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·6 min read·Deep dive
How companies are organised, and what OKRs each department should own
A field guide to functions and seniority, and how each one should scope its OKRs, with examples for eleven teams.
Good OKRs depend on knowing what a team actually controls. That depends on two things: which function the team sits in, and how senior its owner is. This guide maps the three functions almost every company has, what each one should measure, and how scope changes from the executive team down to individual contributors, with example OKRs for eleven departments.
Key takeaways
- Most companies have three functions: R&D (builds the product), GTM (sells and keeps customers) and Operations / G&A (runs the company).
- Each function measures different outcomes: capability and quality, revenue and retention, or cost, people and compliance.
- Match scope to seniority: executives own company outcomes, individual contributors own the slice they can move directly.
- Cross-functional goals are split by what each function controls, never cloned.
The three functions almost every company has
Names vary (“Product & Engineering”, “Revenue”, “G&A”, “Business Operations”), but the shape is remarkably consistent from a 30-person startup to a public company.
R&D: product and engineering
Research and development covers everyone who designs, builds and runs the product: product management, engineering, design, data, QA, platform and security. Its outcomes are about what the product can do and how well it does it: shipped capability, adoption, quality, reliability, delivery speed and cost to serve.
GTM: go-to-market
Go-to-market is everyone who finds, wins and keeps customers: sales, marketing, partnerships, customer success and solutions engineering. Its outcomes are commercial: pipeline, bookings, annual recurring revenue (ARR), win rate, net revenue retention, expansion and customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Operations and G&A
General and administrative functions keep the company running: finance, people (HR), IT, legal, procurement, business operations and support operations. Their outcomes are about capacity, cost and risk: burn and runway, hiring and attrition, compliance, internal SLAs and spend.
Match scope to seniority
The same theme should look different at each level. An executive owns the company outcome; an individual contributor owns the part they can move with their own hands. Giving an engineer “Grow ARR” is as unhelpful as giving the CTO “Fix the flaky login test”.
| Level | Owns | Typical horizon |
|---|---|---|
| Executive | Company outcomes: growth, profitability, market position | Year, broken into quarters |
| Function lead | Function outcomes that add up to the company’s | Quarter |
| Manager | Team outcomes: a product area, a segment, a process | Quarter |
| Individual contributor | The slice they can move directly, often a leading indicator | Quarter, checked weekly |
Not every individual needs personal OKRs. Many teams keep OKRs at the team level and let individuals own key results within them. Either works, as long as every key result has one named owner.
OKR examples for R&D teams
| Team | Objective | Key results |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering | Ship faster without breaking things | Lead time for changes from 6 days to 2 days · Change failure rate from 18% to under 10% · Median CI time from 22 to 8 minutes |
| Product | Make the product the obvious choice for mid-market teams | Ship the 6 features most cited in lost deals · Feature adoption among mid-market accounts from 20% to 45% · Mid-market trial → paid from 9% to 14% |
| Design | Make onboarding effortless | Week-1 activation from 38% to 60% · Median time to first project from 3.5 days to 1 day · Onboarding support tickets from 420 to 150 a month |
| Platform / SRE | Make reliability a feature customers notice | Uptime from 99.84% to 99.95% · p95 page load from 1.8 s to 1.2 s · Sev-1 incidents from 6 to ≤2 |
OKR examples for go-to-market teams
| Team | Objective | Key results |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Win the mid-market | Quarterly mid-market bookings from $0.8M to $1.4M · Win rate vs main competitor from 22% to 35% · Average sales cycle from 74 to 55 days |
| Marketing | Become the brand mid-market buyers search for | Marketing-sourced qualified pipeline from $3M to $5.5M · Organic sign-ups from 900 to 1,600 a month · Blended CAC payback from 19 to 14 months |
| Customer success | Turn customers into advocates | Net revenue retention from 104% to 115% · Gross churn held under $1.0M ARR · Accounts with an executive sponsor from 30% to 70% |
| Partnerships | Open a channel that sells for us | Partner-sourced pipeline from $0 to $1.2M · Certified partners from 2 to 10 |
OKR examples for operations teams
| Team | Objective | Key results |
|---|---|---|
| People / HR | Build a company people want to stay at | Regretted attrition from 14% to under 8% annualised · Time to fill engineering roles from 64 to 40 days · eNPS from +12 to +30 |
| Finance | Grow efficiently | Monthly net burn from $1.1M to $0.8M · Close the books in 5 working days, down from 12 · Forecast accuracy within ±5% |
| IT & security | Pass enterprise security reviews without heroics | SOC 2 Type II report issued · Median security questionnaire turnaround from 9 to 3 days · Devices with full-disk encryption from 82% to 100% |
Use these as shapes, not templates. Replace every number with your own baseline. The point is the pattern: a qualitative objective, then outcome key results in the function’s own metrics.
Cross-functional OKRs
Big company goals cross every function. “Grow enterprise ARR” needs Sales to close, Product to ship what enterprises require, Security to pass their reviews and Customer Success to keep them. Split it by what each function controls:
- Sales owns enterprise bookings.
- Product owns the enterprise features that block deals, measured by adoption or deals unblocked.
- IT & security owns review turnaround and certifications.
- Customer success owns enterprise retention and expansion.
When one team’s objective depends on another’s work, write it down (“Depends on: SSO shipping by week 6”) and link the two. More on this in alignment vs cascading and splitting key results so they add up.
How OKR.ai uses this model
OKR.ai’s AI coach works out each person’s function and level from their role title, job description and connected context, such as your HR system or project tracker. It then scopes drafts to match. Push your OKRs to reports and it splits them by role and function, so the VP Engineering gets reliability and delivery outcomes and the Head of Design gets activation. The coaching rules ship as a plain-text file with every install, so you can read exactly how it reasons.
Build your org on the canvas in minutes with CSV team import, then let AI draft a first pass for every team.
Frequently asked questions
Should every department have OKRs?
Every department should contribute to company OKRs, but not every team needs its own set every quarter. A stable team can carry one OKR focused on the change that matters most and run the rest of its work as business as usual.
Do support and operations teams need outcome key results too?
Yes. Measure the outcome of the work, such as resolution time, SLA attainment, cost per ticket or audit findings, not the volume of tasks completed.
Should individual contributors have personal OKRs?
It’s optional. Team-level OKRs with named owners for each key result work well for most teams. Personal OKRs help when an individual owns a distinct outcome, like a solo marketer owning organic growth.
Where do HR and finance fit if they don’t drive revenue?
They set the capacity and constraints the company grows within: who you can hire, how fast you can spend, what risks you carry. Those are company-level outcomes and deserve OKRs like any other.