When teams first adopt OKRs, things usually feel simpler, not more complicated. There’s a sense of relief in finally writing down what matters and having a shared reference point for priorities. For a while, that’s enough. But that doesn’t tell the full story. According to Harvard Business Review, about 70% of OKR implementations fail. That’s not a great look for OKRs, especially when the framework itself ends up taking the blame.
In most cases, the problem isn’t the framework – it’s what happens as teams grow and work starts crossing boundaries. OKRs that worked well inside a single team struggle in a more interconnected setup without the right structure to support them. That’s the gap this article focuses on. We’ll use a simple hypothetical company, Northstar, to show how teams can use Workspaces and Groups in Oboard to restore clarity.
The OKR Setup: A Company with Real-World Set-Up
Let’s imagine “Northstar” as a fast-moving tech startup company. They begin with a single workspace, starting with barely 15 people across a few core departments. This is important because having multiple workspaces so early could potentially complicate the workflow. But as “Northstar” grows rapidly and expands its scope to meet rising demand, it adds multiple departments that work in parallel. Product, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, and operations each have their own priorities, but work rarely happens in isolation. As the product surface grows, more initiatives span teams, making coordination more challenging without slowing progress.
They already use OKRs to align work, but scaling them is the challenge. Some goals sit neatly within a single team, while others depend on several teams moving together. Leadership needs visibility across the whole, without forcing teams into rigid processes or siloed plans. If your company has outgrown a simple, team-by-team OKR setup, Northstar’s situation will likely feel familiar.
Workspaces: The Foundation of OKR Structure
In Oboard, a Workspace is a dedicated environment for structuring and managing OKRs around a specific strategic area of the business. It defines where objectives live, who owns them, and who has access to them.
Workspaces are not folders or visual groupings. They are structural boundaries that separate goals by domain while still allowing alignment across the organisation. Each Workspace can have its own OKRs, members, roles, and visibility rules.
At a practical level, Workspaces make it possible to:
- Keep ownership clear and accountable
- Let teams execute independently without constant coordination
- Control access to sensitive objectives when needed
NOTE: If you’re just starting out, you don’t have to create multiple workspaces unless your company dynamics absolutely demand it. This is to make it easier for you to get started with what’s important without any complications.
Using Workspaces to Create Clear Strategic Boundaries
Northstar sets up Workspaces around how it wants to do business operations, not around organizational charts or reporting lines. Each Workspace reflects a meaningful area of responsibility.
Their setup looks like this:
- Product Development
Used by engineering, product, and UX to track roadmap execution, delivery quality, and technical outcomes. - Revenue
Shared by sales, marketing, and customer success to focus on acquisition, conversion, and retention. - Operations (Private)
Reserved for finance, HR, and legal, where objectives often involve sensitive or internal information. - Corporate Strategy
Used by leadership to manage company-level objectives and executive reporting.
What makes this structure work at scale is the Company-Wide Workspace. Instead of duplicating OKRs or recreating them for leadership, Northstar links relevant objectives from all other Workspaces under top-level company goals. This creates a single OKR tree that shows how execution across teams connects back to strategy.
The outcome is focus without fragmentation. Teams work within clear boundaries, and leadership gets visibility without micromanaging. Workspaces create focus. The Company-Wide Workspace creates alignment.
Why One Team Structure Might Not be Enough
Most companies structure OKRs around departments. It’s familiar, but it only shows part of how work gets done. In practice, many important goals depend on multiple teams moving together. When OKRs are organised only by departments, this cross-team execution becomes hard to see and even harder to manage.
To bridge this gap, Northstar separates two things that are often mixed together:
- Ownership – which belongs to departments
- Execution flow – which cuts across departments
By treating these as distinct but connected views, Northstar avoids the usual trade-off between clarity and collaboration. This separation is what makes Groups necessary in the first place. So let’s move on to “Groups”.
Groups: Structuring Ownership and Execution Flow
What Groups Are
Groups in Oboard are used to organise OKRs across people and teams in a way that reflects how work is owned and how it moves. Unlike Workspaces, which define where OKRs live, Groups define who is involved and how work connects across the organisation.
Groups exist independently of Workspaces. This means the same person, team, or initiative can be viewed from different angles without duplicating OKRs or breaking structure.
At Northstar, Groups are used to answer two different questions:
- Who owns this work?
- How does this work move across teams?
Building Two Group Structures: Ownership and Flow
To avoid forcing everything into a single view, Northstar uses two parallel group structures.
Organizational Groups (Ownership)
These groups mirror Northstar’s departments and make accountability clear:
- Engineering
- Product
- UX/UI
- Sales
- Marketing
- Customer Success
- Finance
- HR
- Legal
Organizational Groups answer a simple question: Which team is responsible for this OKR?
