trying to drive and becomes a negotiation about what targets will protect each person's review.

We've covered this in detail in 4 reasons why you shouldn't combine OKR and performance reviews. Google itself explicitly separates the two. So should you. OKRs and performance reviews can coexist in the same company, but they have to live in different conversations, with different rhythms, owned by different processes.

If your culture has already entangled the two, untangling them is one of the most leveraged moves you can make on an OKR program. The ambition that disappeared the day you tied OKRs to comp will come back.

9. OKRs cascade strictly top-down

The dogma is that the Company Objective produces Company Key Results, each of which becomes a Department Objective, with its own Key Results that become Team Objectives, and so on down the org chart. Every layer's Key Results turn into the next layer's Objectives. The result is a clean, fully cascaded tree.

It's also a tree that almost nobody can actually build, because the math breaks. A Company Key Result like "increase ARR from $20M to $30M" is also not an Objective for any single team. It's an outcome that depends on Sales, Marketing, Product, and Customer Success all doing different things in concert. Forcing one team to inherit it as their Objective just makes that team accountable for something they can't move alone.

The better approach is directional alignment. Teams see the Company OKRs and write their own OKRs that explicitly tie to a parent (a Strategic Pillar, a Company OKR, or a KPI). The team's OKRs are theirs to define. The alignment is on the Objective-to-parent link, not on the KR-to-Objective link.

10. OKRs replace KPIs

"We're moving to OKRs, so we don't need our KPI dashboard anymore." Or its inverse: "We have KPIs, so OKRs would be redundant."

Both miss what the two things actually are. OKRs and KPIs are not substitutes. They are complements that serve different purposes. OKRs are change goals, measuring something you want to change. KPIs are maintenance goals, for ongoing business-as-usual, measuring something you want to maintain. The car analogy from our OKRs vs KPIs article still holds: KPIs are the dashboard that tells you if the car is running well. OKRs are the GPS pointing you to a new destination.

You need both. A company running only on KPIs has no mechanism for driving change. A company running only on OKRs has no mechanism for keeping the engine healthy between quarters. The dogma that one replaces the other has killed more KPI dashboards (and more OKR programs) than almost any other misconception in this list.

Why these dogmas persist

The reason all 10 of these have stuck around long after the people who invented them moved on is that dogmas feel safer than judgment. Telling a leadership team "always have 3 Key Results" is easier than telling them "use as many Key Results as your Objective actually needs." Telling a team "stretch your goals" is easier than telling them "decide whether your culture is built for stretch or commitment, then act accordingly."

Dogma is what consultants sell when they don't trust their clients to think. Dogma is what frameworks default to when they're being adopted by teams that don't yet have the muscle to deviate. None of these dogmas are crazy. They were all reasonable defaults at some point. They just stopped being defaults and became rules.

The way out is the same as it ever was. Adopt the OKR framework, then experiment with it inside your own company. Notice which conventions actually serve you and which ones you're following out of habit. Break the ones that don't fit. The framework is robust enough to survive that. The dogma isn't.

How Perdoo supports flexible OKRs

Perdoo is built so that none of these dogmas are baked into the product. You can have an Objective with one Key Result or with five. You can close an Objective mid-cycle when it's done or no longer relevant. You can use stretch OKRs or committed OKRs, whichever fits your culture. You can run different cadences for different teams. Your Key Results can be metric-based, milestone-based, or binary. You can track OKRs alongside your KPIs and strategy.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Perdoo's newsletter.

68:T27c6,{"\n "}{"\n "}{"\n "}{"\n "}{"\n "}{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n\n "}{"\n "} Perdoo logo

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "} Perdoo logo

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"We'll delete your inactive Perdoo account soon"}

{"\n"}

{"Hi John,"}

{"\n"}

{"It’s been three months since you used your free "}{"Test Company"}{" Perdoo account, which means it’s now considered inactive."}

{"\n"}

{"Nobody wants old, unused accounts hanging around online. So 30 days from now on July 29, we’ll automatically delete your account for you."}

{"\n"}

{"If you’d like to "}{"keep your account"}{", great! "}{"Just log in to your account"}{" before July 29 to reactivate it."}

{"\n"}

{"Want to "}{"delete"}{" your account immediately? "}{"Let us know here"}{"."}

{"\n"}

{"Interested to hear "}{"what's new in Perdoo"}{"? Reply to this email and we'll share the highlights!"}

{"\n"}

{"If you have any questions, or need help of any kind, just reply to this email."}

{"\n"}

{"Thanks,\n "}
{"Your Perdoo Team"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"Don’t want to receive emails like these? Change your Notification Settings "}{"here."}

{"\n "}

{"\n Perdoo GmbH\n "}
{"c/o m1crooffice, Wandsbeker Chaussee 212-214\n "}
{"22089 Hamburg \n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n\n\n\n"}{"\n"}69:T2414,

We'll delete your inactive Perdoo account soon

Hi John,

It’s been three months since you used your free Test Company Perdoo account, which means it’s now considered inactive.

Nobody wants old, unused accounts hanging around online. So 30 days from now on July 29, we’ll automatically delete your account for you.

If you’d like to keep your account, great! Just log in to your account before July 29 to reactivate it.

Want to delete your account immediately? Let us know here.

Interested to hear what's new in Perdoo? Reply to this email and we'll share the highlights!

If you have any questions, or need help of any kind, just reply to this email.

