18 Product OKR Examples to Kick-start Your Goal Setting
It’s that time again when you need to write your product Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for the next quarter, but we’ll bet this isn’t your favorite task as a product manager. Are we right?
But you are doing them, and so you know how important they are. You want an actionable roadmap and a healthy product trajectory, and having solid product OKRs is the way you’re going to get that.
Luckily, we can make the process less painful for you! Alongside some best practice advice on what makes a good product OKR, we’ve compiled a big ol’ bunch of product OKR examples to help you kick-start your thinking.
There is nothing worse than that initial blank page; staring at the daunting nothingness wondering where on earth you should start. So, forget the blank page and start here instead – a list of ready-made product OKR examples that you can use for inspiration, or – if all else fails – just outright steal.
Keep reading and discover:
- What are product OKRs?
- What makes a good product OKR?
- How to choose the right product OKRs for your team
- Product OKR examples for product usage
- Product OKR examples for commercials
- Product OKR examples for retention/churn
- Product OKR examples for customer satisfaction
- Product OKR examples for different product lifecycle-based stages
- Product OKR examples for velocity/productivity
And if 18 product OKR examples aren’t enough for you, we have more, covering an even wider range of possible SaaS and digital product scenarios. Get them all in our free ebook The Ultimate List of Product OKR Examples.
What are product OKRs?
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a framework used for setting and managing goals across an organization, department, or team. Product OKRs are the declaration of what a product team hopes to achieve within a certain timeframe (typically a quarter), and how they will measure whether that has been achieved.
When it comes to product management, OKRs are integral to shifting a team’s mindset from projects to goals – in other words, from outputs to outcomes.
The objective part of an OKR represents the ambition – what you want to achieve. Each objective is then kept company by a key result or three. They are the measurable metrics, coupled with a specific target, that will need to be hit if an objective is going to be celebrated as achieved. To set a product OKR is to say: “We want to achieve X, and we’ll know we’ve done it when Y happens.”
Product OKRs, when set and managed correctly, will become a product team’s guiding light when it comes to prioritizing their work and focusing their efforts. OKRs set the direction of the product strategy and establish the criteria for evaluating the possible work that could be done.
When faced with a whole bunch of product ideas and possible projects or features, it’s your product OKRs that will help you make the right decision on what makes it onto your product roadmap. When your roadmap aligns with your product OKRs – as a Now-Next-Later roadmap in ProdPad does – you’ll find yourself making product decisions based on the most important business outcomes.
In short, product OKRs are the key ingredient that will keep your product team thinking strategically – choosing and prioritizing what is being worked on based on the likelihood of impacting the objective and getting them where they need to be by the end of the quarter.
As the folks at Google say, “We also use OKRs to help people stay focused on the most important goals, and help them avoid being distracted by urgent but less important goals.” As one of the most experienced organizations when it comes to running OKRs, I think we can all agree that they’ve done alright for themselves. There might just be something in this…
What makes a good product OKR?
There is a bit of an art to writing effective product OKRs. You probably know that, since you’re here looking for some product OKR examples. Most product managers know they’re important to have, but that doesn’t make them easy to write. Like we said, it’s no one’s favorite job.
Let’s start with the general principles of what makes a good product OKR. Once you’re happy you know how to spot a good OKR, we can dive into our product OKR examples and you can decide which might work as a starting point for your own versions.
Let’s break it down….
Objectives: What goals do we want to achieve?
A great product objective is simple enough for everyone in the company to understand, but it should also be inspirational, aspirational, and – most importantly – challenging. Objectives are there to point you in the direction you want to travel and inspire you to constantly look for new ways to do exactly that.
Product objectives should also contribute towards achieving wider company-led goals, and the connection between each of these goals should be outlined in your product strategy.
Key results: How do we measure against those goals?
A great key result should be measurable, challenging, and time-bound. It should also be specific enough to ensure that everyone knows what success looks like.
Key results usually make use of one of the metrics that make up your KPIs. But it’s not enough to simply state a metric – that metric needs a target. A key result should include what you are going to measure, and the specific measurement you want to hit.
You’ll hit your key results when the chosen metric(s) reach the target: that’s the outcome that you’ll use to determine if your OKR has been successful or not.
