Set better growth OKRs
It's not too late to fix them
t feels like there’s one thing on everyone’s mind—OK, one thing other than Christmas: Q1 goals and OKRs.
Everyone is in full planning mode, finalizing their goals for 2025.
But before you dot your i’s and cross your t’s, I’d love to challenge you on your OKRs: Are they really setting you up for success?
I see way too many startups setting bad metrics that result in the wrong focus and ultimately missing their goals.
So, let’s walk through a few examples.
1. Increase sessions
What’s wrong with it: Quantity doesn’t mean quality. You can improve your SEO, set your Meta campaigns to a traffic goal, or get lower-quality traffic in through a platform like Taboola, but it doesn’t mean you’ll hit your goals.
What’s a better metric: I usually avoid focusing on sessions and instead prioritize the source of the sessions we need and the action we want (e.g., improving email conversions). However, if you want to track sessions, I’d add a quality measure, such as time on site or engagement with a certain element. Also, set clear rules about what isn’t allowed to count toward that goal.
2. Improve retention rate
What’s wrong with it: Even in a startup, this is too broad. Retention is impacted by activation, customer retention, and churn prevention. You need to identify where the issue lies and zoom in on that.
What’s a better metric: Focus on one part of the journey, such as the 1st-to-2nd order rate or subscription voluntary churn, to make it more specific.
3. Increase conversion rate
What’s wrong with it: In a startup, too many variables impact your conversion rate—from testing new channels to increasing ad spending to shifting focus away from blog traffic. Your conversion rate may increase without any actual increase in sales.
What’s a better metric: If you have enough traffic to A/B test, I love tracking the overall lift in purchase conversion rate from tests. While this is often over-estimated, it gives you a clearer idea of whether things are improving. Alternatively, look for a more stable channel with consistent conversion rates and use it as a baseline.
4. Increase the number of new customers
What’s wrong with it: This metric is too broad. You could do anything to achieve this goal, but goals are meant to provide focus, not send you in ten different directions.
What’s a better metric? Get specific about the channels or methods you’ll use to increase new customers and set requirements around those customers (e.g., CAC/LTV ratio). Even better: Identify why you can’t scale customers right now and work on solving those foundational issues. For example, if LTV is too low to justify a reasonable CAC, your focus should actually be on a retention-related metric.
I’ve seen the above types of goals time and time again. In trying to get to a better goal, here are some of the questions I get them to think about:
Does this metric drive focus?
Will we hit our overarching goal if we improve this metric?
What else could cause this metric to increase or decrease?
Could this metric be gamified or encourage the wrong behavior?
Does this metric help us understand bottlenecks and/or opportunities?
Is this focused on an output rather than an outcome (e.g., “test 20 new ads”)?
If you’d like some more examples on how to narrow down a growth OKR for D2C you can get a free preview of a lesson from my course on Building an Impactful Growth Experimentation Process. It shares two more examples of potential growth levers to focus on.
Recommendation
While OKRs and goal-setting are tricky to get right, I’ve found Measure What Matters helpful for understanding how to use OKRs effectively to drive focus and alignment.
You can find it online here.
This is my last day before the Christmas break, and I’m excited for a week back in the Netherlands with family and friends after what has been an intense year.
You’ll still get a newsletter next week, but it’ll arrive a day later—I don’t want to bother anyone celebrating Boxing Day. You’ll get a newsletter filled with my best content of the last year.
Till next time,
Daphne