How to Write Measurable Key Results

Turn aspirations into outcomes you can track every week

3.1. From aspiration to measurement

Objectives capture your aspirations. To act on them, you need numbers. Key Results translate "we want to improve this" into "this is how much better it should be by the end of the cycle."

A Key Result is a measurable outcome that proves whether an Objective is being achieved. If the Objective is your destination, Key Results are the milestones on the road that tell you you're getting closer, not just driving in circles.

3.2. Outcome vs. output

The most important concept when writing Key Results is the difference between outcomes and outputs.

Outputs are activities or deliverables — things you do or create. Examples: "Run 5 webinars", "Ship new onboarding flow", "Write documentation."

Outcomes are the effects of those activities on the real world. Examples: "Generate 100 qualified leads", "Increase activation rate from 40% to 60%", "Reduce support tickets by 30%."

Key Results should always be outcomes. Shipping a feature is not success by itself; success is what happens because you shipped it — more usage, more revenue, fewer errors, happier customers.

Try this reframing: Output: "Launch new pricing page." — Outcome Key Result: "Increase pricing page conversion rate from 3% to 5%."

3.3. The structure of a strong Key Result

Good Key Results follow a clear pattern: they specify a metric (what you measure), they state the starting point and target (from X to Y), and they are realistic but challenging within one cycle.

Examples: "Increase monthly active users from 10,000 to 15,000." — "Raise customer satisfaction (CSAT) from 4.1 to 4.5." — "Reduce average cycle time from 10 days to 7 days." — "Increase trial-to-paid conversion from 12% to 20%."

If you can't put a number in your Key Result, it might be a sign you don't yet know how to measure success — or that what you have is still an Objective or a task, not a result.

3.4. How many Key Results per Objective?

You typically want 2–5 Key Results per Objective. Fewer than 2 and you may be oversimplifying the Objective. More than 5 and you are probably mixing multiple ideas into one Objective, or tracking every possible number instead of the few that really matter.

A healthy pattern is to start by brainstorming a list of potential metrics, then narrow it down to the 3–4 that best capture the essence of the Objective. The rest can be supporting metrics or dashboard numbers, but they don't all need to be Key Results.

3.5. Types of metrics you can use

Key Results can be expressed through different types of metrics. pegore supports varied metric types so you can track the right shape for each goal.

Percentages: "Increase activation rate from 40% to 60%."

Absolute counts: "Reach 200 marketing qualified leads per month."

Revenue / currency: "Grow monthly recurring revenue from $5,000 to $8,000."

Time / speed: "Reduce average response time from 12 hours to 4 hours."

Quality scores: "Improve app rating from 3.8 to 4.5."

Binary / milestone: "Ship the new onboarding experience to 100% of new users."

In pegore, you can choose from different metric types (percent, number, currency, score, milestone, streak, and more) to match the nature of each Key Result and keep updates simple during check-ins.

3.6. Avoiding vanity metrics

Vanity metrics look impressive but don't tell you much about real progress. For Key Results, you generally want metrics that are closely tied to your Objective, sensitive to your actions within one cycle, and harder to "game" without genuine improvement.

For example, "number of social media followers" can be a vanity metric if your true Objective is revenue or product usage. A stronger Key Result might be "Increase website sign-ups from social channels from 50 to 150 per month."

Whenever you propose a Key Result, ask: "If this number goes up, have we really moved closer to the Objective — or just made a dashboard look better?"

3.7. Mini exercise — Turn tasks into Key Results

List 5 tasks or projects you worked on recently (for example: "ran onboarding webinar", "created FAQ page", "contacted churned customers"). For each one, ask: "If this goes well, what should change in the numbers?" Then write a Key Result using a "from X to Y" structure.

Once you are comfortable with this pattern, you are ready to connect Key Results to a real-world rhythm — which is exactly what you will learn in the next chapter on the OKR cycle and check-ins.

Example

Task: Follow up with churned customers.

Output (weak): "Contact 20 churned customers this month."

Outcome Key Result (strong): "Recover 10 churned customers and reduce monthly churn rate from 5% to 3%."

The output measures effort; the Key Result measures the change that effort is meant to create.