Summary
OKRs stand for objectives and key results. This goal-setting framework pairs what you want to achieve with measurable results that show your progress. Learn how Asana and Gojek connect goals to work, how a marketing team sets its OKRs, and use a simple template to create your own.
Agreeing on a goal does not mean everyone knows what success looks like or how to measure it. Asana research found that only 16% of employees said their company set and communicated goals effectively. OKRs make those expectations more specific. They pair an objective with measurable results, so your team can track progress and adjust if results fall short. You can use OKRs toset business objectives or plan your team’s next quarter.
Learn how to transform your team’s goals into measurable outcomes with powerful OKRs. When teams can understand how their work ladders up to the organization’s overall goals, better results follow.
OKR meaning and definition
OKR stands for objectives and key results. It is a goal-setting framework that pairs a desired outcome with measurable results. The objective describes what you want to achieve; the key results tell you whether you are getting there. Teams use OKRs to prioritize work and assess progress againstspecific objectives.
What is an objective?
In the OKR framework, objectives describe qualitative goals that define what a team wants to achieve. Teams usually set objectives for a fixed period, such as a quarter or a year, to push performance beyond current results.
Objectives show what different teams might want to achieve:
- Marketing: Get more people to attend our webinars.
Marketing: Get more people to attend our webinars.
- Sales: Help more qualified prospects become customers.
Sales: Help more qualified prospects become customers.
- IT: Resolve employee technology problems faster.
IT: Resolve employee technology problems faster.
- People team: Help new hires understand their priorities sooner.
People team: Help new hires understand their priorities sooner.
- Operations: Deliver incoming requests more reliably.
Operations: Deliver incoming requests more reliably.
Objectives should reflect your company’s strategy, mission, and long-term goals. Some are commitments your team expects to meet; others are ambitious stretch goals.
What are key results?
A key result is a specific, measurable, time-bound, and verifiable outcome that shows progress toward an objective. The objective explains what you want to achieve, while key results define how you track success. Give each key result a starting value, a target, and a deadline so your team can compare the result with its original plan.
Team
Objective
Example key result
Marketing
Increase webinar attendance.
Increase live attendance from 40% to 60% of sign-ups across the three-webinar series by December 31.
Sales
Help more qualified prospects become customers.
Increase the share of qualified leads that become customers from 20% to 27% by December 31.
Resolve employee technology problems faster.
Reduce the median time to resolve employee help tickets from three business days to one by December 31.
People team
Help new hires understand their priorities sooner.
Increase the share of new hires who say they understand their priorities after 30 days from 65% to 85% by December 31.
Operations
Deliver incoming requests more reliably.
Increase the share of requests completed by their agreed due date from 70% to 90% by December 31.
How do OKRs work?
OKRs help teams agree on a priority, decide how to measure progress, and choose work that can influence the result. TheOKR framework follows a simple formula:
- I will [objective] as measured by [key result].
I will [objective] as measured by [key result].
Here’s how three teams could use that OKR formula and determine tasks that might help them reach each result.
Team
Objective
Key result
Work needed to reach the goal
Customer support
Help customers get answers without being transferred.
Increase the share of cases resolved on first contact from 58% to 75% by December 31.
Improve the request form and give agents access to relevant customer history.
Product
Help new users complete their first project.
Increase the share of new users who complete a project within 14 days from 42% to 60% by December 31.
Test shorter setup instructions and a guided first-project flow.
Finance
Make monthly reports available sooner.
Reduce the median time between month-end and delivery of the report from eight business days to four by December 31.
Standardize data requests and set earlier review deadlines.
The objective names the change each team wants to make, and the key result sets a measurable target for that change. Together, they form the OKR. The final column shows the work each team plans to do to help meet its target.
Weak OKRs and how to improve them
You can spot a bad OKR when the objective is vague, the key results lack measurable targets, or the key results describe tasks rather than outcomes. Here are three weaker versions of the examples above:
Weak OKR
What’s missing
Stronger version
Objective: Make support better.
Key result: Improve customer experience.
The objective is broad, and the key result has no measure or target.
Objective: Help customers get answers without being transferred.
Key result: Increase first-contact resolution from 58% to 75% by December 31.
Objective: Help new users complete their first project.
Key result: Launch a guided setup flow.
Launching the flow is work the product team can do. It does not measure whether more users complete a project.
Key result: Increase the share of new users who complete a project within 14 days from 42% to 60% by December 31. Keep the setup flow in the work plan.
Objective: Make monthly reports available sooner.
Key result: Deliver reports faster.
The direction is useful, but the team has no starting value, target, or deadline.
Key result: Reduce the median time from month-end to report delivery from eight business days to four by December 31.