Good product OKRs are:
- Aligned
The whole team should agree with the objectives you’re setting – and should agree that they’re for the good of the product in general. - Defined
Don’t be vague: set some iron-clad win conditions everyone understands – and can work towards with confidence. - Measurable
What separates an OKR from any old aim is that you can objectively say you’ve achieved it, with measurements as a yardstick. - High-reaching
Keep some of your OKRs grounded, but shoot for the stars with others. If you 100% everything, your goals were too grounded.
It’s also worth remembering that:
Product OKRs should ladder up to something big
Great OKRs cascade. Together, all your OKRs should work together to tell a story of where you want the product to go, and what you want it to achieve. You’ll get there by tracking major and minor OKRs – the small ones ladder up to the big ones, and the big ones ladder up to that one massive dream you have for your product.
Product OKRs are team-wide
Individuals can have OKRs, but when you’re dealing with product development, setting goals on that granular level is only going to result in siloed teams working in the dark. OKRs should be transparent, and form a core part of your overall product roadmap – a roadmap that everyone’s working on together.
Product OKRs are learning opportunities
OKRs should be set and reviewed as frequently as is relevant for each one. And when we say ‘reviewed’, we mean it. If you fail to hit an OKR in your given timeframe, the worst thing you can do is delete it from your roadmap and move on. Instead, run an autopsy. Figure out what went wrong, what your teams learned, and how those learnings can help shape future OKRs.
Choosing the right OKRs for your product
What works for Google, wouldn’t work for a brand-new startup, and vice versa. The appropriate product OKRs will vary for different products and teams, depending on a bunch of factors. You need to ensure you pick OKRs that are relevant to you.
It’s worth asking yourself the following questions:
- What stage is your business at?
- What lifecycle stage is your product in?
- What does your market look like?
You’ll want to consider the stage your company is at. Are you starting up, going for expansion, looking to diversify, or about to IPO? Businesses will often have very different objectives at different stages of their life.
At one stage revenue growth might be the most important company-level objective, at another time in a company’s life profitability could be the priority. Those business goals will have a significant impact on which product OKRs are right for you.
You’ll also want to think about the lifecycle stage of your product – again, that will impact the OKRs that will make sense. Are you launching your product? Are you trying to build a customer base from scratch? Do you have a large customer base that you need to invigorate?
And what are the market conditions you’re operating in? What does the competitive landscape look like and how are your consumers behaving?
With these considerations in mind, for each of our product OKR examples, we’ve mapped out a scenario for which the OKR would work. This way, you can see if you recognize your own circumstances in any of our examples and you’ll have an idea of which product OKR examples are worth pulling out for your own use.
The Product OKR examples
OK, here’s what you’ve been waiting for – 18 product OKR examples to pick and choose from to help you get your strategy planning off the ground.
We’ve split the OKR examples into different types, so depending on your overall strategy, you can easily find the examples that are most relevant to you.
But before we dive in, we do need to lay down one caveat.
Here’s the thing: some of the examples we’ve given here include Key Results that could arguably be bordering on Initiatives or projects – things to do, rather than metric-based goals.
That’s because we want to give you as clear an idea as possible of the kind of things that you should be considering for each type of OKR. Hinting at some of the actions around each OKR is our way of really painting that full picture – and helping you get the most value out of our examples.
Key result best practice should usually be metric-focused, measurable goals that will indicate whether or not you’ve achieved your objective. Then the Initiatives you put on your roadmap under each OKR are the things you’re planning to try in order to hit those targets.
So, when you take these OKRs and adapt them for your own use, you might find you want to shift some of the KRs we’ve listed here to become Initiatives, and have the more metric-based KRs as part of your OKRs. We’ll leave that up to you.
Product OKR examples for product usage
Digging into the nuts and bolts of your product usage can help you identify a load of key areas for improvement. Are daily logins declining? Are some features going untouched? Are there UI and UX elements that people aren’t gelling with?
Product usage OKRs are super important because, in the process of setting them, you’ll better understand the role your product plays in your customers’ lives – and push its usefulness in the right direction over time.
Example 1:
Context: This company has managed to grow a decent-sized customer base, but they’re starting to see more churn as companies are now canceling their subscriptions at a pretty high rate. The data shows a drop in the number of users per customer account regularly using the product day-in, day-out. So the question becomes: what can they do to turn the tide here?
