This lexicon serves as a comprehensive guide to essential OKR terms and concepts. We will also define the most common terms in the ecosystem of project management and product development.
Whether you are a seasoned professional or new to OKRs or project/product management, the definitions provided here will help you navigate and understand key terminology, and we hope this lexicon will help you on your journey.
A 1:1 meeting (also written one-on-one or 1-on-1) is a regular, two-person conversation be...
OKR accountability is the owner's commitment to report on progress and decisions made on t...
OKR alignment is the guarantee that every team is working on Objectives that reinforce eac...
An Aspirational OKR is a deliberately ambitious OKR, treated as a success at 70%. It overl...
OKR cascading is the mechanism by which company Objectives are translated into team Object...
A Child OKR is an OKR (most often at team level) that explicitly contributes to a Parent O...
A Committed OKR is a firm commitment expected at 100%. It covers the notions of roofshot (...
A Company OKR is an organization-wide OKR, from which Team OKRs derive, and more rarely In...
The confidence score is the perceived likelihood, on a scale (1 to 10 or 1 to 5), of hitti...
Continuous improvement is the principle that each OKR cycle should move not just the outco...
An OKR dependency is a link of reliance between two OKRs (or between an OKR and an externa...
Execution signals are observable inputs on a team's day-to-day practice (ritual adherence,...
Focus on priorities is the principle that a team shouldn''t carry more than 2 or 3 Objecti...
Goal setting is the discipline of formalizing an organization''s targets to direct collect...
An Initiative is a concrete action, project, or deliverable a team takes on to move a Key...
A Key Result is a quantitative metric that measures the success of an Objective. It captur...
A leading indicator anticipates an outcome. A lagging indicator measures it after the fact...
An Objective is a qualitative, ambitious, and inspiring goal that defines a clear directio...
The OKR Champion is the person who carries the OKR practice inside the organization. Depen...
The OKR cycle is the cadence at which OKRs are set, tracked, and closed out. It combines a...
OKR forecasting is the practice of estimating the likelihood of hitting an Objective befor...
The OKR Owner is the named person responsible for tracking and steering an OKR. In standar...
OKR planning is the framing phase that runs before a cycle kicks off. It typically takes 2...
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal-setting framework built around three elements...
Outcome is the result in the real world (a customer or business change). Output is what th...
A Parent OKR is a higher-level OKR (company, BU, team) that one or more child OKRs roll up...
Radical transparency is the principle that every OKR (company, team, individual) is visibl...
Single-threaded ownership is the principle that each OKR has one dedicated owner who carri...
The SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) sets out the...
Top-down OKRs flow goals down from leadership. Bottom-up OKRs surface proposals from the t...
Weekly rituals are the set of recurring weekly meetings used to follow up on the execution...