OKR Check-In Templates · 7 min read

OKR Check-In Templates: The Master Guide and the 5 Questions That Work Anywhere

I've run OKRs for about a decade, across teams of four and teams of forty. The thing nobody tells you is that the OKR you write in week one barely matters. What matters is the check-in. That's the engine. This is the master guide to the whole series, the one template I'd hand any team on day one, and the five questions I keep coming back to no matter who's in the room.

By Max Bondarenko · Last updated June 2026

The template, up front

I'm not going to bury it. Here's the template I've handed every team I've run, and it fits a weekly, a monthly, or a per-team variant with almost no edits. Five questions. You answer them per key result, you keep it short, and you do it on a schedule you don't skip. That's the whole thing. Everything else in this guide is me explaining why each piece earns its place, because if you don't understand why a question is there you'll quietly drop it, and the format falls apart in about three weeks.

Why each question is there

Question one forces a number against a pace, not a vibe. "Going well" is not an answer. "We're at 24% against a 30% target for this point in the quarter" is. The pacing piece is what people skip, and it's the most important half. A KR can be climbing and still be behind if it needed to climb faster. I want the gap visible every single week, not discovered in the last fortnight.

Questions three and four are the real work, and they're tiny on purpose. One cause, one next action. If you can't name what moved the number, you're not running the KR, you're watching it. And the next action has to be one thing, because a check-in that produces a list of twelve to-dos produces zero of them. I'd rather have one committed action per KR than a beautiful plan nobody owns.

Question five is the one most teams are scared of, and it's the one that saves quarters. It asks: is the target wrong? Here's the aside. A team I ran set a KR to move activation from a baseline of 22% to a target of 40% in a quarter. By week four we could see the ceiling was somewhere around 30% no matter what we threw at it, because the bottleneck was upstream of us. We revised the target down to 32% in week four instead of pretending until week twelve and then writing a sad retro. Revising a wrong target early isn't failure, it's the system working. The teams that won't touch a target until the quarter ends are the ones who learn nothing until it's too late to act.

How to score it without lying to yourself

Scoring is a status word, not a percentage to three decimals. I use three states and one action attached to each, because a status with no action is just a feeling. The colour isn't the point. The action you take because of the colour is the point. Force the pick every check-in, no "amber-ish," no hedging.

How to actually run it

Async by default. Everyone fills the five questions in writing before any meeting, owner by owner, KR by KR. The writing is where the thinking happens. If you only ever say it out loud in a room, you get confident nonsense; if you have to type "24% against a 30% pace toward a 40% target," you can't fudge it. Most weeks the written check-in is the whole ceremony and there's no meeting at all.

When you do meet, keep it to the owners of the OKRs plus whoever can unblock them, no audience. Fifteen to thirty minutes, and you only talk about the "behind" and "at risk" lines. On track gets read silently and skipped, that's the reward for being on track. Skip the live meeting entirely in any week where nothing is at risk and no decision is needed. Cadence is where this lives or dies: weekly for fast-moving execution teams, monthly for slower strategic or leadership OKRs. The per-team variants in this series tweak the rhythm and the wording, but the five questions underneath never change.