Functional Streams (Execution Flow)
These groups represent how value moves across the company. They cut across departments and reflect real execution:
- Acquisition: Sales, Marketing, Product
- Activation: Product, Engineering, UX, Customer Success
- Retention: Customer Success, Product, Marketing
- Platform: Engineering, Infrastructure, Security
- Compliance & Operations: Finance, HR, Legal
A single person can belong to one Organizational Group and multiple Functional Streams at the same time. It mirrors the reality of everyday work.
Here’s an example: A product marketing manager will primarily sit in Marketing, but might need to do some OKR correspondence with Product and Engineering. Group structures in Oboard allow them to interface with these departments in a structured and efficient manner without losing anything in the process.
Because OKRs are tied to Groups, Northstar can see progress from two angles at the same time:
- Performance by Organizational Group: how departments like Engineering, Sales, or Marketing are doing
- Performance by Functional Stream: how initiatives like Activation, Retention, or Platform are progressing
By keeping both views in play, Northstar doesn’t have to choose between clarity and collaboration; they get both at the same time. This makes it possible to answer two critical questions without manual rollups or guessing:
- Are teams delivering?
- Are our cross-team initiatives moving?
Instead of relying on labels or custom fields, Northstar uses Groups as the backbone of its performance reports. The result is clearer signals, fewer blind spots, and a much more honest view of execution.
Access Control: Transparency Without Overexposure
Not every OKR should be visible to everyone, and not every team needs the same level of access. As Northstar scales, it makes sense to view access control as a thing of “relevance” and not just “restriction” for restriction’s sake. With Workspaces, Northstar assigns permissions intentionally. A product marketing manager might have full control in Marketing Development but be limited to “Reader” in Product or Engineering.
While they have “View Only” OKRs in Revenue, Operations runs in a private Workspace, so sensitive finance, HR, and legal objectives stay protected. Leadership, on the other hand, has broad visibility across the system.
This keeps the balance right. And for a SaaS company with multiple business customers, that level of internal control will be much appreciated.
Check-Ins: How They Work Across Teams
Structure gives OKRs a place to live, but check-ins are what keep work moving between teams. As soon as objectives span multiple Groups, visibility becomes just as important as ownership.
Teams check in at a cadence that matches how Northstar runs:
- Company-level objectives are reviewed quarterly to support leadership decisions.
- Sales teams check in monthly as targets and conditions change.
- Product and Engineering update biweekly to stay aligned with delivery cycles.
- Operations and Compliance follow a steady monthly rhythm for internal goals.
Check-ins remain lightweight by design. Updates focus on progress, blockers, and changes in confidence level rather than lengthy status updates. You can also give more context to updates with relevant check-in questions. Reminders are automated and delivered through tools teams already use, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord, so updates don’t rely on manual follow-ups.
Using Check-In Templates in Oboard
Check-ins can be standardized across the organization or customized for specific groups. In Oboard, check-in templates are typically used directly in the check-in comment field when updating an objective or key result/KPI. Instead of writing free-form updates, teams follow a simple set of prompts each time they log progress. This keeps updates consistent and makes them easier to review across a Workspace or Group.
Because check-ins are tied to specific OKRs, these template-based comments live alongside progress changes and remain visible in the check-in history under each objective.
Here are three lightweight templates teams commonly use when leaving check-in comments in Oboard:
1. Weekly Pulse Template (for fast-moving KRs)
- Pulse check: How are you feeling about progress this week?
- Progress: What did you accomplish since the last check-in?
- Signals & blockers: What’s helping or hurting progress?
- Focus ahead: What are your priorities until the next check-in?
2. Monthly Outcome Template (for revenue or growth teams)
- Current status: Where are we relative to our key results?
- What’s working: Which efforts are driving measurable progress?
- What’s not: What isn’t moving the needle?
- Adjustments: Should we recalibrate approach or scope?
3. Cross-Functional Alignment Template (for streams or operational teams)
- Progress snapshot: What’s the current status of key results?
- Dependencies: What other teams or resources do you need?
- Risks: What threats or bottlenecks should we flag?
- Support needed: How can other groups or leaders help?
This approach keeps execution visible as it unfolds. At Northstar, the rule is simple: if an OKR hasn’t been updated, it isn’t treated as reliable.
Final Thoughts: Structuring OKRs for Clarity at Scale
What Northstar ends up with is not a more complex OKR setup, but a more accurate one. Workspaces create clear strategic boundaries, so teams know where their goals belong and who owns them. Groups add a second, equally important view, showing how work moves across the organisation. Together, they remove the need to force OKRs into a single structure that never quite fits.
This approach solves problems teams usually try to fix with workarounds:
- Duplicated objectives,
- Manual reporting,
- Endless alignment meetings,
- Unclear ownership.
Instead of layering a process on top, Northstar uses structure to make OKRs easier to maintain and understand. That’s the real value of using Workspaces and Groups in Oboard. Not to change how OKRs work, but to make them scale without losing clarity, accountability, or visibility as the organization grows.
