KPI vs OKR: What's the Difference — and How Do They Work Together?

If you’ve ever sat in a planning session and wondered whether your OKRs are your KPIs, or whether you need both, or why your OKRs don’t seem to produce the evidence of progress everyone hoped for — you’re in good company. The confusion between KPIs versus OKRs is among the most common questions in strategic performance management today, and the answers matter more than most frameworks acknowledge.

This KPI Fundamentals Guide outlines a healthy relationship between KPIs and OKRs, and how to make them serve their shared purpose of making strategy measurable — and achievable.

What are OKRs?

OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — were developed by Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s and popularised globally by John Doerr, whose book Measure What Matters brought the framework to a mainstream management audience. Today, OKRs are used by organisations of every size and sector, from technology startups to government agencies, as a way to focus effort, align teams, and track progress toward the things that matter most.

OKRs are appealing to many leaders, because the structure is simple. An Objective describes what the organisation, team, or individual is trying to achieve — a qualitative statement of direction and ambition. Key Results describe how they’ll know the Objective is being achieved — specific, measurable, time-bound indicators of progress. Together, they answer two questions: where are we going? and how will we know we’re getting there?

OKRs typically look like this:

Some genuine strengths come with the intent of OKRs:

• They can create focus by limiting the number of Objectives at any level.
• They can create alignment by cascading goals through the organisation so everyone can see how their work connects to strategic direction.
• Their quarterly cadence builds a rhythm of review and adaptation that annual planning cycles rarely achieve.
• Their transparency can support the kind of shared accountability that makes strategic execution real rather than aspirational.

The OKR Institute is internationally recognised as a leading authority on OKR education, research, and practice. In both 2025 and 2026, PuMP creator Stacey Barr was invited to speak at their World OKR Summit — presenting on how the habits of good performance measurement make OKRs work better, and on avoiding the common measurement pitfalls that limit high-impact teams. That the OKR community finds this perspective useful is itself a signal: OKRs and rigorous measurement practice are not in competition. They can — and should — have a healthy relationship.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
An OKR is an agile goal-setting framework that pairs an Objective — what the organisation wants to achieve — with Key Results — the specific, measurable evidence that the Objective is being achieved. Its primary job is to create focus and alignment around the things that matter most.

What are KPIs?

A KPI — Key Performance Indicator — is a quantification that provides objective evidence of the degree to which a performance result is occurring over time.

That definition is from PuMP, and is covered in full in Guide 1: What is a KPI? The Meaningful Definition, which is worth a read if you haven’t already. The short version for this guide: a KPI is ongoing evidence of a result. Not a target, not a task, not a project milestone — evidence that something in the world is actually changing in the direction the goal — or objective — intended.

The purpose of a KPI, understood this way, is to provide the feedback a leader needs to know whether what the organisation is doing is producing the results it set out to achieve. That feedback, gathered consistently over time and displayed in a way that distinguishes real signals from normal variation, is what makes it possible to manage performance rather than just report on it.

KPIs don’t provide a framework for organising strategy. That’s not their job. Their job is to answer one question: is it working?

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
A KPI is a quantification that provides objective evidence of the degree to which a performance result is occurring over time. Its primary job is to provide ongoing feedback on whether goals are producing the results they were designed to produce.

KPIs vs OKRs: where the real differences lie

Given that both OKRs and KPIs are framed as ways to make strategy measurable, it’s reasonable to wonder whether they’re really just two names for the same thing. They’re not — but the differences are more nuanced than most comparisons suggest.

The confusion arises partly because Key Results, when written well, look a great deal like KPIs: they’re quantitative, they’re tied to goals, and they have targets. And in fact, a well-written Key Result is based on a KPI — or at minimum, it should be. The problem is that Key Results, in practice, are frequently written in ways that don’t meet the standard of a meaningful measure. More on that in the next section.

