You’re too early to have OKRs

Every startup eventually has "the OKR conversation."

Someone reads Measure What Matters. A new hire from Google joins. An investor suggests you need "more structure." And suddenly, you're spending two weeks in Q4 planning sessions, cascading objectives, and debating whether 70% achievement is good or concerning.

OKRs aren't bad. They're just built for a different game than the one you're playing.

OKRs assume you know what to measure

When Google sets an OKR to ‘increase engagement by 15%,’ they know engagement matters. They've run the experiments. They've seen the retention curves. They know that metric connects to revenue.

When your 30-person startup sets an OKR to ‘increase activation rate from 23% to 31%,’ you're hoping that matters. You think it probably does. But you won't really know until Q3 when you realise everyone activated, but nobody retained, or that enterprise customers don't care about activation at all.

Andrew Chen, General Partner at a16z, puts it bluntly: "OKRs are almost certainly harmful for pre-P/M fit startups because it causes teams to optimize towards goals as opposed to constantly asking if the goal is even the right one to begin with."

OKRs create false precision. They make you feel scientific about numbers you're actually guessing at.

OKRs optimize for alignment over learning

Growth is what defines a startup, not process. Startups should focus on weekly growth rates and making something users want—everything else is secondary. 

The OKR framework is designed to get 500 people rowing in the same direction. But early-stage companies don't need everyone rowing together—they need someone to figure out which direction the shore is.

You need to try things, fail fast, and change course. OKRs create the opposite incentive: commit publicly to a number, then spend the quarter defending why you're still chasing it even after Week 3 proved it was the wrong target.

We've watched teams game their own OKRs, sandbag their projections, or ignore clear signals because ‘we committed to this in planning.’ The structure meant to drive performance ends up blocking the very learning you need to survive.

OKRs are coordination overhead you can't afford

Planning cycles. Alignment meetings. Mid-quarter check-ins. Retrospectives. Cascading and cross-functional dependencies.

When you're 15 people trying to find product-market fit, every hour spent on goal-setting theatre is an hour not spent talking to customers, shipping features, or fixing the thing that's actually broken.

Shreyas Doshi, former product leader at Stripe and Google, distinguishes between good and great product managers on this exact dimension. He notes that good PMs converge on trusted processes like sprints and OKRs and apply them uniformly, while great PMs adapt their toolkit based on team composition, stage, and needs. They don't take a one-size-fits-all approach.

Most companies that swear by OKRs often succeed despite the framework, not because of it. They have great leadership, they talk constantly, they make fast decisions. The OKRs just give them a way to write it all down.

The quarterly cycle doesn't match your reality

OKR cycles are typically quarters, when iteration should be happening weekly. By the time you finish one OKR cycle, the market has shifted, your hypothesis has changed three times, and half your team is working on something that wasn't even in the original plan.

Hunter Walk, co-founder of Homebrew and former YouTube executive, spent nine years doing quarterly OKRs at Google. His advice to startups? Don't blindly mimic processes built for a different scale. What works for a company with thousands of employees and proven product-market fit rarely translates to a team still searching for theirs.

Instead of an OKR, go for many experiments chasing a single North Star goal. 

Instead of 12 quarterly objectives across 4 teams, pick one metric that actually matters. Revenue. Weekly active users. Enterprise renewals. Whatever represents "are we winning?"

Then let teams run experiments against it. No 90-day commitments. No cascading trees.

Just: "Here's what we think might move the needle. Let's try it for two weeks and see."

When you’re moving fast, it’s best to measure progress by weekly growth rate. If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week. This kind of simple, relentless focus on what actually matters beats elaborate planning systems every time.

You'll learn faster. You'll pivot easier. And you won't waste October planning goals you'll abandon by February.

OKRs will have their day—for when you actually need that coordination overhead. When you've figured out your playbooks, and you're scaling what works. When you know which metrics actually predict success because you've lived through enough cycles to have the data.

But until then? The best framework is the one that doesn't slow you down.