On June 13, 2025, Pernelle and I presented our experience with OKRA—a lightweight method we’ve been shaping and evolving over the past two years to help teams better connect strategy with execution. What began as a simple idea to make OKR planning more collaborative has steadily become one of the tools that help us cultivate autonomy, alignment, and ownership.
We were invited by Omio’s OKR shepherds to share our learnings with product leaders across the company. The invitation came at a time when our teams had demonstrated consistent results, but more importantly, a stronger sense of clarity, accountability, and team-driven direction. OKRA isn’t the only reason for that—but it’s helped create the conditions for it.
Our outcomes were solid, but what stood out most was a shift in mindset. Teams became more focused, and discussions moved from “what are we supposed to do” to “how do we make this work.” That behavioral change is where OKRA really adds value.
The Track Record That Earned Us the Platform
Since adopting OKRA in Q3 2022, our teams have achieved more than 85% of key results and milestones across eight quarters, with the last six months reaching over 94%. That’s not just execution—it’s engagement.
Of course, no framework alone explains team success. But OKRA helped us tackle three chronic issues: vague strategic translation, shallow alignment, and planning that encouraged compliance instead of real commitment. OKRA offered us a way to turn company-level goals into plans that teams understood, challenged, and co-owned.
Understanding OKRA: Beyond the Acronym
The OKRA framework originated from our team’s need to bridge the gap between strategic vision and tactical execution. OKRA represents a fundamental shift in how we approach collaborative strategy development. The acronym stands for Objectives and Key Results Agreements, but the real power lies in the facilitation methodology that brings these elements together.
Unlike traditional OKR cascading, where objectives flow down from leadership with minimal team input, OKRA creates space for teams to contribute their expertise, surface constraints, and build hypotheses about what will actually work. The framework operates on the principle that the people closest to the customer and the technology have insights that are essential for effective strategy execution.
The methodology is deliberately lightweight and flexible. Rather than imposing rigid templates, OKRA provides a structured facilitation approach that can be adapted to different team contexts, organizational cultures, and strategic challenges. The core insight is that strategy execution improves dramatically when teams are involved in the strategy creation process, not just the delivery phase.
What distinguishes OKRA from other OKR approaches is its emphasis on surfacing assumptions and dependencies early in the planning process. Traditional OKR development often treats these as implementation details to be worked out later. OKRA makes them central to the strategy conversation, leading to more realistic commitments and fewer mid-quarter surprises.
The Five-Session Framework in Detail
The OKRA methodology consists of five distinct collaborative sessions, each designed to produce specific outputs while building on the insights generated in previous sessions. This progression from vision to execution plan creates both clarity and commitment.
| Session | Primary Focus | Key Output | Typical Duration | When to Use | Learn More |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Session 0 | Product Vision | Shared context and vision statement | 30 minutes | When group strategy is unclear or missing | Read Session 0 |
| Session 1 | OKR Ideation | Draft objectives and key result candidates | 60 minutes | When company OKRs are available | Read Session 1 |
| Session 2 | Milestones Planning | Actionable milestones mapped to hypotheses | 75 minutes | After team OKRs are drafted | Read Session 2 |
| Session 3 | Effort & Dependencies | Effort estimates and dependency mapping | 90 minutes | After milestones are defined | Read Session 3 |
| Session 4 | Quarter Planning | Visual timeline with risk assessment | 75 minutes | Before execution begins | Read Session 4 |
Official OKRA Templates: Get the Figma board with all session templates and canvases.
Session 0: Building Shared Context
Session 0 addresses the common challenge of unclear or delayed strategic direction. Rather than waiting for perfect clarity from above, teams use this session to align on what they already know: customer pain points, platform capabilities, business opportunities, and stakeholder expectations.
The session follows a structured format where participants contribute insights about customer needs, technical constraints, business priorities, and competitive dynamics. These inputs are then synthesized into a shared vision statement that provides direction for subsequent planning activities.
This approach prevents teams from starting with misaligned assumptions or invented priorities. Instead, they begin with a grounded understanding of the context they are operating within, which serves as the foundation for all subsequent planning decisions.
Learn more: Session 0 detailed guide
Session 1: Translating Strategy into Team Objectives
Session 1 is where company-level objectives are translated into team-specific contributions. This is not a simple cascading exercise but a creative process where teams explore how their unique capabilities can contribute to broader organizational goals.
The session uses techniques like silent ideation, clustering, and pairing to ensure all perspectives are heard. Teams work through the connections between customer problems, business objectives, and technical possibilities, developing hypotheses about what initiatives will create the most impact.
The output is a set of draft objectives and key results that are both inspiring and grounded in reality. These are not final commitments but working hypotheses that will be refined through subsequent sessions.
Learn more: Session 1 detailed guide
Session 2: From Hypotheses to Action
Session 2 transforms high-level objectives into concrete milestones and initiatives. This session distinguishes between different types of work: feature development, validation experiments, technical spikes, and platform investments.
The collaborative approach ensures that all team members contribute to identifying the work needed to validate the team’s hypotheses. Engineering perspectives on technical complexity, product insights about customer validation, and design considerations about user experience all inform the milestone development process.
