Okrs kpis

OKRs & KPIs Skill

How this skill behaves (read first)

Claude's default happily generates a tidy OKR list for any request — which is exactly the failure: objectives invented with no strategy behind them, five objectives per team, key results that are activities in disguise ("conduct 20 interviews"), and a "North Star" picked in one sentence. Goals written this way actively misdirect a team for a quarter.

So this skill is generative but gated:

1. Establish context — strategy, level, cycle, and what data exists. No strategy → say so and work at the right level instead of inventing one.
2. Apply the always-true core — outcome KRs with baseline/target/timeframe, one focus objective, leading+lagging mix.
3. Surface the context-dependent decisions — framework weight, North Star, cadence, cascading model — with trade-offs; let the user choose.

Then it hands the result to pm-okr-metric-validity-audit for validation.

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Step 0 — Establish context before writing any goal

Ask if not known; state the assumption if proceeding without an answer:

• Is there a strategy to derive from? Strategy is the "why/what"; OKRs are the "how much/by when." Without strategic choices, OKRs become disconnected targets that move numbers without advancing position. If none exists, flag it — offer to define the strategic priority first rather than generating goals from nothing.
• Level — company, product, or team? Team OKRs should be each team's chosen contribution to product objectives, not product KRs mechanically divided up.
• Team size & maturity — a small squad may be better served by the simpler levers / rate-limiting-step framing (which metrics move the North Star; which is the bottleneck) than by full OKR ceremony. A squad often needs only 1–2 KRs per objective.
• Cycle — quarterly is the default rhythm; annual strategy breaks into sequenced quarterly checkpoints (not every priority appears every quarter).
• What data exists — a KR without a collectible number is theater. If the right metric doesn't exist yet, a legitimate KR is "research and define the activation metric" — better than chasing a target you don't understand.

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The always-apply core (correct for almost every case)

Objectives — qualitative, ambitious, memorable:

• An objective answers "where do we want to go?" — concise, inspiring, time-bound, not a solution.
  • ❌ "Launch mobile app by Q3" (an output wearing outcome clothes) ✅ "Delight users with seamless mobile experiences"
  • ❌ "Optimize customer acquisition efficiency" (corporate fog) ✅ "Make our signup the simplest in the industry"
• It must pass the "So what?" test: achieving it represents meaningful strategic progress, not completed activity. "Conducted 10 user interviews" fails; "validated that customers will pay 3× more for real-time collaboration" passes.
• One focus objective per team per quarter. If only ~1 in 4 experiments works and a team runs one a week, that's ~3 wins a quarter — spreading across multiple objectives spreads to zero. Achieve the highest-impact objective before queueing the next.

Key results — falsifiable, outcome-based:

• It's not a key result unless it has a number: baseline → target, unit, timeframe. Obviously achieved or not — no room for debate.
  • ❌ "Improve website performance" ✅ "Reduce page load time from 4.2s to under 1.5s by end of Q2"
• KRs measure outcomes (behavior/business change), never activity or shipped things.
  • ❌ "Ship the redesigned dashboard" ✅ "Reduce user error rate on dashboard tasks by 40%"
• 2–4 KRs per objective (1–2 for a single squad — a squad should own a KR; don't over-engineer).
• Mix leading and lagging — lagging outcomes (retention, MRR) confirm after the fact; leading drivers (activation, onboarding completion) allow course-correction. An all-lagging set can only report failure once it's too late.
• Stretch is a feature: ~70% achievement is healthy. Separate aspirational OKRs from committed deliverables so a miss is information, not betrayal.

Every target gets the gaming question:

• Ask "how could someone hit this number while making the product worse?" — and pair aggressive targets with a guardrail (check/health) metric.
  • ❌ "Increase session duration 20%" alone ✅ Same target + "task completion time does not increase; support contacts stay flat"

KPIs vs. OKRs — don't conflate:

• KPIs are ongoing health signals (churn, DAU/MAU, resolution time) that persist across cycles; OKRs are the quarterly push for change. A KPI can serve as a KR when an objective targets it — but a dashboard of KPIs is not an OKR set, and OKRs shouldn't try to monitor everything.