Here is where OKRs and KPIs genuinely differ — across the five dimensions that matter most in practice:

Dimension	OKRs in practice	KPIs done well
What’s being measured	Often actions or milestones — what we’ll do, or how much of it we’ll do	Results — quantitative evidence of what changed
Cadence	Typically quarterly, regardless of the measure	Depends on how quickly signals of change can be detected — could be weekly, monthly, or annual
Relationship to strategy	Organises goals and aligns effort across teams	Provides ongoing evidence of whether those goals are being achieved
How they’re designed	Usually brainstormed or adapted from published examples	Designed from the goal itself — working backwards from what evidence of that goal would look like
Role of targets	Built into the Key Result as part of its definition	Set separately, after the measure is defined and baselined

Reading across the table, a pattern emerges: OKRs are primarily a framework for organising and aligning strategic intent. KPIs are primarily a tool for evidencing whether that intent is producing results. They’re answering different questions — and the organisations that get the most value from both are the ones that understand that distinction clearly. This means there is no “KPI vs OKR” — good KPI practice builds the rigour of evidence into OKRs.

The practical implication is important: OKRs and KPIs are not alternatives. An organisation using OKRs without well-designed Key Results is well-aligned but flying blind. An organisation using KPIs without a clear framework for goals and alignment might have good evidence but no coherent story about what it’s trying to achieve. Together, done well, they cover both.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
OKRs answer the question what are we focused on, and is everyone aligned? KPIs answer the question is our focus producing results? They’re complementary, not competing — and organisations that treat them as alternatives are missing the value of both.

Why most Key Results end up measuring actions — and how to fix it

If the most important thing a Key Result can do is provide genuine evidence of a result, why do so many of them end up measuring actions instead, like this one:

The honest answer is that the OKR literature itself is inconsistent on this point. John Doerr defines Key Results as things that “monitor how we get to the objective” — which could be interpreted as measuring progress toward a result, or as tracking the actions taken to get there. In practice, the vast majority of OKR examples in published guides, including most of those in Measure What Matters, are written as actions with quota targets: conduct X workshops, hire Y people, launch Z features. These are verifiable — you can confirm whether they happened — but they’re not evidence that anything improved.

Here is what that looks like side by side:

OKR Objective	Action-based Key Result	Result-based Key Result
Objective: Improve the experience of new customers	Complete onboarding redesign by end of Q2	Percentage of new customers completing onboarding without contacting support, by month
Objective: Strengthen our community partnerships	Hold six partnership meetings this quarter	Proportion of active community partners rating relationship quality as strong or improving, by quarter

The difference is not cosmetic. The action-based version tells you whether something was done. The result-based version tells you whether it made a difference. For the purposes of strategy execution — which is the whole point of OKRs — only the second version answers the question that matters.

Fixing action-oriented Key Results

There are five specific problems that cause Key Results to drift toward actions rather than results, and each has a practical fix:

1. The Objective is written as a project, not a result — so the Key Results become project tasks. Fix: rewrite the Objective as the outcome you’d see if the project succeeded.
2. The Key Result is a milestone, not a measure — it describes a point in time rather than ongoing evidence. Fix: ask “what would we see changing over time if this is working?”
3. The Key Result has a quota target, not a performance target — “complete 10 interviews” rather than “proportion of customers rating service as excellent is at least 80%.” Fix: replace the count of activity with the level of desired impact.
4. The measure is chosen for availability, not relevance — the data was easy to get, so it became the Key Result. Fix: start with the result and work backwards to what evidence of that result would look like, before asking what data is available.
5. The goal itself is vague — “improve culture” or “increase innovation” — so there’s no clear result to measure and actions fill the gap. Fix: define the goal precisely enough that you could describe what you’d see, hear, or count if it were achieved.

These aren’t failures of OKRs as a framework. They’re design challenges — and every one of them is solvable with a more deliberate approach to how Objectives and Key Results are written.

A note about where the actions should be

If the action-orientation is removed from the Key Results, does that mean the action doesn’t matter? Of course not — action is the only way to move the Key Results in the right direction to achieve the Objective. But where does the action live now, if not in the Key Results?

An idea from Stacey Barr is to extend the OKR concept to OKRA — Objectives, Key Results and Actions.

The OKRA format keeps measures as measures, and actions as actions — rather than letting one substitute for the other. And now three important questions — instead of the two mentioned earlier — are answered: where are we going? and how will we know we’re getting there? and what’s the best action to get there?

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
A Key Result that measures an action tells you whether something was done. A Key Result that measures a result tells you whether it made a difference. Only the second version does the job OKRs were designed to do.

What OKRs don’t tell you — and what fills the gap

There is a step that every strategy framework — OKRs, Balanced Scorecard, Results-Based Management, and every bespoke planning framework — assumes you already know how to do: choose the right measure for a goal.