Thanks,
Your Perdoo Team

Don’t want to receive emails like these? Change your Notification Settings here.

Perdoo GmbH
c/o m1crooffice, Wandsbeker Chaussee 212-214
22089 Hamburg

6a:T135eb,{"\n"}{"\n "}{"Perdoo Product Update ❤️"}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n \n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n "}

{"\n "}{"\n\n "}

{"\n\n \n\n"}{"\n "}{"\n\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}{"\n"}

{"\n\n "}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"Hi John, 👋"}

{"\n"}

{"We're still working on a major update that is scheduled for release this quarter, which will improve performance and unlock many new possibilities."}

{"\n"}

{"In the meantime, we did release a series of improvements."}

{"\n"}

{"Continue reading to see what's new!"}
{" "}

{"\n"}

{"New Teams app!"}

{"\n"}

{"The entire Perdoo app is now available inside your Teams environment! Installing it is simple, but it does require IT admin rights for Microsoft Teams."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"Newly designed mobile app"}

{"\n"}

{"Our new mobile apps for iOS and Android deliver a faster, consistent experience across all goal types:"}

{"\n"}

{"Real-time updates:"}{" All data now syncs instantly, so you always have the latest info at your fingertips."}

{"\n"}

{"Expanded goal support:"}{" View and manage all goal types, incl. KPIs. "}

{"\n"}

{"Full language support:"}{" The mobile app now supports all languages available in the web app."}

{"\n"}

{"Enhanced meetings experience:"}{" Edit existing Talking points and Action items directly from the app."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"Explore: Full goal name and Strategic Pillar description"}

{"\n"}

{"Hover over a goal or Strategic Pillar to see its full name and/or description."}

{"\n"}

{"Improved AI Assistant"}

{"\n"}

{"We've improved the AI Assistant so it's less overwhelming, generates better results, and we gave Premium accounts more tokens!"}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{""}

{"\n"}

{"Add Explore Saved views as a widget in Custom Dashboards"}

{"\n"}

{"Easily display any Saved view from Explore as a widget on a Custom dashboard, so you can instantly see or evaluate performance."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"Better import options"}

{"\n"}

{"We've streamlined the different options for importing goals and improved the CSV import experience."}

{"\n"}

{"You now have a more flexible template and clearer guidance, so importing your goals is much faster and easier. "}

{"\n"}

{"Check out our Release Notes →"}

{"\n"}

{""}

{"\n"}

{"\"Easy-to-use, highly customizable,"}
{"and with a clear Goal Tree view\""}

{"\n"}

{"\"It’s very easy to use while still offering all the functionality we need to manage our OKRs effectively.\""}

{"\n"}

{"\"The platform is highly customizable, allowing us to adapt it to our processes rather than changing our processes to fit the tool.\""}

{"\n"}

{"Operations Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)"}

{"\n"}

{"Read full review →"}

{"\n"}

{"AI Chat: "}{"Chat with our AI Assistant from within the app."}
{""}{"Vince (our always-on AI Coach) can not access the data in your Perdoo account, but our new AI Chat Assistant can!"}

{"\n"}

{"New goal tracking capabilities"}

{"\n"}

{"Initiatives for KPIs."}
{"Owner/Teams for Key Results and Initiatives."}
{"Align Strategic Pillars to each other."}

{"\n"}

{"Improvements for Explore's new Map view"}

{"\n"}

{"More Structure: Your Ultimate Goal will be displayed at the top, then Strategic Pillars, and then KPIs and OKRs."}
{"New Capabilities:"}
{"- Reorder Strategic Pillars."}
{"- Filter out unaligned goals."}

{"\n"}

{"Other"}

{"\n"}

{"Looker integration."}
{"Google Analytics integration."}

{"\n"}

{"\n"}

{"If you don’t want to receive emails like this, "}{"unsubscribe"}{" from this list."}

{"\n"}

{"\n "}

{"\n"}

{"\n\n\n"}{"\n\n"}{"\n\n"}6b:T112c8, Perdoo Product Update ❤️

Hi John, 👋

We're still working on a major update that is scheduled for release this quarter, which will improve performance and unlock many new possibilities.

In the meantime, we did release a series of improvements.

Continue reading to see what's new!

New Teams app!

The entire Perdoo app is now available inside your Teams environment! Installing it is simple, but it does require IT admin rights for Microsoft Teams.

Newly designed mobile app

Our new mobile apps for iOS and Android deliver a faster, consistent experience across all goal types:

Real-time updates: All data now syncs instantly, so you always have the latest info at your fingertips.

Expanded goal support: View and manage all goal types, incl. KPIs.

Full language support: The mobile app now supports all languages available in the web app.

Enhanced meetings experience: Edit existing Talking points and Action items directly from the app.

Explore: Full goal name and Strategic Pillar description

Hover over a goal or Strategic Pillar to see its full name and/or description.

Improved AI Assistant

We've improved the AI Assistant so it's less overwhelming, generates better results, and we gave Premium accounts more tokens!

Add Explore Saved views as a widget in Custom Dashboards

Easily display any Saved view from Explore as a widget on a Custom dashboard, so you can instantly see or evaluate performance.

Better import options

We've streamlined the different options for importing goals and improved the CSV import experience.

You now have a more flexible template and clearer guidance, so importing your goals is much faster and easier.

Never let a signup go cold again.