The size or stage of the organization does not determine whether OKRs should be implemented or not. There are plenty of examples across the board where organizations in different stages and of different sizes derived immense value out of the OKR methodology. Example: Flipkart adopted OKRs when there were 1000s of employees, Curefit when 35 employees, xto10x when 3 employees.

There are primarily 5 major pitfalls that any organization needs to be wary of while implementing OKRs.

For most organisations, it’s recommended that quarterly cycles are followed. This provides more agility to iterate in case the chosen strategy needs revision.

Irrespective of the cycle duration, it’s important that annual objectives are defined keeping in mind the long-term vision of the organization. The annual objectives are further broken down into a bunch of quarterly objectives that add up to the annual objective. As part of the best practice, organizations also set up monthly milestones to keep a track of their progress on quarterly objectives.

We recommend taking a milestone-based approach and tagging these OKRs as “Solutioning” OKRs. This sets clear expectations and encourages creativity, risk-taking, and innovative thinking in the organization. Solutioning OKRs may not move a metric majorly in the current quarter but will help in identifying future levers that will impact outcome. End of quarter the only expectation is to hit the milestone that was supposed to be achieved.