Quarterly Goals vs OKRs: A Simpler Alternative for Founders

Introduction

OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — have become the gospel of Silicon Valley. Google popularized them. Every startup founder has read "Measure What Matters." And every company above 50 people seems to have a quarterly OKR cycle.

But here's a secret that OKR consultants won't tell you: for most individuals and small teams, OKRs are overkill.

They were designed for large organizations that need alignment across hundreds of people and dozens of departments. For a founder or a small team, the overhead of "properly" implementing OKRs often outweighs the benefits.

This article explores a simpler alternative: Quarterly Goals. We'll look at why OKRs often fail, what makes the 90-day timeframe powerful, and how to implement a goal-setting system that actually works for small teams and individual contributors.

The Promise and Problem of OKRs

OKRs work beautifully at scale. When you have 10,000 employees, you need a system that cascades goals from company to division to team to individual. You need explicit alignment. You need shared language for talking about priorities.

But most people implementing OKRs aren't running 10,000-person companies. They're founders with five employees. Team leads with a handful of direct reports. Individual contributors trying to focus their own work.

For them, OKRs often create more problems than they solve.

Problem 1: Format Over Function

Teams spend hours debating whether something is an Objective or a Key Result. They wordsmith until the OKRs are grammatically perfect but meaningless in practice.

"Objective: Become the category leader in customer satisfaction. Key Result: Increase NPS from 45 to 60."

This sounds good. It's properly formatted. But has anything changed? The team knew they wanted happier customers before the OKR cycle. They'll know it after. The exercise of writing it in OKR format added process, not clarity.

Problem 2: Metric Gaming

OKRs push you to make everything measurable. In theory, this creates accountability. In practice, it creates metrics that are easy to measure but don't capture what actually matters.

"Increase customer satisfaction" becomes "Increase NPS by 15 points." But NPS and satisfaction aren't the same thing. Now you're optimizing for a number that's correlated with what you want but isn't actually what you want.

You can game NPS. You can survey customers right after positive experiences. You can adjust who you ask. You can hit the number without improving actual satisfaction.

When the metric becomes the goal, you've already lost.

Problem 3: Cascade Complexity

In larger organizations, OKRs cascade from company to team to individual. Each level's OKRs should support the level above.

This creates alignment. It also creates bureaucracy.

For a small team, there's nothing to cascade. The founder knows the company goals because they set them. The team knows because they talk to the founder daily. Alignment happens naturally through proximity.

Adding a formal cascade process creates overhead without creating value. You're running a sophisticated system for a problem you don't have.

Problem 4: The Grading Theater

OKRs traditionally end with a grading process. Did you hit 70% of your Key Results? That's the "ideal" score — ambitious enough to be meaningful, achievable enough to not be demoralizing.

This creates perverse incentives. Teams learn to set goals they can hit 70% of. Truly ambitious goals get sandbagged. Easy goals get inflated.

And the grading itself consumes significant time. Quarterly reviews become elaborate justifications for why you almost hit your numbers. Energy goes into scoring the past rather than planning the future.

The Alternative: Simple Quarterly Goals

Here's what works better for founders and small teams:

One to three goals per quarter. Written in plain English. Measured by whether you achieved them or not.

That's it.

No Key Results. No cascading. No grading percentages. No debates about format.

Example: A Founder's Q1 Goals

Ship version 2.0 with the three features customers are asking for most
Reach $10k MRR
Hire our first full-time engineer

These are clear. They're measurable. At the end of the quarter, you know exactly where you stand.

Did you ship v2.0? Yes or no. Did you hit $10k MRR? Yes or no. Did you hire the engineer? Yes or no.

There's no ambiguity. No grading. No lengthy retrospective about whether you achieved 68% or 72% of your targets.

Example: A Team Lead's Q1 Goals

Reduce average ticket resolution time from 48 hours to 24 hours
Ship the self-service portal with at least 80% of common requests automatable
Achieve team NPS (internal satisfaction) of 8+

Again: clear, measurable, binary at the end of the quarter.

Example: An Individual Contributor's Q1 Goals

Complete AWS certification
Lead the database migration project to successful deployment
Mentor two junior developers through their first feature launches

No complexity. No format debates. Just clear statements of what success looks like.

Why 90 Days Works

The quarterly cadence isn't arbitrary. Ninety days is a sweet spot that creates several powerful dynamics.

Long Enough for Meaningful Work

Weekly goals are too tactical. You can't ship meaningful features in a week. You can't transform a metric in a week. Weekly goals devolve into task lists.

Ninety days is enough time to build something substantial. You can learn a new skill. Ship a major feature. Meaningfully move business metrics. Hire and onboard team members.