This step is always present in the framework’s structure. There’s always a column for KPIs, a field for Key Results, a box for performance measures. But the how — the procedure for deciding which quantification actually provides the best evidence of this specific goal — is almost never included. The framework assumes it. It doesn’t teach it.

Well-intentioned attempts to fill the gap, in most organisations, use one of three substitutes: brainstorming a list of measures that seem related to the goal, browsing published KPI examples from other organisations, or defaulting to what’s already being measured. Each of these produces KPIs that are easy to generate and hard to argue with — and largely useless for knowing whether the goal or Objective is being achieved.

The result is familiar: KPIs that sit in a dashboard, get reported each quarter, prompt mild discussion, and change nothing. Not because measurement doesn’t work, but because the measures were never designed to provide useful evidence of the goals they’re attached to.

Deliberate KPI design is needed to fill the gap

What fills the gap is a structured approach to measure design — one that starts from the goal itself, articulates what evidence of that goal would look like (drawing on what can be observed, counted, rated, or calculated), and then selects the most relevant and feasible measure from that evidence base. This is what PuMP’s Measure Design technique does, and it is the piece that makes OKRs — and every other strategy framework — genuinely measurable rather than merely populated with numbers.

Importantly, adding this step doesn’t require changing the OKR framework. The Objectives stay the same. The Key Results slots stay the same. What changes is how the Key Results are chosen — using evidence-based design rather than brainstorming. The OKR framework provides the structure; the Measure Design technique provides the substance.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
Every strategy framework assumes you know how to design a meaningful measure for a goal. Almost none of them explain how. That missing step — systematic, evidence-based measure design — is what determines whether your Key Results (or KPIs) produce genuine feedback or just fill a template.

Using OKRs and KPIs together: a practical approach

Making OKRs and KPIs work together is not a theoretical exercise. The practical starting point, for most organisations, is a terminology problem — and solving it unlocks everything else.

Start with a shared glossary

Ayça Tümer Arıkan, a PuMP Affiliate in Europe, encountered this challenge directly when working with Hello Chef, a food delivery company that was integrating OKRs and PuMP. In her words:

“The measurement terminology they used was what they learned from the OKR literature and some other reference books, which were all mixed up in terms of PuMP’s clear point of view. For example, sometimes they had a measure as a KR (Key Result of the OKR), but sometimes a change initiative was also written as a KR. Also, some terms were understood differently by different people. So, we realised that the first thing needed to be done was to get aligned on terminology, so that everyone understands the same thing from a term used and we can start talking the same language.”

This is not an unusual experience. OKR terminology varies between practitioners. KPI terminology varies between frameworks. When both are in use, the same word can mean six different things to four different people in the same meeting.

The solution Ayça and Hello Chef used was to build a shared glossary — a single-page reference that defined each key term in the way the organisation had agreed to use it, drawing from both OKR and PuMP conventions where they aligned, and making a clear choice where they didn’t. Before any further measurement work could proceed, everyone needed to be speaking the same language.

If your organisation uses both OKRs and KPIs, building that glossary is the single most valuable thing you can do before the next planning cycle.

Write Objectives as results, not projects

The most important structural change for making OKRs and KPIs genuinely complementary is to ensure that every Objective describes a performance result — something that will change in the world because of the organisation’s effort — rather than a project, initiative, or activity.

An Objective written as a result becomes easy to measure: what evidence would we see if this result were being achieved? An Objective written as a project has an obvious completion date, not an obvious measure. And once an Objective is result-oriented, the Key Results can be designed as convincing evidence of that result — which is exactly what makes a Key Result function as a meaningful KPI.

Apply structured measure design to Key Results

Once Objectives are written as results, the Key Results can be designed rather than brainstormed. This means working through a structured process: making the goal precise enough to be measurable, identifying what observable evidence of that goal would look like, and selecting the measure that provides the most relevant and feasible evidence. This is the process covered in Guide 2: How to Design Good KPIs — and it applies directly to Key Result design, not just to standalone KPIs.

The result of combining OKRs with evidence-based measure design is an OKR system where the Objectives are genuinely strategic, the Key Results are genuinely evidential, and the whole framework does what it was designed to do: make it possible to know whether the work being done is producing the results that matter.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
OKRs and KPIs become genuinely complementary when Objectives are written as results (not projects), Key Results are designed as measures of those results (not actions), and the whole team shares a clear and consistent understanding of what each term means.