Objective: Supercharge product use
Key Results:
- Launch a regular customer email to showcase new and underused features every week for the next 6 months, achieving at least 40% open rate and 20% click-through rate
- Introduce a gamification device within the next month to encourage users to log in and use the product daily – to increase Daily Active Users (DAU) by 20% in 3 months
- Increase the average daily usage time per user by 15% in 3 months
Example 2:
Context: These guys have a monster user base, but they’re not seeing as much new feature uptake as they’d like. Maybe their users aren’t in the product frequently enough, or maybe they’re not communicating that new stuff clearly? Either way, they’re keen to see future new releases land with a little more success.
Objective: Release new features people clamor for
Key Results:
- Increase customer engagement with release notes by 30% in 3 months
- Add in-app flags to highlight all new features, and achieve a click-through rate of 10%
- Increase new feature adoption rate for returning users from 36% to 90%
Example 3:
Context: The customer success team at this B2B software company has reported that a bunch of its customers are now using another couple of tools alongside theirs to get the job done. Naturally, there’s a growing worry that customers will start relying more on those other products. So what can we do to keep those customers using the product as much as possible?
Objective: Become the most valuable tool our customers use to do ALL of their job
Key Results:
- Conduct 50 customer interviews, discover the jobs they’re trying to do and what tools they currently use for each – and identify gaps
- Launch two new features in the next 3 months to keep users in our product for longer
- Increase average session time across the user base by 40% in 6 months
- See a 30% increase in daily active users (DAU) over 3 months
Product OKR examples for commercials
Let’s talk numbers; it’s business-hat-wearing time. Improving or maintaining your product profitability means setting commercial or revenue-based OKRs that are designed to make that big red line go up.
When setting commercial OKRs you’re going to be lasered in on metrics that speak to revenue and profit
– so that’s monthly recurring revenue (MMR), annual recurring revenue (ARR), or general revenue based on customer acquisition or expansion. But that doesn’t mean losing sight of usability and removing pain points; these are the measures that tend to have the biggest impact on conversion rates, after all.
Example 4:
Context: This company has a really strong customer base but a whole bunch of them are still on legacy price plans that don’t reflect the new (higher) subscription price that new customers pay. The goal, then, is to move as many of them as possible over to the new pricing without massive fallout.
Objective: Kill our legacy pricing, softly
Key Results:
- Create an education program to show legacy customers the features they’re missing out on
- Convert 60% of customers on legacy plans to new plans, increasing revenue by $500 per account
- Keep churn of legacy customers below 3% for the year
Example 5:
Context: With a cost per acquisition (CPA) for new customers higher than its marketing budget can cover, this company needs to boost the revenue they get from each and every existing customer, or it’ll find itself in hot water. That’s going to spell bad news for their projected annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth.
Objective: Make something worth upgrading for
Key Results:
- Complete development and QA of a new (tiered) feature within 8 weeks
- Achieve 90% feature adoption among existing users within 3 months of launch
- Generate $50,000 in additional monthly recurring revenue within 6 months
Example 6:
Context: This company’s website gets a boatload of traffic from various channels and the product has a core user base that really loves it . But something’s amiss: all that traffic isn’t converting to a trial at anywhere near the industry standard rate of 5-15% . Instead, it’s converting at a monthly average of just 1 .5% . It’s time to investigate ways to make those initial interactions much stickier.
Objective: Convert everyone who starts a trial
Key Results:
- Review the entire trial onboarding flow to decrease the Time to Value (TTV) to <10 minutes
- Review 12 months of trials to see where people stop engaging
- Test 3 new ways to re-engage people during their trial, and user test them
- Increase trial to paid conversion by 10% in 6 months
Product OKR examples for retention/churn
Retention or churn-based OKRs can be used to build on the things that make your product useful over the long term. When your customer churn rate is lower than your customer acquisition rate, you’ll be growing your user base.
The best way to do that is to drill into the potential causes of churn and work to eradicate them, all while testing out initiatives that promote long-term use.
Example 7:
Context: This company has a leaky funnel, they’re really good at getting people in and using their product but their renewal rate is worryingly low. They’ve decided to try to dig into customer behavior to see if they can reduce churn.
