How to Plan Your OKR Cycle in 7 Simple Steps

Imagine — you are finally done with your OKRs for the year. Your team has been aligned, focused, productive, and performing better than you could have ever expected. But now, the next cycle is right around the corner, with entirely new business goals. And as the grind never stops, it’s time to do it all again.

Planning an OKR cycle can be daunting, especially if you’re new to the framework or looking to refine your approach. This guide will help you to plan your next OKR cycle successfully, ensuring alignment, clarity, and focus.

Step 1. Set a Timeline and Check-In Cadence

The OKR Candence determines how long your OKR cycle will be and how often you want to have your OKR planning sessions. Another way to look at it is to ask yourself how frequently your company’s priorities change. There isn’t a wrong answer to this question — we have seen small start-ups planning their OKRs to last two weeks and companies setting OKRs for the next 5 years. You just need to find the cadence that works best for you.

There may even be more than one. For example, one of the most common approaches is to plan Company OKRs yearly while departments work on a quarterly OKR cadence. Either way, at this stage of your OKR journey, you need to determine the following:

Start and End Dates. Clearly define the beginning and end dates of the OKR cycle. This provides structure and ensures everyone understands the timeframe for achieving their objectives and key results.
Regular Check-Ins. Schedule weekly or bi-weekly meetings to review progress. These check-ins are opportunities to celebrate small wins, identify and address roadblocks, and realign focus if priorities have shifted. Use these meetings to maintain momentum and accountability.
Mid-Cycle Reviews. Halfway through the cycle, conduct a more in-depth review to evaluate overall progress. Are your objectives still relevant? Are the key results on track? This is a chance to pivot, adjust targets, or reallocate resources if necessary, ensuring your OKRs remain realistic and impactful.
Closing Reviews. Hold a thorough review session at the end of the cycle to assess what was achieved, what wasn’t, and why. Document these insights for the next planning cycle.

Step 2. Align with Organizational Goals

OKRs for teams are supposed to be designed on the ground by the people who will bring them to life. However, you should still align them with the company goals. The best way to do this is to cascade your OKRs from the company’s strategic objectives.

In the relevant section of our OKR Alignment and Breakdown Guide, we further explore how to break down company OKRs for departments. If you are interested in the subject or want to see examples, check it out.

Understand Top-Level Goals: Review your organization’s Mission, Vision, and long-term priorities. If those are not obvious — consider asking the top management about their plans for the upcoming year and build upon those. This context will help you align your team’s efforts with broader business objectives. For instance, if the company aims to expand its market share, your team’s OKRs should be aimed at supporting this effort.
Collaborate Across Teams: Discuss shared Objectives with other departments to prevent silos and encourage interdepartmental synergy. Cross-functional collaboration ensures that OKRs from different teams complement rather than conflict. For example, if the product team prepares for a major launch, the marketing team’s OKRs should focus on promoting the new release.
Identify Focus Areas: Select areas where your team can deliver the most impact. Avoid spreading efforts too thin — instead, narrow them down to 2-3 high-priority Objectives that align with organizational goals. Consider where your team’s unique skills and resources can drive the most value.
Translate Goals into Team Objectives: Once you understand the broader goals, translate them into actionable team-level objectives. For example, if the organization aims to improve customer satisfaction, your team’s objective might be to reduce support ticket resolution time.

Doing all that during the same meeting is a) implausible and b) inadvisable. Instead, standard OKR practices recommend splitting this stage into Alignment and Refinement meetings. Alignment is for the broad strokes approach, while Refinement meetings focus on establishing finer details.

Step 3: Define Clear Objectives and Measurable Key Results

Writing actionable Objectives and Key Results is an art. We have touched on the subject plenty of times — in the OKR Guide or the article on How to Write OKRs. So, if you are a newcomer to this, we highly recommend you check those resources out. However, if you just need a refresher, here it is.

Objectives should be ambitious yet achievable, inspiring your team to excel. To define your Objectives:

Do Not Spread Too Thin. Limit objectives to 2-3 per team for better focus.
Be Ambitious. Choose goals that energize and challenge your team.
Focus on Outcomes: Objectives should describe what you want to achieve, not how to do it.

Key Results (KRs) measure progress toward achieving objectives. Follow these principles:

Measure What Matters: Use metrics to track progress objectively.
Limit Yourself: Keep the number of KRs reasonable — 3-5 per Objective is enough.
Stay Actionable: KRs should be specific, clear, and within the team’s influence.

Here is an example of a well-written, clear OKR:

[O]: Increase customer satisfaction from customer support interactions
- [KR1]: Reduce average first-response time for support tickets from 4 hours to 1 hour.
- [KR2]: Achieve a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) of 90% or higher on support interactions.
- [KR3]: Resolve 95% of support tickets within 24 hours.

Step 4: Engage Your Team

OKRs are supposed to be built from the bottom up and not strictly sent from the top down. So do not try to decide alone what your team will do in the next cycle — instead, engage them and bring them in. Here’s how:

Host Brainstorming Sessions: Hold collaborative sessions where team members can contribute ideas for objectives and key results. This ensures a diversity of perspectives and fosters a sense of shared ownership.
Foster Collaboration: Encourage open discussions about how individual and team goals align with organizational objectives. Highlight interdependencies and how different team members’ efforts contribute to the broader mission.
Clarify Expectations: Communicate each team member’s role and responsibilities within the OKR framework. Ensure that everyone understands how their contributions will be measured and celebrated.
Incorporate Feedback: Use the team’s feedback to refine the OKRs before finalizing them. This iterative approach improves the quality of the OKRs and increases team buy-in.
Encourage Accountability: Assign ownership of specific objectives and key results to individual team members or sub-teams. This promotes accountability and ensures that progress is actively monitored.

