Defining Too Broad Of An Objective
One recurring pattern I’ve seen over the years as an OKR coach and facilitator – particularly at department and company level – is the tendency to choose or start with an objective statement that is far too broad or vaguely defined. And to a certain extent, I understand where this is coming from. Teams and leaders want to stay flexible, and we all fear locking ourselves into the wrong path or bet.
But here’s the problem: when the objective statement – the outcome we are trying to achieve – is too broad or general, it opens up such a wide space that it becomes incredibly hard to know where to go or how to measure if we’re heading in the right direction. It’s not that there are too few potential direction, but that there are too many.
Think of if like this: a vague objective statement is like standing in the middle of a desert with a compass but no map. Technically, the treasure you are looking for is out there somewhere… but the terrain is endless. You could spend weeks walking in the wrong direction and not even realize it. You’re expending energy and time doing work, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting any closer to the thing that matters. You might, eventually, but it’s very likely that this “eventually” is well beyond any reasonable date and definitely beyond your defined cycle.
Let me give you a concrete example of a bad objective statement:
Bad Objective: Improve user satisfaction
Why it’s bad / not useful: It’s broad and doesn’t anchor the team to anything specific or relevant. “Improve user satisfaction” could mean anything from fixing bugs, improving speed, redesigning a feature, offering a discount or freebie, changing pricing and the list goes on. It leaves the team wandering.
Instead, a better version might look like this:
Better objective: Increase satisfactionwith onboarding for new users
Why it’s better: It immediately narrows the “actionable” terrain for achieving it. It doesn’t cover everything under “user satisfaction” – just one specific, high-leverage area. The team knows where to focus and where to start looking.
Please note that I wrote better, not ideal or almost perfect. There are still quite a few improvements but for the purpose of this example, it’s “better enough”.
A Good Objective Statement Leads To Natural Focus & Velocity
This is where the idea of narrowing the actionable space comes in. When you set a relevant and scoped objective – one that is tied to your team’s actual influence / control and also relevant and connected to the company strategy – you get a natural cone of focus. You go from exploring an almost infinite plane to navigating an eventually conical space: still room to explore, but with clearer borders.
Another OKR example. Here’s a poorly scoped OKR:
Objective Statement: Delight our users
KR1: Conduct 5 user interviews
KR2: Launch newly designed homepage
KR3: Increase NPS by 3 points
Better scoped OKR example:
Objective: Improve the experience for first-time users trying to complete their first task
KR1: Reduce avearage time to first task completion for first-time users from 27 min to 15 min
KR2: Increase percentage of first-time users who complete their first task in one session from 37% to 65%
KR3: Achieve a satisfaction rating of 4.5/5 from 3.7 on first-time user experience survey
Notice that the objective already narrows the actionable space quite a bit: improve the experience only for first-time users and only those trying to complete their first task. The key results also give the team enough freedom to explore different ways of achieving and reaching the desired outcome while still being focused enough to avoid getting lost.
A well defined objective statement shapes where the team should focus and in what space progress should be made. You want your teams to explore all relevant paths with a clear purpose and inside a space that’s been intentionally defined.
So when defining your OKRs, think about the potential actionable space set by the objective:
1. Is it too broad? do we risk having teams getting lost or trying to achieve the OKR in the worng way/direction?
2. If I play devil’s advocate, in how many ways could the team “get lost” while still making progress within the actionable space defined by the objective?
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