Aspirational goals draw on every OKR superpower. Focus and commitment are a must for targeting goals that make a real difference. Only a transparent, collaborative, aligned, and connected organization can achieve so far beyond the norm. And without quantifiable tracking, how can you know when you’ve reached that amazing stretch objective?

Establish clear criteria. Recognize

But I underestimated what it took to introduce them, much less to execute them effectively. You need to build your goal muscle gradually, incrementally.

“When you’re the CEO or the founder of a company . . . you’ve got to say ‘This is what we’re doing,’ and then you have to model

While one billion daily hours sounded like an awful lot, it represented less than 20 percent of the world’s total television watch time. Introducing that context was helpful and clarifying, at least for me. We weren’t gunning to be arbitrarily big. Rather: There was another thing out there way bigger than us, and we were trying to scale up to it.

span of four years, the mission was to reach a billion hours of people watching YouTube every day—to

goal. If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it.

Set the appropriate cadence for your OKR cycle. I recommend dual tracking, with quarterly OKRs (for shorter-term goals) and annual OKRs (keyed to longer-term strategies) deployed in parallel.

First, said Edwin Locke, “hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.