Step 5: Track and Manage OKRs with OKR Software

OKRs were designed in the 1970s; since then, we have made great strides in automating the process. That’s why you should use dedicated OKR software to track and manage the OKRs you have set for the next cycle.

Centralize OKRs: Use a dedicated OKR platform like the Oboard OKR App to maintain a centralized location for all team and individual Objectives. This ensures everyone can access the same information, fostering alignment across teams.
Track Progress in Real Time: Many tools allow teams to update their progress dynamically, providing a real-time view of where efforts are paying off and where adjustments are needed. This transparency helps teams stay proactive.
Automate Updates: Update OKRs automatically based on the status of your Jira tasks. This way, you don’t need to track everything you do manually — just link the relevant Epic or a list of Issues to the KR and enable the automated sync.
Set up Reminders. To facilitate OKR management and review, set up automated check-in reminders and update notifications. This will keep everyone informed without overburdening team members with administrative tasks.
Generate Reports: Use built-in reporting features to create summaries of progress and outcomes. Share these with stakeholders during check-ins or at the end of the cycle to demonstrate the impact of your OKRs. If you are using Oboard, you can even set up a custom dashboard to track the progress of selected KRs in real-time.
Integrate With Existing Tools: Choose a platform that integrates seamlessly with the tools your team already uses, such as Jira, Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord. This reduces the friction of adopting new technology. And let’s be honest — you know which tool we will recommend.

Once your OKRs are set, they need to translate into actual work — which usually means projects, epics, or time-bound initiatives in Jira. Mapping those initiatives onto a timeline can help teams prioritize, avoid bottlenecks, and stay aligned on delivery expectations. If you’re using Jira, this comprehensive guide to project timelines breaks down how to visualize and manage your work across weeks or quarters, helping your OKR cycle stay grounded in reality.

See what Oboard OKR App can do for you!

Step 6. Reflect on the Previous Cycle

Once the cycle is over, it’s time to begin again — and again, and again, and again. That’s the beauty of OKRs: they are iterative, and therefore, you get better at planning and managing them with each new cycle under your belt.

But before you can start planning your next great adventure, take the time to review your results from last year. This practice is called an OKR Retrospective, and it is used to extract and learn the lessons from the previous OKR cycle.

Assess Performance

Start by examining whether your team achieved the Objectives set in the previous cycle. Now, depending on which version of the OKR framework your company uses, you may or may not be expected to achieve 100% of the Objective. For example, the standard OKR practice separates Objectives into three types based on your confidence level. However, there are still expectations, and falling too far behind projections — or pulling too far ahead — is a sign that your planning in the last cycle wasn’t perfect. Maybe you had a Committed Objective that ended up way below the expected 70% — and at the same time, you achieved 90% of one of your Experimental moonshots.

If this happened, consider whether resource constraints, lack of experience, unforeseen challenges, or misaligned priorities contributed to the problem. You can fix these things — or at least account for them — when planning the next OKR cycle, bringing your predictions for the next year even closer to reality.

Reassess Metrics and Approach to Measurement

There are many ways to measure something, most of which are suboptimal. For example, if your Objective is “To become the most praised coffee shop in the city,” then you could be measuring:

The number of pounds of coffee grounded;
The number of coffee cups sold;
The number of good reviews on social media.

The first two metrics are vital for your company. You should be tracking them; they make for decent KPIs if you use them. However, for this OKR, the last metric on the list is the only relevant one. Everything else is secondary and/or busywork.

Busywork should not be tracked via OKRs outside of very particular circumstances. So, do not track busywork when you plan for the next OKR cycle. Instead, reassess your approach to measurement, find the outcome, and track it instead.

NOTE: This step relates to the Input, Output, and Outcome Key Results — however, this subject deserves a separate article on the Oboard blog. For now, check out this infographic.

Gather Feedback

Your team needs to have a say in their OKRs, so before you even begin planning for the next cycle, learn what they thought about the last one. Here are some good questions to ask:

Were the steps for setting and tracking OKRs easy to follow? If not, where did you experience confusion or friction?
Were team members aligned and working effectively toward shared Objectives? What could improve collaboration?
Did the OKRs reflect the most critical priorities for this cycle? Were there any objectives that felt less relevant or impactful?
Did you have the tools, time, and support to achieve your key results? What resources were missing or insufficient?
Did the Objectives inspire you and your team? How could they have been more motivating?
Were the metrics tied to the key results actionable and reflective of progress? How could they be improved?
How well did the OKR framework adapt to unexpected challenges or changes during the cycle?
What would you recommend we do differently in the next cycle to improve outcomes and team satisfaction?

Step 7. Restart

Once you have tallied your successes and learned the lessons of the previous cycle, the only thing left is to begin again—at Step 1!

Conclusion

Planning your next OKR cycle is not easy — it will take days or even weeks of work. However, following the best practices from the guide above can make this process more structured and rewarding. From setting the right cadence to choosing the right OKR App, you can ensure that your team stays focused on the right goals and remains impactful.

Remember, OKRs are not just about goal-setting — well, they are, but they are a bit more than that. They are also a tool to inspire and encourage ambition, focus, and accountability. They ensure that you will reflect on your previous attempts, refine your approach, and then restart the cycle with more confidence and experience than you have had before. And when you look at them in that context, the grueling work during the planning phase doesn’t seem as bad.