How to Plan the Next Quarter with OKRs Like a Scale-up

Staying focused and aligned in the fast-paced world of scale-ups is crucial to achieving rapid growth and success. One proven framework that can help scale-ups maintain this focus is OKRs—Objectives and Key Results.

At its core, the OKR framework is designed to help organizations set clear, measurable goals and track their progress. Yet, the success of such a framework comes and goes with how you implement it in your business.

In fact, research by Locke & Latham shows that setting specific, challenging goals is one of the most effective ways of improving productivity when done right.

But here's what most guides don't tell you: planning the quarter is the easy part. The hard part is translating those plans into weekly action.

In this comprehensive guide, we'll break down not just how to set quarterly OKRs, but how to ensure they actually drive your team's work every single week.

Understanding OKRs

What Are OKRs?

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal-setting framework that helps organizations define and track objectives and their outcomes.

• An Objective is what you want your team to achieve. It's the direction you set—significant, concrete, action-oriented, and inspirational.
• A Key Result explains how you measure that you're getting closer to the destination—specific, time-bound, aggressive yet realistic, measurable, and verifiable.

This example is effective because it provides a clear direction (Objective) and measurable outcomes (Key Results). Setting such specific and ambitious targets creates a roadmap for your team to follow.

For more foundational information on OKRs, check out What is an OKR?.

Initiatives: The Secret That Makes OKRs Work

How often have you set a goal only to reflect a few months later and realize you didn't take any steps to achieve it?

No worries, we've all been guilty of it.

But how do you fix that? By connecting daily and weekly tasks to your OKRs. We call these tasks initiatives. Initiatives are the things you and your team do to achieve the OKRs.

By tracking them alongside your OKRs, everyone knows every single day what they need to do to achieve your business's goals. It immediately becomes visible when someone is struggling and not completing their initiatives.

The Benefits of Using OKRs + Initiatives:

• Focus: Helps teams concentrate on what truly matters
• Alignment: Ensures everyone is working towards the same goals
• Commitment: Creates a culture of accountability
• Tracking: Allows for close progress monitoring visible to everyone
• Stretching: Ensures you reach more than everyone thought possible

The Importance of Quarterly Planning

Why Quarterly Planning Is Crucial for Scale-ups

Quarterly planning allows scale-ups to remain agile and responsive to market changes. It provides a regular cadence for reviewing performance, adjusting strategies, and setting new priorities. This ensures that the team stays aligned and focuses on the most critical objectives.

In the fast-paced environment of a scale-up, things can change rapidly. Quarterly planning helps maintain momentum while providing the flexibility to pivot as needed. Breaking down annual goals into quarterly objectives ensures everyone remains focused on achieving short-term milestones that drive long-term success.

How OKRs Fit Into Quarterly Planning

OKRs provide a structured way to set and achieve goals within a quarter. They help translate high-level company vision into actionable and measurable targets that can be tackled over three months, ensuring continuous progress and alignment.

Setting OKRs every quarter creates a rhythm that keeps your team engaged and motivated. Each quarter, you can assess what's working, make necessary adjustments, and set new objectives that align with your evolving business priorities.

The Step-by-Step Planning Process

Let's walk through the complete quarterly planning process:

OKR Overview Dashboard

Step 1: Review the Previous Quarter

If you've set OKRs before, start here.

Analyze which objectives were met and which were not. Discuss what worked, what didn't, and why. This retrospective will provide valuable insights for the next planning cycle.

Understanding past performance helps you identify patterns, learn from mistakes, and build on successes. It sets the foundation for more effective planning and execution in the upcoming quarter.

Questions to ask:

• Which Key Results did we achieve? Which did we miss?
• What initiatives moved the needle most?
• Where did we get distracted from our priorities?
• What should we do differently this quarter?

Step 2: Define the Company-Level OKR

When it comes to OKRs in scale-ups, less is more. Don't overcomplicate the OKR-setting process by defining too many OKRs. Start with your company's most important goal.

How do you define the company-level OKR? Look at your goal for this year and ask yourself: "What must we change or improve to achieve that goal?"

The answer to this question will be your company-level OKR. Focusing on a single, impactful objective ensures the entire company is aligned and working towards a common purpose, maximizing your chances of success.

Step 3: Define Team-Level OKRs (Optional)

Now that you have defined the company-level OKR, ask each team to define team-level OKRs that align with it.

They can ask themselves the same question: "What must our team change or improve to help us achieve our company-level OKR?"

OKRs ensure that all team members focus on the top priorities. Adding more OKRs creates more priorities and distractions.

I only recommend adding team OKRs when they make sense—for example, when a team cannot directly contribute to the company-level OKRs through initiatives alone.

Step 4: Assign Accountability

Assigning accountability is a critical step in ensuring the success of your OKRs. Once your company-level and team-level OKRs are defined, designate specific individuals for each Key Result.

Being accountable means providing an account of what's happening regarding the Key Result. Other people can hold you accountable by asking questions about progress.

Important: Accountability does not mean that the person does all the work; it means they know what's going on and report on it.

Just being accountable to someone else can help drive performance. This creates a sense of ownership and responsibility, ensuring everyone is committed to achieving the objectives.

