How to Cascade OKRs: Aligning Goals Across Your Organization

Last verified: February 2026

Overview

Cascading OKRs is the process of connecting company-level goals to team and individual objectives, ensuring everyone's work contributes to shared outcomes. Done well, cascading creates alignment without micromanagement. Done poorly, it creates a rigid top-down hierarchy that kills ownership.

The Alignment Spectrum

There are three approaches to OKR alignment:

1. Strict Cascading (Not Recommended)

Company OKRs → Department OKRs → Team OKRs → Individual OKRs

Every goal flows directly downward. This feels orderly but creates bottlenecks, reduces autonomy, and takes too long to finalize.

2. Directional Alignment (Recommended)

Company OKRs set direction. Teams create their own OKRs that contribute to company objectives, but they have autonomy over how they contribute.

3. No Alignment (Not Recommended)

Every team sets independent OKRs. This creates silos and duplicated effort.

The Recommended Process

Step 1: Set Company OKRs (Week 1)

Leadership sets 3-5 company-level OKRs for the quarter. These should be broad enough that multiple teams can contribute.

Example Company OKR:

Objective: Accelerate product-led growth
KR1: Increase free-to-paid conversion from 3% to 8%
KR2: Achieve 50% month-one retention rate
KR3: Reduce time-to-value from 7 days to 1 day

Step 2: Teams Draft Contributing OKRs (Week 2)

Each team asks: "How can we contribute to the company's objectives?"

Product Team OKR (contributing to Company KR3):

Objective: Make the first-run experience effortless
KR1: 80% of new users complete onboarding in under 10 minutes
KR2: Reduce support tickets from new users by 40%
KR3: Launch interactive product tour with 70%+ completion rate

Marketing Team OKR (contributing to Company KR1):

Objective: Build a conversion engine that turns users into customers
KR1: Increase trial-to-demo conversion from 12% to 25%
KR2: Launch 5 customer success stories targeting our ICP
KR3: Achieve 30% email nurture click-through rate

Step 3: Cross-Team Review (Week 2-3)

Teams share draft OKRs and identify:

Dependencies — "We need the design team to deliver X for our KR2"
Overlap — "Both marketing and product are targeting onboarding"
Gaps — "No team is owning the retention KR"

Step 4: Finalize and Publish (Week 3)

After alignment discussions, finalize OKRs and make them visible to the entire organization.

Best Practices

60/40 split — roughly 60% of team OKRs should align upward, 40% can be team-specific
Don't force every KR to cascade — some important team goals won't map to company OKRs
Avoid going deeper than 2 levels — Company → Team is sufficient for most organizations
Individual OKRs are optional — many companies skip them and use team OKRs only
Update alignment quarterly — as company priorities shift, team alignment should shift too

Common Pitfalls

Over-cascading — forcing 4+ levels of alignment creates bureaucracy
Copy-paste cascading — teams shouldn't just copy company KRs as their own
Ignoring cross-functional alignment — vertical alignment isn't enough; horizontal (team-to-team) matters too
Waiting for perfection — alignment is iterative, not perfect on day one

How Krezzo Helps

Krezzo provides visual alignment maps showing how team OKRs connect to company objectives. The platform highlights gaps where no team is contributing to a company KR, surfaces dependencies between teams, and makes the entire OKR hierarchy visible to everyone in the organization.

Sources

Doerr, John. Measure What Matters. Penguin, 2018.
Niven, Paul R. and Lamorte, Ben. Objectives and Key Results. Wiley, 2016.
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