## FAQ


### Are OKRs heavyweight or lightweight?

OKRs are lightweight. This is on purpose. OKRs are deliberately created to be lightweight goal tracking, that is effective for teams of all sizes, that provide high-level summaries with ways to know progress.


### How long should I spend writing OKRs?

If you know what you're doing, in terms of your goals, your intentions for deadlines, and how you want to make progress, then writing OKRs should take you minutes. If you don't know what you're doing, or you want to communicate with more clarity among many teams, then you can spend more time honing them. 

For example, here's how one company of a hundred people does it. Each month, each team, department, and chief officer spends one hour writing OKRs, and one hour reading everyone OKRs. Typically this is all fast and easy, because all participants have a good general idea of their own work goals, deadlines, and progress points, and the participants have good ongoing communications overall. All the participants are free to edit and polish their OKRs are they wish, based on feedback from other participants and based on better understanding from other OKRs.


### How does OKR compare to other communication approaches?

OKRs summarize each team's few most-important goals, deadlines, and progress points. OKRs are quick, fast, easy, and light, which helps all the participants.

OKRs emphasize how to measure whether a key result is accomplished, and how to measure progress on it.

OKRs are intended to be visible to all the participants, so all the teams can understand all the top few goals.

If your teams are doing these kinds of ideas above, and communicating these among your teams reguarly by other communication approaches, then generally speaking you're already doing the conceptual equivalent of OKRs. Recall that OKRs are a concept, not a specific communication protocol (such as email or chat), and not a specific kind of interface (such as a task list or work board).


### How does OKR compare to email or chat?

OKRs are different than team communication via messaging, email, and chat because OKRs provide always-up-to-date shared visibility and progress measurement.

For example, when a new person joins a team, then the new person can see all the OKRs, and do not need to dig through message archives, or email mailboxs, or chat channels. 

In addition, OKRs are intended to roll up, so each team can have its own OKRs, which will roll up into a department's OKRs, which will roll up into the company's OKRs; this enables participants to quickly look at different levels of resolution of goals, which is very useful for balancing priorities among teams.


### How does OKR compare to task lists or work boards?

OKRs focus on the top few goals, deadlines, and progress points; task lists and work boards typically capture much more information, such as a total enumeration of all task items or work items.

OKRs aim to solve the problem of "how do we quickly communicate about teams' most important goals?"; task lists and work boards typically aim to solve the problem of "how do I capture every to-do item?".

Some web services are offering ways to blend OKRs with typical task lists and work boards, including ways to summarize goals, and track proress, and roll up task items and work items into the relevant OKRs. Teams can use these services to get the best of both worlds.


### Can you do OKRs for capabilities that are all-or-nothing?

Yes. OKRs that are all-or-nothing are fine in practice, when you have ways to measure progress. For example the objective "Land a team on the moon" is all-or-nothing, and has progress indicators such as "Orbit a team around the moon", "Orbit a team around the earth", "Prove mission control performance during a crewed mission", and so forth. Each of those all-or-none items can have sub-OKRs, sub-KPIs, sub-metrics, etc. as you wish.


### Should measurements and times be explicit or implicit?

Explicit. An explicit measurement and explicit timebox work better than an implicit measurement and implicit timebox, because different teams might be using different measurements/metrics and different cadences/timelines/deadlines. For example, an engineering team may want to use uptime metrics and a quarterly cadence, whereas a sales team may want to use cashflow metrics with a yearly timeline, whereas a product launch team may want to use user engagement metrics with a launch-date deadline.


### Are OKRs transparent?

Yes. All OKRs default to be transparent, meaning they are visible to everyone in the organization. In practice, there might be very rare OKRs that are transparency exceptions, such as OKRs for maximum-security projects or maximum-secrecy research. Transparency and visibility build mutual understanding, and also can be significant for helping for inter-team goals, team-of-teams projects, cross-functional areas, and roll-ups.