Company-wide OKRs · 10 min read
Three Company OKRs, Not Thirty: The Numbers Every Team Lines Up Behind
I've run OKRs at the company level for about a decade, and the version that works looks nothing like the version most people draft. I've watched leadership teams turn the annual planning offsite into a coverage exercise, where every department gets its own objective so nobody feels left out. That's not strategy. That's a seating chart. Here's how I'd actually set company OKRs, with real numbers and the check-in I'd hold them to.
By Max Bondarenko · Last updated June 2026
If the whole company can't recite all of them, you have too many
The trap at the company level is coverage. Someone in the room argues that if marketing has an objective, sales needs one too, and then finance wants theirs, and suddenly the deck has eleven objectives and forty key results. Everyone nods. Nobody can name three of them a week later. I've sat in those reviews. They're theater.
My rule: three company objectives, max. Four if I'm feeling generous and one of them is purely defensive. Every team in the building should be able to point at how their work moves one of those three numbers. Alignment beats coverage every single time. A company OKR isn't a place to list everything you're doing; it's the short answer to 'what are we actually betting the quarter on.'
Growth
This is the top-line bet. At the company level I don't care about leads or pipeline stages here. I care about the number the board reads first.
Prove we can grow revenue fast enough to earn the next stage of the company.
KR1Grow ARR from $4.2M to $7M
KR2Lift net new ARR added per quarter from roughly $480K to $900K
KR3Cut average sales cycle from 71 days to 52 days
The ARR target is the headline, but it's the second KR that keeps it honest. A single annual number lets a team coast for three quarters and panic in the fourth. Pace it. The sales-cycle KR is there because growth that comes only from working leads harder isn't repeatable; growth that comes from closing faster is. I'd push back hard if someone tried to hit the ARR number purely by discounting.
Retention and customer
Growth without retention is a bucket with a hole in it. At the company level the single best customer number is net revenue retention, because it folds churn, downgrades, and expansion into one honest figure.
Turn our existing customers into the engine that grows the company, not just the thing we defend.
KR1Raise net revenue retention from 106% to 120%
KR2Bring logo churn down from 2.4% monthly to 1.3% monthly
KR3Increase the share of accounts with an executive sponsor from 31% to 55%
NRR above 120% means your existing base alone would grow the company even if you stopped acquiring. That's the bar I hold this to. The executive-sponsor KR looks soft, but I've never seen an account with a real sponsor churn quietly. They leave loud, with warning, and you can save them. The teams I've run that ignored this lost their biggest accounts to silence.
Product
The company-level product objective is almost never about shipping features. It's about whether people who sign up actually get to value. Activation is the number that decides whether your growth and retention objectives are even possible.
Make sure the people who try us actually reach the moment the product is worth paying for.
KR1Move activation from 38% to 60% of new accounts reaching first value within 14 days
KR2Reduce median time-to-first-value from 9 days to 3 days
KR3Raise week-4 retention of activated users from 54% to 70%
Activation is the most underrated company OKR there is. I've watched teams pour money into the top of the funnel while 62% of signups never reached value, then wonder why payback periods were brutal. Fix activation and every other number gets cheaper. The time-to-value KR is the one I'd protect; a 60% activation rate that takes three weeks still loses people emotionally before they convert.
Financial health
This is the objective that keeps the other three from being reckless. You can buy growth, retention, and activation with cash you don't have. The financial-health OKR is the adult in the room.
Grow on terms that make the business stronger, not just bigger.
KR1Improve gross margin from 61% to 70%
KR2Reduce CAC payback from 16 months to 11 months
KR3Extend cash runway from 14 months to 22 months
Gross margin is the truest single read on whether the business model works at scale; 70% is the line where SaaS economics start behaving. I pair it with payback because a margin win that comes from underspending on the customer is a mirage. The runway KR is the one nobody wants to write down and everybody's grateful for in a bad quarter.