Quarterly goals create space for work that actually matters.

Short Enough to Create Urgency

Annual goals are too distant. December feels impossibly far away in January. It's easy to procrastinate. Easy to assume you'll make up ground later. Easy to let months slip by without progress.

Ninety days is close enough to count. You can visualize the end. Week by week, you see the quarter progressing. Procrastination has real, visible consequences.

Frequent Enough to Adjust

Things change. Markets shift. Priorities evolve. Strategies need updating.

Annual goals lock you into decisions that may become irrelevant. By the time you realize a goal doesn't make sense, you've invested months of effort.

Quarterly goals give you four chances per year to learn and redirect. If Q1's approach didn't work, Q2 can try something different. The feedback loop is tight enough to actually be useful.

Visible Enough to Drive Behavior

When goals are always in your face, they influence daily decisions.

At SayNo, we use quarterly goals as the filter for Signal vs. Noise. When a task lands on your plate, the question is simple: Does this help me hit my quarterly goals?

If yes, it's Signal. If no, it's Noise.

This creates clarity that OKRs often obscure. You don't need to check whether a task contributes to a Key Result that supports an Objective that ladders to a company-level goal. You just ask: "Does this help me hit my Q1 goals?"

How to Set Quarterly Goals

Setting effective quarterly goals is simpler than OKR planning, but it still requires thought.

Step 1: Look at the Year

Before drilling into the quarter, zoom out. What do you want to have accomplished by December 31st? What would make this year a success?

This doesn't need to be elaborate. Three to five annual themes or targets is enough.

Step 2: What Makes This Quarter Unique?

Each quarter has its own character. Q1 might be about foundation-setting. Q4 might be about finishing strong. The quarter's context should inform its goals.

Ask: Given where we are and where we want to go, what needs to happen in these specific 90 days?

Step 3: Choose 1-3 Goals

More than three goals isn't focus — it's a wish list.

Each goal should be:

Specific enough to be unambiguous: "Improve retention" is vague. "Reduce monthly churn from 8% to 5%" is specific.
Within your control: Goals dependent entirely on external factors create learned helplessness. Choose goals you can actually influence.
Meaningful if achieved: If hitting the goal wouldn't change anything important, it's not worth tracking.

Step 4: Write Them in Plain English

No format. No template. Just clear statements of what you're trying to achieve.

If someone unfamiliar with your context could read your goals and understand what success looks like, you've written them well.

Step 5: Make Them Visible

Goals that live in a document you open once a quarter don't drive behavior. They need to be visible — on your wall, in your daily tool, reviewed at every weekly planning session.

At SayNo, quarterly goals appear at the top of your task view. Every day, you see what you're working toward. Every task is evaluated against those goals.

What About Accountability?

One criticism of simple quarterly goals is that they lack the accountability mechanisms of OKRs. No formal check-ins. No grading. No cascading visibility.

But accountability doesn't come from process. It comes from commitment and transparency.

Share your goals. Tell your team, your manager, your stakeholders what you're trying to achieve this quarter. Public commitment creates social accountability.

Review weekly. Spend 15 minutes each week asking: Am I on track? What needs to change? This doesn't require elaborate process — just honest reflection.

Be binary at quarter-end. Did you achieve it or not? No rationalizations. No partial credit. Clear acknowledgment of reality creates accountability for the future.

Simple systems can have strong accountability. Complex systems can lack it entirely. The process isn't what matters — the commitment is.

When OKRs Make Sense

To be fair, OKRs are the right choice in some situations:

Large organizations that genuinely need alignment across many teams
Highly measurable businesses where Key Results can be precise without gaming
Teams with dedicated goal-tracking resources (a chief of staff, an operations team)

If you have 500 employees and a full-time chief of staff managing your OKR process, go for it. The overhead is justified by the alignment benefits.

But if you're a founder, a small team leader, or an individual contributor trying to focus on what matters — keep it simple. You don't need enterprise-grade goal software for a problem that fits on an index card.

Conclusion

The best goal-setting system is the one you actually use.

OKRs can work, but they require significant overhead to implement well. For most individuals and small teams, the complexity isn't worth it.

Quarterly Goals offer the benefits of OKRs — focus, time-boxing, measurability — without the bureaucracy. They're simple to set, simple to track, and simple to act on.

Try it this quarter. Pick one to three goals. Write them in plain English. Make them visible. Let them guide your daily decisions.

Notice how much clearer work becomes when you know exactly what you're trying to achieve.

The sophistication isn't in the system. It's in the clarity.

SayNo's Quarterly Goals feature makes goal-setting simple. Set your goals, connect your tasks, and watch your Signal Ratio improve.