Objective: Make renewing a no-brainer
Key Results:
- Interview 100 ex-customers who didn’t renew their subscription, find out the common reasons why, and put a plan in place to mitigate against them
- Be comprehensively competitive with the features and pricing of our core competitors in 6 months
- Increase customer retention by 20% in 3 months
- Introduce a renewal incentive for Account Managers to leverage
- Within 2 months, increase NPS scores to at least 8 for 80% of customers with renewal dates in the next 6 months
Example 8:
Context: This company has three enterprise-level pricing bands. Its most popular is the middle price ($599 a month), but that’s also the one that churns at the highest rate. It’s competitively priced against other players in the same space, so the goal is to do whatever they can to make that tier work harder when it comes to retention.
Objective: Create the sector’s stickiest price plan
Key Results:
- Interview 50 customers on each pricing band and understand their product usage to see why the churn rate is so different
- Review the features of the $599 plan against competitors and make an action plan based on any gaps in our offering
- Reduce churn rate for the $599 plan by 30% within 12 months
- Achieve a 20% increase in customer satisfaction scores for the $599 plan within six months
Example 9:
Context: This company is nailing new business wins, but people aren’t sticking around long enough to make up for their marketing spend. The result? Super low customer lifetime value. The big problem is: they don’t really know what’s causing that churn.
Objective: Eliminate churn before it happens
Key Results:
- Set up automated health scoring for all customer accounts based on churn indicators by end of the month
- Ensure a Customer Success Manager proactively engages with 100% of customers with low health scores within two months
- Reduce churn rate to under 3% in 6 months
Product OKR examples for customer satisfaction
You should probably be looking to drive customer satisfaction with every product decision you make and goal you set, but satisfaction-specific OKRs tend to focus on ways to improve the overall experience and turn existing customers into lifelong ones.
The key results that make up this kind of OKR can usually help you identify areas for product improvement based on real-world customer feedback.
Example 10:
Context: This company has much longer response rates than the industry average, so – naturally – they’re getting some pretty rough feedback. Customers think they take too long to solve issues, and that’s creating reputational trouble; churn is starting to increase as a result.
Objective: Increase our efficiency in solving customer issues
Key Results:
- Reduce the number of customer interactions needed to solve a problem by one-third in 3 months
- Close the feedback loop: send customers notifications when something they asked for has
launched for 100% of feature releases from the next release - Implement digital listening tools to proactively search for, and respond to, feedback
- Improve customer satisfaction scores related to support interactions by 20% within 4 months
- Reduce the backlog of unresolved customer support tickets by 40% within 3 months
Example 11:
Context: Customer satisfaction often results in an increased likelihood to recommend. So if this company wants to garner those all-important recommendations, they need to ensure they’re making customers feel like being a life-long customer is a real no-brainer.
Objective: Boost customer loyalty and referrals
Key Results:
- Launch a referral program that incentivizes existing customers to recommend the product and drive 40 referrals by the end of the quarter
- Design and launch a loyalty scheme that rewards loyal customers and get 70% of the customer base engaged with it by end of the quarter
- Increase NPS score to 80 by the end of this year
Example 12:
Context: This company has a product that people love – so much so that they get a bit evangelical about it when talking to their friends. Loyalty is high, but there are LOTS of product requests coming in that point to waning satisfaction. The answer? Get customers involved in the future of the product.
Objective: Make customers feel more involved
Key Results:
- Launch a customer advisor board (CAB) that solicits requests and recognizes long- term contributions and achieve a 50% uptake by invited customers within 2 months
- Drive 20k impressions to a publicly available roadmap on the website
- Get 70% of the customer base to actively participate in focus groups or feedback surveys within 6 months
Product OKR examples for different product lifecycle stages
Every single product goes through the same lifecycle stages: Introduction/launch, Growth, Maturity, and Decline – and they all require a different set of strategies.
It stands to reason then that your OKRs for each stage should be specific to the kind of challenges and opportunities you’re facing at the time. To demonstrate that, let’s follow the same fictional company through the stages of its life and look at its objectives and goals during each…
Example 13 – Launch:
Context: This company is fresh, new, and wet behind the ears. The team soft-launched their product with friends and family and it’s now ready for prime-time: a rollout to a local audience. Their focus is on getting users in and using the platform as fast as possible, and their target audience is US-based tech companies.
