The OKR Cadence

The OKR Cadence

As a system, OKRs can be flexible.

We’ve seen many different organizations successfully tailor this goal-setting system to their unique needs.

One choice you have is your cadence: setting the length of your OKR cycle.

The most popular OKR cadence is quarterly. That gives you four cycles to achieve your annual North Star OKRs, with each cycle 90 days long. That’s long enough to get meaningful work done, but short enough to adapt to changing circumstances with new sets of goals and milestones.

Our advice: Choose the cycle length that best aligns with your organization’s natural rhythm.

For example, we know a major league baseball team that uses OKRs, and they split their cycle into three: the preseason, the season itself, and the postseason.

Kleiner Perkins, where I work, also uses trimesters. It makes sense for us to approach the year as the start, the middle, and then everything we need to get done before the end of the year.

We see other organizations using a six-month cadence. They want teams to spend less time planning OKRs and more time executing them. But because they’re setting their OKRs just twice a year, they expect them to be more ambitious than they’d be in a quarterly cadence.

A lot of startups choose a quicker cadence because they can’t afford to wait a quarter to learn whether they’ve achieved or missed their goals. Some pick a six-week cadence, or even a monthly one.

Choosing a cadence that works for all

Two final reminders:

First, no matter what cadence you pick, make sure everyone in the organization is using the same one.

And second, set your OKRs only for the next cycle. Don’t try to write out the whole year’s OKRs from the start.

That would be like mapping out all the plays of a football game before it begins! You’ll want to use the learnings from the last cycle to help you craft OKRs for the next one.

So here’s a quick recap of an OKR year:

At the beginning, leadership sets organization-wide OKRs: your annual North Star OKRs.

From there, orient shorter-cycle OKRs towards those annual goals.

Just as in sports, where a game consists of quarters, innings, or halves, pick the cadence that matches the speed that your organization likes to play.