How Asana helps teams make OKRs more consistent
Asana uses OKRs to connect company priorities with team goals and key results. Employees can see company, team, and individual goals in Asana, along with the projects and tasks assigned to them. Goal owners share progress updates so teams can follow the work after the initial planning session.
However, teams can agree on an objective and still describe success differently. One team might list deliverables, while another sets a target without explaining how they'll measure it.
Asana describes using templates to show teams what information to include in their objectives and key results. By setting the format and required details in advance, Asana gives teams a consistent starting point without having one person design every goal.
Consistency matters after you write a goal, too.Asana’s Work Innovation Lab found that executives were 2.5 times as likely as non-executives to update goal status in Asana. Give each key result an owner and agree on when to review its current value, so everyone knows how to report progress.
“Your goal management needs to help you make good decisions, fast. You need to have built-in flexibility to pivot quickly when circumstances change, or when you run into roadblocks,” says Lotte Vester, Asana’s former Head of Organizational Strategy.
You can apply the same approach with your OKRs: agree on the information every goal needs before teams start writing them. The simple template later in this article offers a starting point you can adapt.
Watch how Asana uses work management to set and design goals.
How to create and track OKRs in Asana
Let’s follow a marketing team planning three webinars in Q4 2026. The team wants more people to sign up and attend, while making sure the sessions are useful. The team will review the first webinar, adjust the next two, and assess the full series by December 31. All names and figures in this example are illustrative.
1. Set up the objective and key results
Maya Chen owns the objective “Get more people to attend our webinars.” The team uses its previous three comparable webinars as the baseline and agrees on these targets for the new series:
Key result and owner
Baseline
Target by December 31
Average sign-ups per webinar: Maya Chen
200
300
Live attendance as a share of sign-ups: Jon Bell
40%
60%
Average usefulness rating: Priya Shah
3.5 out of 5
4.5 out of 5
The owners agree on how to measure each result before launching the series:
- Maya uses the registration report to calculate average sign-ups across the three webinars, counting each person once per webinar.
Maya uses the registration report to calculate average sign-ups across the three webinars, counting each person once per webinar.
- Jon divides total live attendances by total sign-ups across the series. He counts each person once per webinar and excludes recording views.
Jon divides total live attendances by total sign-ups across the series. He counts each person once per webinar and excludes recording views.
- Priya asks attendees “How useful was this webinar?” on the same 1–5 scale after every session. Each survey closes seven days after its webinar, with the final session held by December 24. She records the response count and rate alongside the average rating.
Priya asks attendees “How useful was this webinar?” on the same 1–5 scale after every session. Each survey closes seven days after its webinar, with the final session held by December 24. She records the response count and rate alongside the average rating.
In Asana Goals, create the objective as a parent goal and add the three key results as subgoals, each with its owner and December 31 deadline. Add Marketing webinar series under Related work so the team can find the promotional tasks and session plans.
Each owner updates their key result in Asana using the latest registration, attendance, or survey report.
2. Review progress and decide what to change
After the first webinar, 300 people have signed up, and 135 have attended live. That is a 45% attendance rate, below the 60% target.
Jon enters 45% from the attendance report and marks the key result as At risk in Asana. In his OKR status update, he records the sign-up and attendance counts, explains the shortfall, and links the next action to the webinar project.
The team reviews the reminder schedule and session timeline. Jon takes responsibility for testing a reminder before webinar 2, with the task due before that session. The team keeps the original target and checks attendance again after each remaining webinar.
3. Review final results and plan the next cycle
At quarter-end, Maya reviews the full series with Jon and Priya. They use the same counting rules and seven-day survey windows they agreed on at the start.
Measure
Baseline
Target
Final result
Average sign-ups per webinar
200
300
320: met
Live attendance
40%
60%
55%: missed
Average usefulness rating
3.5 out of 5
4.5 out of 5
4.6 out of 5: met
The series attracted 960 sign-ups and 528 live attendees. Priya received 330 survey responses, a 62.5% response rate among live attendees. The 4.6 rating reflects feedback from respondents, not everyone who registered.
Sign-ups and usefulness met their targets, but attendance fell short by 5 percentage points. Jon records the final attendance value and the missed target; Maya closes the overall objective as Partial and summarizes the results in Asana.
For the next series, Jon will ask registrants who missed the live sessions what prevented them from joining. The attendance rate improved, but the team cannot yet tell whether the reminder made the difference. They’ll use the feedback to choose their next test.
That’s how teams use Asana for OKRs: record the key result, document what they learned, and connect the next action to the objective.
A simple OKR template
Copy this table into a document or spreadsheet and adapt it for your team. These fields are a starting point for recording the goal, the work behind it, and what happens at each review.
Field
Fill in
Objective
What do you want to change, and why does it matter?
Owner and deadline
Who owns the objective, and when will you assess it?