The logic: why these work
Every KR above passes the same test: it has a baseline, a target, and it measures an outcome, not an activity. 'Improve activation' is a wish. 'Activation from 38% to 60%' is a commitment you can be wrong about, which is the whole point. If you can't state where you are today, you don't understand the number well enough to own it. And the target has to stretch. I calibrate so a great quarter lands around 70% of the way there; if a team hits 100% on everything, they sandbagged the targets and I'll say so in the review.
Here's the scar. One year I let our leadership team set six company objectives because every function lead made a compelling case for theirs. We landed about 60% on each, which sounds fine until you realize that meant we were mediocre at six things and excellent at none. The next year I forced it down to three. We hit roughly 85% on all three and the business felt different, because the whole company was pulling the same direction instead of splitting attention six ways. Fewer objectives, hit harder, beats more objectives hit halfway. Every time.
The weekly check-in I run at the company level
Company OKRs die in the gap between the planning offsite and the end-of-quarter scramble. The fix is a short, boring, weekly rhythm where each objective owner reports confidence, not activity. I keep it to 30 minutes and I ban status updates that don't touch a number.
Five questions I ask every week
- 01For each of the three objectives, what's your confidence we hit target this quarter: green, yellow, or red, and what changed since last week?
- 02Which single KR moved the least this week, and is that a pacing problem or a real wall?
- 03Is any team doing work right now that doesn't ladder up to one of these three? If so, why?
- 04What's the one decision you need from this room today to keep your number on track?
- 05If you had to cut one of the three objectives to save the other two, which goes, and does that change how we should spend this week?
And revise targets early, not at the end. If by week three a KR is clearly mis-set, because the baseline was wrong or the market moved, I'd rather rewrite it openly in week three than let the team chase a dead number for ten more weeks. Adjusting a target with eleven weeks left is honesty. Adjusting it in the final review is just rewriting history so the slide looks green.
A company OKR template you can steal
Fill in the blanks with your own numbers. The pattern that matters is qualitative objective on top, three outcome KRs underneath, each with a baseline and a target you could be wrong about.
| Objective | A one-sentence bet for the quarter, no numbers (e.g. 'Prove we can grow revenue fast enough to earn the next stage') |
|---|---|
| KR1 (Growth) | Grow ARR from $[X]M to $[Y]M (e.g. $4.2M to $7M) |
| KR2 (Retention) | Raise net revenue retention from [X]% to [Y]% (e.g. 106% to 120%) |
| KR3 (Health) | Improve gross margin from [X]% to [Y]% (e.g. 61% to 70%) |
| Cadence | Weekly 30-min confidence check; monthly target re-test; quarterly scored review |
| Owner | One named exec per objective (not 'the leadership team'); KRs co-owned by the function closest to the number |
Company-wide OKR template
Questions people actually ask
How many company-wide OKRs should we have?
Three objectives, max, with three or four key results each. I'll allow a fourth objective only when one is purely defensive, like financial health. The test is simple: if a random person in the company can't recite your objectives from memory, you have too many, and nothing is actually aligned.
Should every department get its own company objective?
No, and this is the most common mistake I see. Company OKRs aren't a fairness exercise where each function gets a slot. They're the handful of numbers the whole business lines up behind. A department's work shows up as a KR or a contribution to one of the three objectives, not as its own headline.
What's the difference between a company OKR and a department OKR?
Company OKRs are outcomes the CEO would report to a board: ARR, net revenue retention, gross margin, activation. Department OKRs are how a single team moves one of those numbers, like a marketing pipeline target or a support response-time goal. If a department OKR doesn't ladder up to a company objective, I'd question why you're spending the quarter on it.
How do you set the right target for a company OKR?
Start from a real baseline, then set a target that stretches so a great quarter lands around 70% of the way there. If you'd bet your bonus you'll hit 100%, it's too soft. I'd rather a team hit 70% of an ambitious number, say activation moving from 38% to 60% and landing at 54%, than 100% of a number they always knew they'd clear.
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