Objective: Gain new users fast
Key Results:
- Increase customer sign-ups by 20% within 3 months
- Create an onboarding in-app and email flow that encourages users to invite 3 colleagues, and
increase average number of users per account by 30% in 3 months - Launch a referral program that encourages current users to get friends to open an account and add 100 new customers through this channel within 3 months
- Increase user engagement by 20% within 3 months
Example 14 – Growth:
Context: Our fledgling company has now been operating for a few years, and things are looking good. Their user base is around 80% US-based, but they want to ensure that they can still grow that local audience without any serious attrition before they really make a push into international markets.
Objective: Build a more robust user base
Key Results:
- Increase user retention by 10% within 3 months
- Increase user engagement by 20% within 3 months
- Design a robust upsell campaign and grow expansion revenue by 20% within 6 months
Example 15 – Maturity:
Context: Our fictional product is getting a bit long in the tooth now – locally at least. Growth in the US is plateauing, so the company is looking to increase international growth by bringing localized versions to new markets. But doing that smoothly requires some clear goal setting.
Objective: Become world-renowned
Key Results:
- Review localization options to get the platform ready to launch in EMEA
- Increase international customer engagement by 20% within 3 months
- Launch a customer success program in 5 new markets
Example 16 – Decline:
Context: Our product has been around for a long old time by this stage. It’s grown in its local market and achieved successful international expansion, but now it’s being impacted by some innovative, indirect competitors that help people solve their problems in completely new ways. Fewer and fewer people are looking for a tool like what our hero company offers, so their existing customers are starting to shift their behavior.
Objective: Reimagine and revitalize the product
Key Results:
- Conduct customer research and market analysis to identify new trends, pain points, and customer needs – within the next month
- Develop and launch at least two new features or enhancements that address the identified customer needs – within the next six months
- Ensure adoption of the new features by 70% of existing customers by end of the year
- Increase overall customer satisfaction scores by 20% within 3 months of launching the new features
Product OKR examples for velocity/productivity
Productivity OKRs are all about picking up the pace, getting more done, and achieving a higher throughput in any given timeframe. That makes them ideally suited to teams looking to work in a scrum or spring-based lean framework.
Importantly, when we talk about velocity, we’re talking about the speed at which a team completes tasks, so it’s important to measure it and use it to set objectives.
Example 17:
Context: The product development team’s got big ideas, but things tend to fall down a bit when it comes to actually getting projects across the line. The organizational nuts and bolts need tightening if they want to escape that ‘over promise, under deliver’ treadmill.
Objective: Increase team velocity
Key Results:
- Introduce a scrum master to own sprint planning and monitor progress
- Simplify the code review process to reduce time-to-ship by 20% in 3 months
- Train the entire team on the ‘planning poker’ technique to minimize over/underestimation by end of the quarter
Example 18:
Context: Development thrives when it’s collaborative and transparent, but sometimes bad habits build over time, and teams find themselves working in unhelpful silos that slow the workflow. Here we’ve got a company suffering from dev bottlenecks and sluggish turnaround times.
Objective: Improve the development process
Key Results:
- Transfer Jira backlog into a product management tool to boost visibility (something like ProdPad maybe 😉)
- Increase the percentage of sprint work completed from 60% to 90% in 3 months
- Reduce the average time taken to move a feature or enhancement from conception to deployment by 20% within 4 months
- Increase employee satisfaction scores by 20% across the development team
There you have it – 18 product OKR examples that you can use as you see fit! If any of those resonated with you, take them as a starting point, tweak, and adapt until you have the perfect OKRs to take to the team.
And look, if you want to get really serious about your OKR management, sign yourself up for a free trial of ProdPad and see what our OKR tool can do.
You can also access our sandbox environment and see our OKR tool complete with real-life objectives and key results, then hop over into one of the example roadmaps and see how the Now-Next-Later roadmap is structured around your OKRs. Heck, you can even view your entire roadmap by Objectives for a super-fast view of what you’re doing to achieve each of your goals.
Happy goal setting!
