Every January, B2B SaaS Guru does what every company does: we gather in a room, we open a template, and we spend four hours converting hope into a spreadsheet. This year we set nine Key Results across three Objectives. We tracked them in a dashboard. The dashboard had a URL. People bookmarked it.
In the spirit of radical transparency, we recently attempted a Q1 OKR retrospective, six months late, and discovered something remarkable: nobody could locate the original doc. What follows is our honest, memory-based reconstruction of what we believe we set out to achieve, and what actually happened.
Objective 1: "Delight the customer at every touchpoint"
We are fairly confident this was one of our Objectives, because it appears, verbatim, in every OKR-setting exercise conducted by any company in recorded history. Nobody present in the retrospective could name a single Key Result underneath it. One participant recalled "something about NPS." Another recalled that NPS had, at some point, "gone up," though whether this occurred during Q1, whether it was measured, or whether the participant was thinking of a different company's NPS, could not be confirmed.
Status: Presumed delighted. Customer unavailable for comment.
Objective 2: "Scale the platform for enterprise"
This Objective had a Key Result we do remember, because it was a number, and numbers are the only part of an OKR anyone retains past March: "Reduce P95 latency by 40%." We reduced P95 latency by 40%. We are very proud of this. We would like to note that P95 latency has since drifted back up by roughly 40%, in a process engineering refers to as "regression" and everyone else refers to as "load-bearing forgetting" — the specific skill of hitting a number once, screenshotting the dashboard, and never looking at it again.
Status: Achieved, then quietly un-achieved, off the books.
Objective 3: "Foster a culture of ownership"
Nobody could recall this Objective's Key Results at all. Someone suggested it might have been "increase eNPS," which is Net Promoter Score for employees, a metric invented so that companies could apply customer-satisfaction math to the question of whether their own staff enjoy existing there. We do not run this survey. We have never run this survey. We are now unsure whether this Objective was real or whether it was hallucinated by the retrospective itself, a phenomenon we have started calling OKR confabulation: the confident recollection of a goal you're pretty sure sounds like something we'd set.
What we learned
A Key Result you have to look up is a Key Result you didn't hit. The ones we remembered were the ones with a number attached to a dashboard we happened to open for an unrelated reason. Everything stored only in the doc is, six months later, indistinguishable from a goal we made up just now to sound accountable.
"Aligned" and "forgotten" produce the same Q3. The whole promise of OKRs is that everyone rows in the same direction. What we actually got was everyone rowing in whatever direction their manager mentioned in a 1:1 sometime in February, which is a fine direction, just not one that was voted on by nine Key Results in January.
The retrospective is the only part anyone does honestly, because by the time it happens, the stakes are gone. Nobody's bonus depends on Q1 anymore. This is also, not coincidentally, the only meeting all quarter where anyone said "we didn't do that" out loud instead of routing it through a dashboard color.
Our recommendation
Set three OKRs. Put them somewhere you will see them by accident — a Slack topic, a monitor nobody turns off, the subject line of a recurring calendar invite you can't delete. Do not put them somewhere you have to choose to look, because you won't, and six months from now you'll be doing this exact exercise with slightly better lighting.
If your Q1 OKRs are currently a Notion page with two views and one broken formula, email us at contact@b2bsaas.guru. We'll help you write next year's. We can't promise anyone will remember them either, but we can make the retrospective very funny.