When I first built OKRs Tool, the goal was intentionally narrow.
In 2025, OKRs Tool did one thing well: it helped teams create, track, and manage OKRs. That was it.
At the time, that focus felt important. Many of the teams I was speaking to didn’t want another complex system. They were trying to move away from spreadsheets and static docs, not replace them with enterprise software.
What they needed was something simple enough to use every week - a place where goals stayed visible, ownership was clear, and progress didn’t disappear between planning cycles.
For a long time, that was enough. Teams adopted OKRs, ran weekly check-ins, and actually kept them alive past the first month.
Then the conversations started to change.
“We’re Tracking OKRs - But Everything Else Is Still Scattered”
As teams became more consistent with OKRs, a familiar pattern showed up in customer calls and emails. Teams kept asking some version of the same question:
“What do we do with this information next?”
In practice, OKRs weren’t the only thing teams were managing. They were also tracking KPIs, reviewing performance, and trying to understand how work connected across teams. The problem was that all of that lived somewhere else.
People told us:
- KPIs were still in spreadsheets or BI tools
- Performance reviews happened in isolation, disconnected from goal outcomes
- As teams grew, it became harder to see how goals aligned across the org
Nothing was “broken.” But everything was fragmented.
Teams weren’t asking OKRs Tool to do more for the sake of it. They were already stitching together their own performance loop with documents, exports, and side conversations - and it was starting to creak.
So we did something about it.
Making Alignment Easier to See as Teams Grew
One of the first things we heard from growing teams was that alignment became harder to see, even if goals were written well.
As more teams and cycles were added, people lost the ability to answer simple questions quickly:
- How does this team’s objective support the company goal?
- Where are we overlapping?
- Where are we drifting?
That feedback led to the alignment map.
Instead of treating OKRs as separate lists, the alignment map made it possible to visualise how objectives connected across levels.
With the alignment map, you can see company-level goals at the top, with department and team OKRs branching below them. It wasn’t about hierarchy - it was about making relationships between goals visible again.
For teams, this reduced duplication and surfaced dependencies earlier, without adding process.
Bringing KPIs Back Into the Same Place as Goals
Another theme came up repeatedly: teams were running OKRs for change, but still relying on KPIs to understand business health.
The issue wasn’t choosing one over the other - it was that they lived in different tools.
By adding KPI tracking, teams could finally keep ongoing performance metrics alongside their OKRs. With KPI tracking, you can see clear ownership, targets, update frequency, and simple status signals. Nothing fancy - just enough structure to make metrics usable week to week.
This helped teams spot mismatches earlier. Situations where OKRs looked fine, but KPIs were drifting - or where KPIs were healthy, but goals weren’t moving in the right direction.
Having both in one place reduced guesswork and cut down on context switching.
Turning Outcomes Into Reflection With Performance Reviews
The last gap teams kept pointing out was reflection.
OKRs and KPIs showed what happened, but reviews were still happening elsewhere - often weeks later, based on memory rather than outcomes.
Performance reviews were added to solve that specific problem.
Instead of treating reviews as an HR process, they became a natural follow-on from an OKR cycle.
With performance reviews you can see a simple overview: who’s completed their self-review, where manager reviews are still pending, and which summaries are ready to view.
Reviews pull directly from the same context teams already use to execute. That made conversations more grounded and reduced the need to reconstruct the quarter from scratch.
For many teams, this was the missing step between finishing one cycle and starting the next.
Closing the Execution Loop
Looking at the product honestly, this evolution wasn’t about adding unrelated capabilities. It was about supporting the full loop teams were already running - just across too many tools.
Today, OKRs Tool covers four connected parts of that loop:
- Direction → OKRs define what teams are trying to change
- Reality → KPIs show how the business is actually performing
- Alignment → Visual mapping makes goal relationships visible as teams scale
- Reflection → Performance reviews turn outcomes into learning
That’s not “everything performance.” It’s the execution loop.
And once teams can see that loop clearly, they spend less time reconstructing context - and more time deciding what to do next.
One Place to Set Direction, Track Reality, and Reflect
What changed over time wasn’t the ambition of OKRs Tool - it was the scope of what teams expected it to support.
With alignment, KPIs, and performance reviews working alongside OKRs, teams could finally tell a single story:
- What we’re trying to achieve
- How we’re actually performing
- What we learned this cycle
Instead of moving between tools and documents, everything lived in one place. The benefit wasn’t more data or deeper analytics. It was fewer gaps between planning, execution, and reflection.
What Stayed the Same
Even as the product expanded, one thing didn’t change: the emphasis on simplicity.
We didn’t set out to build a full HR or enterprise performance suite. The goal was to keep the lightweight, execution-first feel that made OKRs Tool useful in the first place - while removing the points where teams were forced to improvise.
Clear ownership, regular check-ins, and visibility still matter most. The difference now is that those habits extend beyond goal tracking into how teams understand performance as a whole.
Looking Ahead
This evolution wasn’t driven by a roadmap exercise. It came directly from how teams were already working - and where they were compensating with spreadsheets, docs, and side systems.
By supporting goals, metrics, alignment, and reviews in one place, OKRs Tool now reflects a more complete picture of performance.
Not just where teams want to go - but how they’re actually getting there, and what they learn along the way.