The result is a comprehensive map of the initiatives, experiments, and validation work needed to achieve the team’s objectives, with clear connections between each milestone and the underlying hypotheses it is designed to test.
Learn more: Session 2 detailed guide
Session 3: Reality-Checking the Plan
Session 3 is where teams confront the practical realities of their ambitious plans. Each milestone is evaluated for technical effort, business value, user experience impact, and resource requirements. Dependencies on other teams and external factors are identified and documented.
This session prevents the common problem of overcommitment by forcing explicit conversations about capacity, complexity, and coordination needs. Teams develop shared understanding of what is realistic within their constraints while identifying the highest-impact opportunities.
The scoring approach is designed to facilitate conversation rather than achieve mathematical precision. The goal is alignment on relative priorities and realistic sequencing, not perfect estimation.
Learn more: Session 3 detailed guide
Session 4: Creating the Execution Map
The final session brings all previous work together in a visual timeline that makes dependencies, risks, and learning opportunities explicit. Teams sequence their milestones, identify potential bottlenecks, and create shared understanding of how the quarter might unfold.
This is not rigid project planning but collaborative scenario development. The visual approach makes it easy to discuss trade-offs, adjust sequencing, and identify points where the team will need to make strategic decisions based on what they learn.
Learn more: Session 4 detailed guide
Implementation Insights from the Leadership Presentation
Presenting OKRA to leadership required distilling two years of framework creation and iterative development into actionable insights. The most important message was that OKRA works because it solves fundamental problems in how teams translate strategy into action.
The first key insight is that strategy communication improves dramatically when it becomes collaborative rather than broadcast. Traditional strategy cascading assumes that clarity emerges from detailed documentation and persuasive presentations. OKRA demonstrates that clarity actually emerges from collaborative sense-making where teams contribute their expertise to strategic problem-solving.
The second insight is that planning processes should connect discovery work with delivery work rather than treating them as separate activities. Many teams struggle with the false choice between detailed planning and agile responsiveness. OKRA integrates learning and delivery by making hypothesis validation a central part of the planning process.
The third insight is that sustainable high performance requires genuine team ownership of objectives rather than sophisticated measurement and accountability systems. When teams participate in developing the strategy, they develop commitment that persists through inevitable implementation challenges.
Scaling Considerations and Organizational Impact
One of the leadership team’s primary questions was how OKRA could scale across different team contexts and organizational levels. Our experience suggests that the framework’s adaptability is actually its greatest strength for scaling.
Different teams naturally emphasize different aspects of the framework based on their context. Teams working on experimental products spend more time in Sessions 0 and 1, building shared understanding of uncertain market dynamics. Teams working on established platforms focus more heavily on Sessions 3 and 4, optimizing delivery coordination and dependency management.
The facilitation approach also adapts well to different organizational cultures. Teams with strong hierarchical traditions can use OKRA to create structured input opportunities without fundamentally changing decision-making authority. Teams with collaborative cultures can use the framework to channel their collaborative instincts toward strategic alignment.
The key organizational impact has been improved strategic coherence without sacrificing team autonomy. Leaders gain confidence that teams are working on the right problems while teams gain influence over how those problems get solved. This balance between alignment and autonomy has proven sustainable across multiple organizational changes and strategic pivots.
Practical Next Steps for Leadership Teams
For leaders considering OKRA adoption, our recommendation is to start with willing teams rather than organization-wide rollouts. The framework works best when teams choose to engage with it rather than having it imposed upon them.
The first step is typically running Session 1 with a team that already has clear company-level objectives. This provides immediate experience with the collaborative approach while demonstrating how team input can improve strategic clarity rather than complicate it.
Success with initial implementation usually leads to organic adoption by other teams who observe improved alignment and delivery consistency. The framework spreads through demonstration rather than mandate, which creates stronger implementation commitment.
Leadership support is most valuable when it focuses on creating conditions for effective facilitation rather than monitoring framework compliance. Teams need time for the collaborative sessions, access to relevant strategic context, and permission to surface concerns about feasibility or resource constraints.
The long-term organizational benefit is not just improved OKR completion rates but enhanced strategic adaptability. Teams that understand the reasoning behind objectives can adjust tactics as conditions change while maintaining strategic coherence. This capability becomes increasingly valuable in dynamic business environments where rigid planning assumptions quickly become obsolete.
Resources and Additional Learning
Teams interested in implementing OKRA can access our complete facilitation templates and detailed session guides through the resources we’ve developed over two years of framework evolution.
Official OKRA Resources
Templates: Access the complete Figma board with all session templates and canvases
Complete Framework Guide: OKRA Alignment Guide covers the full five-session process and timing considerations
Individual Session Guides
Each session has detailed facilitation instructions, timing recommendations, and examples from real team implementations:
- Session 0: Product Vision - Read Session 0
- Session 1: OKR Ideation - Read Session 1
- Session 2: Milestones Planning - Read Session 2
- Session 3: Effort & Dependencies - Read Session 3
- Session 4: Quarter Planning - Read Session 4
Series Overview
OKRA Series: Introduction to OKRA • Revisiting OKRA