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The context-dependent decisions (surface, don't auto-apply)

Present each with its trade-off and a recommendation tied to Step 0; let the user decide. Applying all of these by default is a mistake.

Decision	Apply when	Avoid / adapt when	Default recommendation
Define a North Star Metric	Stable business model; need one number uniting customer value + business success (Spotify: time listening; Airbnb: nights booked) that's simple, frequently measurable, product-influenceable	Business model in flux (the wrong North Star misguides the whole strategy — Facebook had to abandon "time spent"); or one already exists	Propose 2–3 candidates with the value-exchange rationale; pressure-test before adopting — it should hold for years
Full metrics hierarchy (NSM → KPI drivers → team inputs)	Multiple teams need to see how their inputs ladder up; cross-team alignment is the pain	Single team / early product — hierarchy becomes ceremony	Sketch the causal chain (feature adoption → engagement → NSM) even if informal
Cascading model	Top-down breakdown: tight coordination needed across teams	Team-chosen contribution: teams closest to the work know what moves the objective	Set objectives top-down, let teams propose their own KRs; check team OKRs don't conflict
Cadence ceremony	Dual cadence (annual strategic + quarterly tactical) + weekly confidence check-ins (green/yellow/red) + mid-quarter review + retrospective: org large enough that drift compounds	Small team — keep planning + weekly check-in + retro only	Scale ceremony down before scaling targets down; never set-and-forget
Metric ownership (RACI)	Cross-functional metrics where shared responsibility becomes no responsibility	Obvious single-owner metrics	One accountable owner per KR, named at planning
Mid-cycle OKR changes	Genuine strategy shift (self-serve → enterprise pivot)	Tactical changes within an objective (email → in-app tutorials needs no new OKR)	Default to stability; if changing, document why and what was learned — constant metric-shifting destroys trust in the system

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Validate the result (orchestration)

Hand-offs name each lens by its installable skill name. Invoke one only if that skill is installed; if it isn't, this skill's own core already carries these rules — proceed without it rather than blocking.

After producing or revising, hand it to the audit lenses rather than declaring it done. These are candidate lenses — posture per docs/orchestration-policy.md, or route the whole artifact through pm-product-review. Here okr-metric-validity is the always-relevant lens for this artifact (auto-runs) — a goal set's whole value rests on metric validity. If the user invoked this skill for one specific thing, respect that scope. For a full idea-to-plan build, pm-idea-to-plan is the compositional front door that pulls this in as the success-metrics rung after the plan is framed and de-risked.

• pm-okr-metric-validity-audit (auto-runs) — every objective, KR, KPI, and North Star candidate: vanity exposure, falsifiability, outputs-as-outcomes, gaming/guardrails, causal connection to value, leading/lagging balance. This skill writes; that audit interrogates.

If the audit surfaces a conflict, resolve back toward the primary goal: a small set of goals the team can actually steer by — fewer, better-connected metrics beat comprehensive ones.

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Common do/don't patterns

❌ Don't	✅ Do
Generate OKRs from a one-line request with no strategy	Gate: ask what strategic choice these goals serve; flag if none exists
Write 4 objectives per team "to cover everything"	One focus objective; queue the rest
"Increase engagement" as a KR	"Increase DAU/MAU stickiness from 18% to 25% by end of Q3"
Accept "launch X" as a key result	Rewrite as the behavior change the launch should cause
Pick a North Star in one sentence	Propose candidates, test the value-exchange logic, warn it should hold for years
Set an aggressive growth target alone	Pair it with a named guardrail metric
All-lagging KR sets (MRR, churn only)	Add the leading drivers the team can act on weekly
Divide product KRs mechanically among teams	Let teams propose their contribution; check for conflicts
Treat 70% achievement as failure	Frame stretch as designed; separate committed from aspirational
Ship the goal set as final	Hand off to pm-okr-metric-validity-audit

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Source lessons (Uxcel)

• OKRs, KPIs, and North Star Metrics
• Using the Product Strategy to Defining OKRs
• Defining Success Metrics
• Thinking in Outcomes, not Features
• Cadence, Rituals, and Accountability
• Product Metrics & KPIs