Company strategy often produces company OKRs and team OKRs modeled after them, while leaders keep a parallel set of "also important" priorities. Teams present roadmaps tied to OKRs but receive pushback about where work on unmeasured priorities occurs, leading to incremental KPI improvements rather than strategic progress. Unmeasured priorities get ignored because they are not measurable, causing a loss of commitment. Keeping a backdoor of priorities creates wiggle room but undermines OKR value and buy-in. Establishing shared principles before writing OKRs, agreeing which priorities will be measured, and committing without parallel unmeasured priorities restores focus and progress.
Here's an interesting cycle: Company Strategy is written (and maybe communicated). Company OKRs are written based on KPIs and some strategic topics. Teams model their OKRs after the company OKRs. The company insists that other things are "also important." So when teams share their roadmap items connected to the OKRs, but get pushback on where the work on these "other important things" is happening.
It's tempting to keep a backdoor of priorities open next to your OKRs, to have more wiggle room and be less committed to what you defined at the beginning of the quarter. But that's a lose-lose situation. The value, and therefore the buy-in, for measuring progress through a method like OKRs gets undermined, further reducing the team's commitmen t. To circumvent that, I recommend creating a shared understanding around these fundamental principles before writing your OKRs:
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