An OKR that begins with “Increase the percentage of customers completing setup and imports from 20% to 30%” gives the team something to optimize toward. An OKR that begins with “Ship the onboarding module by Q2” describes a delivery date. One of those can be adjusted when evidence suggests a better path. The other locks the team to a plan regardless of what the work reveals.
Pitfall 2: Letting OKRs become disguised work plans
Even when teams try to write outcome-led OKRs, the language often slides toward delivery. The key result ends up describing a piece of work rather than a measurable change.
Compare two key results for a team working on user retention:
The first is a delivery milestone. The second is an outcome. The distinction is important because it changes how the team makes decisions throughout the quarter. A team tracking against a delivery milestone will prioritize shipping the module on time. A team tracking an outcome will regularly ask whether the module is the best way to move the metric and will adjust their approach if the evidence points elsewhere.
The cultural shift Lucid’s teams worked through was exactly this: moving the conversation from “What are we planning to ship?” to “What outcome are we trying to create?” That shift requires writing key results that are genuinely measurable and tied to something that matters to the customer or the business, rather than to the completion of a task.
A useful test: If a key result can be satisfied by doing a task, regardless of the impact, it is a work plan. If it can only be satisfied by evidence that the desired outcome occurred, it is an OKR.
Pitfall 3: Using scoring systems that flatten meaningful progress
The most common OKR scoring model assigns equal weight to every key result, then averages the scores to produce an objective score. The appeal is simplicity, but equal weighting collapses meaningful information in the process.
When exceptional work in a high-priority area earns the same fractional score as middling progress on something less consequential, the scoring system stops functioning as a measure of progress and starts functioning as a source of demoralization. As Rowley put it: “This model is failure-focused. It doesn’t feel good, so teams aren’t motivated with it.”
The alternative is scoring built around real targets. Rather than assigning equal fractions to every key result, airfocus lets teams set specific numerical targets, percentages, or milestones for each key result, with scores rolling upward through the objective hierarchy as check-ins are logged.
A team with a target of increasing the setup-and-import completion rate from 20% to 30% can record their current position at any point in the quarter, and the system calculates how that compares to the goal. Leaders see a consolidated view of group performance without having to chase updates from individual teams.
Pitfall 4: Disconnecting team OKRs from company strategy
One of the most consistent frustrations for product and engineering teams is uncertainty about how their work connects to broader company goals. The team delivers its objectives and still has no clear sense of whether any of it moved the metrics the business cares about.
This disconnect has a structural cause: Team OKRs live in one place, group or department OKRs in another, and company-level objectives somewhere else entirely, with the connections between them left unstated and invisible.
By using airfocus to house OKRs, Lucid’s engineering teams addressed this directly. Rather than keeping OKRs in separate documents at each level of the organization, the team built a connected hierarchy, with team objectives feeding into group goals, group goals feeding into department targets, and department targets tied to a concrete business outcome, in this case, an ARR target for the process accelerator product area.
The three teams working on that product area can see exactly where they sit in that chain. “Just being able to show them [airfocus], and answer how what they’re working on contributes to what the business is doing is invaluable,” said Rowley. “And it takes me just two clicks to get here.”
That visibility also changes the conversation during planning. When the relationship between team OKRs and company strategy is explicit, it becomes easier to identify gaps, surface competing priorities, and make deliberate choices about where to focus. The airfocus OKRs and Objectives page covers how a connected OKR hierarchy works in practice.
