OKRs at Scale

The article argues that the simplest way to scale OKRs is to give a whole set of teams one shared objective. When the goal is common, teams are forced to coordinate, expose dependencies, and adopt agile habits without adding new ceremonies. Team-level OKRs work fine in small orgs, but at 200-plus teams they create hyper-local optimization: a team may hit its key results while sabotaging another's progress. Because each team owns only its own metrics, the cost of cross-team interference is invisible. By grouping several squads into a "team of teams" and assigning them a single OKR, the success metric becomes global. The article shows a diagram where three teams each own lower-level key results that act as leading indicators for the top-level goal. If any squad falls short, the whole group fails, so the teams continuously share status, blockers, and learnings. Teams still keep their own tactical key results, but those are now explicitly linked to the shared outcome. This alignment gives clear line-of-sight, reduces duplicate work, and cuts the number of meetings and review cycles leaders have to oversee. The process stays the same; only the scope of the objective changes. The takeaway for engineering leaders is practical: stop proliferating isolated OKRs and instead create a small set of shared goals for cross-functional groups. The result is better communication, fewer process inefficiencies, and a more scalable way to measure true impact.