Don't score your OKRs like Google

Need help to grade OKRs? Read our completeOKR scoring guide

We can thank Google for making OKRs as popular as they are today, but far too many teams are trying to replicate the exact way they do it—which ends up being harmful.

Let me explain.

Here's how Google scores their OKRs:

• Use a 0 to 1 scale.
• Getting 1 out of 1 should be super hard and not happen that often.
• Instead, you should be aiming for 0.6 or 0.7 out of 1 at the end of the quarter.

In short, 0.6/1 is considered great. 1/1 means maybe you set your goals too low. The idea behind that scoring is to push teams to be ambitious and stretch themselves. That looks great in theory, but it's really confusing in practice.

Most things in life have taught us that 100% = complete, and it's hardly natural for people to start setting goals thinking 0.7 = 100% and 1 = 200%. You will end up having different celebration scales for your OKRs and KPIs, unless you also tell your team that they'll get full bonuses for achieving 70% of the sales targets.