OKRs - Objectives and Key Results - started as an alignment tool. A way to connect individual work to company strategy. A framework for setting ambitious goals and measuring progress toward them.
Somewhere along the way, they became weapons.
Goals that were meant to inspire became quotas to dread. Key results meant to clarify became metrics to game. Quarterly reviews meant to reflect became tribunals to survive.
This isn’t inevitable. OKRs can work without weaponization. But it requires separating direction from execution.
How OKRs Get Weaponized
The failure mode is predictable.
Leadership sets aggressive objectives. Those cascade to teams as requirements, not aspirations. Teams set key results they can actually hit, knowing failure has consequences. Everything becomes conservative, political, or both.
Meanwhile, the actual work - the projects, tasks, and decisions that determine outcomes - gets disconnected from the framework. OKRs become reporting theater layered on top of real productivity.
Worse: when OKRs tie to performance reviews, the incentive is to sandbag. Set achievable goals. Avoid ambition. Play the game.
This isn’t what the framework was meant to do. But it’s what happens when goals become weapons instead of guides.
Keep Direction Separate from Delivery
Here’s a simple principle: OKRs handle direction. Your task tool handles delivery.
OKRs should answer “where are we going?” not “what did you do today?” They’re strategic, not tactical. They set context without micromanaging execution.
Kanman stays out of the goal layer entirely. It handles projects and tasks - the actual work. No OKR tracking, no goal hierarchies, no connection between your todo list and your quarterly review.
This separation is deliberate. When your task tool knows about OKRs, it tempts you to align every action with scoring well. You start optimizing for the metric instead of the outcome.
Keep strategy in one place. Keep execution in another. Let them inform each other without entanglement.
Set Human-Sized Goals
Weaponized OKRs tend to be abstract and oversized. “Increase user engagement by 40%.” “Achieve market leadership in Q3.” “Transform customer experience.”
These aren’t actionable. They’re banners, not guides. And when you can’t see the connection between your daily work and the banner, the banner becomes noise at best, anxiety at worst.
Human-sized goals connect to actual work. “Ship the new onboarding flow.” “Reduce checkout errors by half.” “Talk to ten customers this month.”
You can wake up and know what to do about these. You can put them in your project list and drag them to the top. They’re concrete enough to execute.
Reframe Key Results as Outcomes
Key results work best when they describe observable outcomes, not activity metrics.
Activity metrics: hours logged, tickets closed, meetings attended. These measure motion without measuring progress.
Outcomes: features shipped, bugs fixed, customers retained. These measure what actually changed.
Velocity charts don’t tell you if the team built the right thing. Ticket counts don’t reveal if the product improved. Activity can happen without progress. Outcomes require progress.
When setting key results, ask: “If we achieved this, what would be different in the world?” Not “how would we know we were busy?”
Protect the Team from the Framework
Managers can shield teams from weaponized OKRs without ignoring organizational requirements.
Accept that you’ll need to report upward using the company’s framework. Translate that framework into something workable for your team. Don’t pass the pressure through unchanged.
If leadership wants a 40% engagement increase, figure out what specific projects might contribute. Present those projects to your team as the work, not the metric. Let people focus on building rather than measuring.
The team sees: “We’re shipping a better onboarding flow.” Leadership sees: “Progress toward engagement objective.”
Same reality, different framing. The work stays human-sized. The dashboard gets its numbers.
When to Ignore OKRs Entirely
Some work shouldn’t connect to OKRs at all.
Maintenance. Infrastructure. Tech debt. Support. These keep the system running but don’t advance quarterly objectives. Forcing them into the framework distorts both.
Organizations that require every hour to map to an OKR create perverse incentives. Critical work gets ignored because it doesn’t score. People hide maintenance behind fake objectives. The framework becomes fiction.
Good OKR implementations carve out space for essential work that isn’t goal-aligned. The framework describes strategic pushes, not the full picture of what happens.
The Right Tool for Execution
OKRs set direction. Task tools handle execution.
Kanman keeps your projects front and center with no connection to goal frameworks. You see what you’ve started and what needs finishing. You drag to reprioritize. You ship.
No OKR tracking. No performance metrics. No anxiety about whether your task list aligns with your quarterly review. Just the work.
This isn’t avoiding accountability. It’s recognizing that accountability for outcomes is different from accountability for alignment. Ship good work. The OKR conversation takes care of itself.
Want to focus on delivery, not dashboards? Handles your projects without OKR entanglement. Kanman - annual workspace subscriptions. €4 / month for individuals, €10 per seat / month.
Marco Kerwitz
Founder of kanman.de