Our research shows that 67% of companies still track OKRs in Excel or Google Sheets. For a team of ten or fifteen, it works. A spreadsheet is easy to spin up, everyone already knows how to use it, and it doesn’t add process on top of the work.
As organizations grow, coordination gets harder. More people contribute to the same goals, ownership shifts and weekly updates take more follow-up than they used to.
What worked at ten or fifteen people starts to feel heavier at thirty or fifty.
You can usually tell when the spreadsheet is reaching its limit by listening to the questions that keep coming up in meetings. They sound practical at first, but over time they repeat themselves.
The first one is usually about updates.
1. “How do we make sure everyone actually updates this?”
When this question starts coming up more than once, it’s usually a sign the spreadsheet isn’t carrying its weight anymore.
Updates stop happening naturally. Someone has to chase them and numbers sit unchanged for weeks until a reminder goes out from the manager. What used to take five minutes at the end of the week turns into a coordination task.
It often shows up like this:
- Calendar blocks labeled “Update OKRs”
- Slack messages nudging specific people to refresh their key results
- Meetings that start by asking whether the sheet is actually up to date
A spreadsheet won’t tell you that a key result hasn’t been touched in two weeks. It won’t flag stalled progress or surface inactivity. As the team grows, relying on reminders and good intentions stops scaling.
The time spent driving updates starts competing with the time spent discussing outcomes
2. “Who’s actually responsible for this key result?”
Adding an “Owner” column feels like accountability. In practice, it often isn’t.
Names stay attached to key results long after roles shift. Work that spans teams ends up with shared ownership, which usually means no one feels fully responsible.
When progress slows, the spreadsheet doesn’t surface that ambiguity. It just continues to display a name in a cell.
As teams grow, ownership needs to be more than a label. It needs to be clear, visible, and consistently enforced. When accountability depends on memory or informal agreement, confusion builds slowly. You don’t notice it in week one, but you do feel it by the end of the quarter.
3. “Can someone send me the latest version before the meeting?”
This is usually the moment version control becomes a real problem.
It starts quietly. Someone exports the sheet to prepare slides and edits get made in that copy. Meanwhile, the original file keeps evolving. Before long, there are multiple versions floating around, each slightly different.
It often looks like:
- Exported versions used in presentations
- Edits made in duplicated files rather than the primary sheet
- Leadership reviewing numbers that don’t match what teams see
When people begin asking which version is correct, attention shifts away from performance and toward reconciliation. Even small inconsistencies slow decisions and chip away at trust in the data.
A single, live source of truth removes that friction. When everyone is looking at the same numbers, conversations stay focused on outcomes rather than file management.
4. “Why didn’t we catch this sooner?”
This question usually comes up after a key result has been off track for weeks.
In a spreadsheet, nothing changes unless someone changes it. A key result that shows 40% progress today will still show 40% next week if no one updates the cell. There’s no signal that progress has stalled and no prompt that something hasn’t moved.
Leadership often notices the problem during a monthly review or at the end of the quarter. At that point, the conversation shifts to damage control. There’s less room to adjust priorities or reallocate effort.
Earlier visibility changes how a cycle unfolds. When stalled progress is obvious in week three or four, teams can respond while there’s still time to move the outcome.
5. “How does this team’s OKRs connect to what we’re trying to achieve as a company?”
Alignment becomes harder to follow as more teams get added.
What starts as one clean sheet slowly turns into multiple tabs. Product OKRs have their own tab. Sales OKRs are tracked differently and engineering OKRs use a slightly different format. Scoring definitions drift. Dependencies live in people’s heads rather than in the system.
Most teams understand what they’re working on. Fewer can clearly explain how that work ties back to company-level objectives without opening another document or asking for context.
When alignment isn’t immediately visible, OKRs lose some of their coordinating power. They become a set of parallel goals rather than a shared direction.
When Is the Right Time to Switch?
Teams usually move beyond spreadsheets when maintaining the system starts taking more effort than reviewing the outcomes themselves.
Migration does require work as data has to be moved, habits need to adjust and people have to get comfortable with a new interface. The coordination overhead of staying in a system that no longer supports accountability, visibility, or alignment continues to grow each quarter.
If several of the five questions above show up repeatedly in your internal conversations, the spreadsheet has likely reached its practical limit. The patterns tend to cluster together, and seeing them side by side makes the shift easier to evaluate
When the same questions keep coming up and the same friction keeps repeating, it usually means the system itself is the constraint. At that point, effort and discipline aren’t the issue. The structure is.
What to Look for in OKR Software
When teams move on from spreadsheets, the temptation is to overcorrect and adopt software built for organizations much larger than their own. Extra layers of configuration and governance don’t necessarily improve execution. They often slow it down.
OKR software should make a few things obvious:
- Updates should take under two minutes
- Ownership should be clearly assigned and visible
- Progress should be visible across teams without extra reporting
- Company objectives and team OKRs should connect naturally
- Weekly check-ins should fit into existing workflows
If those basics aren’t immediately clear in the product experience, friction will return. It may look different, but it will feel familiar.
Spreadsheets work well when coordination is simple, but as teams grow and dependencies multiply, maintaining clarity requires a system designed to support shared visibility and consistent accountability across the organization.
