OKRs don't fail. Check-ins do.

Google adopted OKRs in 1999, when John Doerr brought them over from Intel, and never let go. LinkedIn, Spotify, Twitter, and Airbnb built theirs the same way. On the other side of the table, venture firms like Kleiner Perkins run their own portfolios on OKRs and expect the companies they fund to do the same.

But this isn't a Silicon Valley franchise. OKRs aren't reserved for household names, nine-figure raises, or companies headquartered in the US. Strip away the logos and what's left is a simple habit: say what you're trying to achieve, say how you'll know you got there, and check in on it every week. A ten-person team in Singapore needs that as much as a ten-thousand-person one in Mountain View — arguably more, because a small company can't afford for its strategy to live only in the founder's head.

At its core, an OKR is an act of communication. It's how a leader turns a vision into something the whole company can hold — and how someone on a working-level team turns that vision into a Tuesday afternoon's work.

The alternative to OKRs isn't "no structure" — it's micromanagement. And the way out of micromanagement was never tighter oversight. It's hiring good people, telling them clearly why the company is doing what it's doing, and then trusting them to figure out how. OKRs are the mechanism for that trust: they let a founder say "here's where we're going and why" once, well, instead of relitigating it in every meeting.

Small companies scale almost for free. Double the headcount of a five-person startup and you roughly double what it ships — everyone can still fit around one table and hold the whole strategy in their head.

That stops being true at some point. One founder put it in pizza terms: once a team is too big to feed with two large pizzas, its output stops scaling in a straight line. Past that size, growth starts costing you in coordination — more management overhead, more meetings to stay aligned, and worse, people quietly pulling in different directions, their effort canceling out instead of adding up.

OKRs exist for exactly that moment. They're the structure that lets a company keep growing without growth itself becoming the thing that slows it down.