Key result (repeat as needed)
Change [measure] from [baseline] to [target] by [date].
Supporting work
Which projects or tasks will help achieve the result?
Progress check-in
Record the current value, any blockers, and the next action.
Final result
Compare the outcome with the target and note what you learned.
Ready to put this into practice? Start with Asana’s OKR project template. Use the template to draft your team’s OKRs, or use Asana Goals to connect goals across teams as shown above.
Create an OKR template
How Gojek, Joyn, and Interactive use Asana for OKRs
Customer teams use Asana to connect goals with their work in different ways. Gojek shows an established OKR workflow, Joyn shows how it adapted its goal-setting process with Asana, and Interactive shows how faster reporting supports its plans to introduce OKRs.
Gojek: Public OKRs, projects, and milestones
At Gojek, leaders track company OKRs on a board visible to everyone. Teams use those priorities to set their own OKRs, then use a template to turn each key result into a project with milestones and tasks.
That connection helps teams translate a company priority into the work they need to do. Leaders use portfolios to follow the key results and projects that matter to them, while project owners share regular status updates explaining progress and risks. Gojek reports that keeping OKRs visible also helped teams stay aligned during an internal restructuring.
By using Asana to coordinate work, Gojek estimates it saves 3,486 workdays a year. That is a companywide coordination saving, not a measure of how many OKRs it achieved.
Joyn: Reduced goal management by 60%
Joyn found that its traditional OKR format produced vague objectives and required teams to spend too much time searching for three to five suitable results. They moved to a more flexible process in Asana, connecting company goals with team goals and using relevant KPIs, milestones, or deliverables to measure progress.
Joyn reports that this approach reduced goal-management time for team leads by 60%. This experience is why they choose metrics that help a team make decisions, rather than forcing every goal into the same format.
Interactive: Saving time on weekly reporting
Interactive’s cloud business operations team brought project information into Asana so colleagues could see progress without relying on spreadsheets with a single owner. Its customer story illustrates how Asana’s AI reporting features save project managers one to two hours each week on reporting.
The story describes using Asana Goals for OKRs as a planned next step. The reported saving comes from the reporting workflow already in place.
What types of OKRs do teams use?
Three commontypes of OKRs are committed, aspirational, and learning OKRs. Choose a type based on what you expect to achieve and how much uncertainty the work involves.
- Committed OKRs are business goals your team expects to achieve in full. Use them when you can commit resources and agree on a realistic target, such as moving all customers to a new domain by year-end without losing access.
Committed OKRs are business goals your team expects to achieve in full. Use them when you can commit resources and agree on a realistic target, such as moving all customers to a new domain by year-end without losing access.
- Aspirational OKRs set ambitious moonshot goals that push teams beyond current performance and allow room for partial achievement. For example, a team might aim to double the reach of a successful webinar series while testing new ways to attract attendees.
Aspirational OKRs set ambitious moonshot goals that push teams beyond current performance and allow room for partial achievement. For example, a team might aim to double the reach of a successful webinar series while testing new ways to attract attendees.
- Learning OKRs support exploration when you need evidence before choosing a larger target. For example, a marketing team could test three webinar topics with its intended audience and identify which one receives the highest usefulness rating. Use the findings to decide what to invest in next.
Learning OKRs support exploration when you need evidence before choosing a larger target. For example, a marketing team could test three webinar topics with its intended audience and identify which one receives the highest usefulness rating. Use the findings to decide what to invest in next.
Company and team OKRs describe whose priorities the goals represent. Either level can use any of these types, and teams can help shape goals through a mix of top-down and bottom-up planning.
What are the best practices for setting OKRs?
Our marketing team’s OKR example and customer stories show why writing the objective is only part of the process. Keep these practices in place throughout the cycle:
- Limit the number of objectives. Choose the priorities your team has the time and resources to pursue.
Limit the number of objectives. Choose the priorities your team has the time and resources to pursue.
- Make key results measurable. Agree on the starting value, target, deadline, and source before tracking progress.
Make key results measurable. Agree on the starting value, target, deadline, and source before tracking progress.
- Assign key result owners. Assign each result to one person responsible for updating it and explaining changes.
Assign key result owners. Assign each result to one person responsible for updating it and explaining changes.
- Check in regularly. Review results while you still have time to adjust.
Check in regularly. Review results while you still have time to adjust.
- Connect OKRs to daily work. Keep the supporting projects and tasks visible alongside the goals they serve.
Connect OKRs to daily work. Keep the supporting projects and tasks visible alongside the goals they serve.
Bring your OKR to life
Start with one objective your team cares about. Add measurable key results, name the owners, and schedule the first review. Asana’s OKR project template gives you a place to organize that work and keep the next steps visible.
Create an OKR template