Step 5: Create Initiatives

The most crucial step in the planning process is creating initiatives. This is where you connect higher-level goals with people's daily activities.

Start by thinking about what you must do to achieve your OKRs and writing them down. Let each team do this for themselves. They could create initiatives for both company-level and team-level OKRs.

Initiative Planning

Push for collaboration. You want teams not to work in silos but rather help each other achieve their goals. This won't happen automatically—you need to actively encourage cross-team initiatives.

Step 6: Communicate and Make Progress Visible

Share the finalized OKRs and initiatives with the entire team. Do this in such a way that progress on the OKRs and initiatives is visible to everyone all the time.

Use an OKR management solution like Loach to easily manage all your OKRs and initiatives in one place.

From Quarterly Plan to Weekly Execution

Here's where most OKR guides end—and where most teams fail.

Planning the quarter is the easy part. The hard part? Translating those plans into weekly action.

The typical pattern:

• Week 1: Your team remembers the OKRs
• Week 4: Half your team forgot what the goals were
• Week 12: Your OKRs are collecting dust

The Weekly Planning Process

To prevent the "dust-collecting" problem, you need a weekly rhythm that connects quarterly OKRs to daily work.

Every Monday, each team member should be able to answer:

1. What is our team's strategic focus this week?
2. Which initiatives should I prioritize?
3. How does my work this week connect to our quarterly OKRs?

Weekly Check-in

Breaking Down OKRs Into Weekly Focus Areas

The secret to OKR execution is decomposition—breaking abstract quarterly goals into concrete weekly priorities.

Example:

Quarter OKR	Monthly Milestone	Weekly Focus
Get 100 G2 reviews	Month 1: 25 reviews	Week 1: Set up review request automation
		Week 2: Send campaign to recent customers
	Month 2: 60 reviews	Week 5: Identify promoters from NPS data
		Week 6: Personal outreach to top customers

This decomposition ensures that every week, your team knows exactly what actions drive progress toward quarterly goals.

Make Progress Visible

Ensure that everyone knows the current status of the OKRs and the initiatives. You want to create a culture of accountability where everybody says what they will do and does what they have said.

The best way to do this is by making progress transparent to everyone. Utilize dashboards, regular updates, and visual tracking tools to keep everyone informed about progress toward the OKRs.

OKR Dashboard

Regular Check-Ins and Progress Reviews

Ensure all team members update their OKRs and initiatives weekly. Ask them what they achieved that week and what is holding them back from achieving more.

Schedule a weekly all-hands meeting to review progress, check-ins, and discuss blockers with the team. From what I've seen, this is the best way to hold people accountable and remove blockers quickly.

The weekly check-in should take no more than 5-10 minutes per person. If it's taking longer, you're doing it wrong.

Adjusting and Pivoting as Needed

Be flexible and ready to adjust OKRs if necessary. Updating your OKRs as market conditions change or new opportunities arise is a sign of staying relevant and effective.

Don't be afraid to pivot if specific objectives no longer align with your overall strategy or if external circumstances change. This adaptability ensures that your team remains focused on the most important goals, even as the business environment evolves.

Tips for Success

Keep OKRs Simple and Focused

Avoid overloading with too many objectives. Focus on a few key priorities that will drive the most significant impact.

Simplifying OKRs helps prevent overwhelm and ensures that everyone understands what is most important. Aim for clarity and precision in your objectives and key results so your team can easily grasp and focus on their goals.

Encourage Team Collaboration and Ownership

Involve the team in setting OKRs and emphasize their role in achieving them. This fosters a sense of collaboration and commitment to the shared goals.

When team members participate in the OKR-setting process, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for the outcomes. Encourage open communication and collective problem-solving to strengthen team cohesion.

Avoid Common Pitfalls

How Loach Helps Teams Execute

Loach is designed specifically to solve the translation gap between quarterly OKRs and weekly execution.

How it works:

1. Quarterly: Break Down OKRs

   • Input your OKRs
   • AI-guided process helps decompose them into weekly focus areas
   • Output: Clear roadmap from quarter to week

2. Weekly: See What Matters

   • Teams open Loach for Monday planning
   • See your strategic focus this week
   • Add operational work alongside strategic priorities
   • Output: Clear plan with strategic work protected

3. Ongoing: Adjust and Learn

   • Simple weekly check-ins on progress
   • Adjust plans based on reality
   • Stay aligned without endless meetings

OKR Architect - AI-Guided Planning

The result: Teams that actually use their OKRs weekly, instead of letting them collect dust until the quarterly review.

---

Conclusion

Quarterly planning with OKRs doesn't have to be complicated. With these simple, actionable steps, you can create a clear roadmap for your scale-up's success.

But remember: setting OKRs is just the beginning. The real work is translating those quarterly goals into weekly action—every single week.

Keep your OKRs straightforward and focused. Connect them to weekly initiatives. Make progress visible. And use tools that help you plan, not just track.

---

Related resources:

• How to Set Effective OKRs — Step-by-step framework with templates
• Weekly OKR Execution — Turn quarterly goals into weekly plans
• The Translation Gap — Why most OKRs fail and how to fix it

---

Ready to turn your OKRs into weekly action plans? Get started with Loach.