Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How Early Stage Startups Should Think About Goal-Setting

Google's internal OKR process has proved scalable for decades, but its full-blown quarterly cadence can drown early-stage teams in paperwork. The article argues that startups should treat OKRs as a lightweight, outcome-focused tool and deliberately separate manager-level objectives from maker-level execution. This split keeps senior goals visible while letting engineers own the day-to-day key results without a bureaucratic overhead.

The author recounts nine years at Google, running 36 quarterly OKRs and annual meta-goals, working directly with senior leaders on YouTube. That experience shows how systematic grading and quarterly rhythm create clarity, but also how the process inflates as organizations grow. The takeaway is that the discipline is valuable, but the implementation must be trimmed for smaller teams.

For startups, the piece suggests adopting a stripped-down cadence: set a handful of high-impact objectives each quarter, align them with a single annual meta-goal, and let individual contributors define maker-level key results that map back to the manager OKRs. It also points readers to an OKR template from Coda, a portfolio company, to avoid building a custom spreadsheet.

By keeping the framework simple and maintaining the manager/ maker distinction, early-stage companies can use OKRs to focus on what matters, improve decision-making, and scale their processes without the overhead that bogs down larger enterprises.