Rock Your Strategy

Author: Paperclip Editor

  • How to Run Your OGSM Quarterly Review

    How to Run Your OGSM Quarterly Review

    Most OGSM plans quietly fall apart between reviews — not because the strategy was wrong, but because no one built a reliable ritual for interrogating it.

    Running an OGSM quarterly review means gathering your leadership team for 60–90 minutes to assess four things: whether your Objective still reflects your ambition, whether your Goals are on track, whether your Strategies are working, and whether your Measures are telling the truth. You review Dashboard Measures to check the scoreboard and Action Plan Measures to understand why. Then you decide: stay the course, adjust tactics, or trigger a full re-plan.

    In this article you’ll get a step-by-step facilitation guide — what to prepare before the meeting, the exact four questions to ask the room, how to update your OGSM documents correctly, and a 60–90 minute agenda you can run this quarter.

    What should you prepare before the quarterly review?

    The quality of your quarterly review is determined before anyone walks into the room. If you arrive with stale data and no pre-read, you’ll spend the first 30 minutes catching up instead of deciding.

    Prepare at least 48 hours before the session:

    • Update your Dashboard Measures. Pull actual vs. target for every Goal. If a measure is amber or red, be ready to explain the gap — not defend it.
    • Update your Action Plan Measures. Each Strategy should have measurable milestones. Gather those actuals too.
    • Prepare a one-page summary. A single document showing the current state of every Objective, Goal, Strategy, and Measure gives the room a shared starting point. Our OGSM template is built for exactly this.
    • Flag the outliers in advance. Don’t walk through everything line by line. Pre-identify the two or three items that need a real conversation and make sure everyone knows what they are.
    • Send the pre-read 24 hours before. Your team should arrive oriented, not overwhelmed. If people are still reading the summary when the meeting starts, you’ve already lost 20 minutes.

    The facilitation job gets much easier when the facts aren’t in dispute before you begin.

    What are the four questions to ask the room?

    The quarterly review is a structured interrogation of your OGSM. These four questions give the session its spine. Ask them in order.

    1. Is our Objective still the right ambition? Quarterly reviews rarely change the Objective — but you should ask. Has the competitive environment shifted? Has something internally changed the scope of what’s possible or necessary? If the answer is yes, flag it for a full re-plan (more on that below). If not, confirm it and move on quickly.

    2. Are our Goals on track? Goals are your quantified targets — revenue, market share, retention, whatever you committed to. Go Dashboard Measure by Dashboard Measure. Green means proceed with a brief acknowledgement. Amber means diagnose. Red means decide. Don’t skip the green ones — a quick confirmation that something is working builds team confidence and keeps the energy right before you hit the difficult conversations.

    3. Are our Strategies producing results? This is where most reviews get shallow. Strategy is how you intend to win — not a list of activities. The question is not “did we do the work?” but “is this approach generating the outcomes we expected?” Look at your Action Plan Measures here. If the activities are happening but the results aren’t following, your Strategy may be wrong — and that’s a different problem than your team underperforming.

    4. What decisions do we need to make today? Every quarterly review must close with explicit decisions, not vague intentions. Resources reallocated? Strategy retired? New initiative approved? Write them down and assign owners before you leave the room. If you leave without decisions, you held a status update, not a strategy review.

    How do you update Dashboard Measures versus Action Plan Measures?

    This is one of the most common points of confusion in OGSM practice, so let’s be precise.

    Dashboard Measures live at the Goal level. They tell you whether you’re on track to achieve your Objective via your Goals. These are typically lagging or leading indicators — monthly revenue, customer NPS, pipeline coverage, retention rate. You update them with actuals and compare against target. A Dashboard Measure tells you that there’s a problem.

    Action Plan Measures live at the Strategy level. They track whether your Strategies are being executed effectively — things like number of new partnerships activated, conversion rate changes from a specific initiative, or features shipped against a roadmap commitment. These tell you why you may be on or off track at the Goal level.

    The rule is simple: when a Dashboard Measure turns red, go immediately to the corresponding Action Plan Measures. The cause of the gap is almost always there. For a deeper look at how these two measure types work together and how to set them up correctly, read our guide to the OGSM Measures Column.

    Update both sets of measures before the meeting. Update the document formally after — with the decisions and any adjusted targets recorded against the relevant measures.

    When should a quarterly review trigger a full re-plan?

    Most quarterly reviews should end with small adjustments: tweak a Strategy, reallocate budget, retire an initiative that isn’t generating results. That’s healthy OGSM practice.

    A full re-plan is warranted when:

    • The Objective is no longer valid. A market shift, acquisition, or significant internal change has made the original ambition wrong or irrelevant.
    • Multiple Goals are structurally off track. Not a bad quarter, but a pattern that suggests the targets were wrong or the underlying business model has changed.
    • Core Strategies are clearly failing. Not just slow — genuinely not working, with no credible line-of-sight to recovery in the remaining period.
    • A critical assumption has been invalidated. Every Strategy is built on assumptions. If a core assumption has been proven wrong, the Strategy resting on it is suspect.

    Be honest here. Continuing to execute a plan everyone in the room knows is broken is more expensive than re-planning. Trigger the re-plan early and you’ll have better options. Waiting until the annual review because “we committed to this” just compounds the cost.

    What does a 60–90 minute quarterly review agenda look like?

    Keep the agenda tight. Quarterly reviews fail when they sprawl into all-day workshops. Here’s a structure that works for most leadership teams:

    0:00–0:10 — Open and orient (10 min) Confirm everyone has reviewed the pre-read. Note the key items flagged for discussion. Set the decision-making expectation: you’re leaving with explicit calls, not actions to investigate.

    0:10–0:30 — Dashboard review (20 min) Walk through each Goal and its Dashboard Measure: actual vs. target, trend, owner commentary. Mark green, amber, or red as you go. Keep green items brief.

    0:30–0:50 — Strategy deep dive (20 min) Focus only on amber and red Dashboard items. For each one, interrogate the Action Plan Measures. What’s driving the gap? Is the Strategy still valid, or does it need to change?

    0:50–1:10 — Decisions and adjustments (20 min) What changes? Who owns it? Are any Strategies being retired or replaced? Is a full re-plan needed? Every decision gets an owner and a due date before you move to the next one.

    1:10–1:20 — Close and next steps (10 min) Assign follow-up actions. Confirm the date and format of the next review. If you’re unsure how often you should be running these sessions, our article on OGSM review cadence covers the full annual rhythm and when to deviate from it.

    That’s a quarterly review that sharpens your strategy rather than just reporting on it. The difference between teams that execute well and teams that drift is usually this: the ones who execute have a meeting they can’t avoid where the facts are on the table and decisions have to be made. Build that meeting, run it well, and your OGSM becomes a live tool rather than a document that ages in a shared drive.

    Rock on.

  • Using OGSM to Build Your HR Strategy (With KPI Examples)

    Using OGSM to Build Your HR Strategy (With KPI Examples)

    Most HR strategies live in a slide deck that no one else in the business reads, references, or holds the HR function accountable to.

    OGSM for HR works by translating your company’s Strategies into people-function Goals and Measures. Instead of a standalone HR plan that runs parallel to the business, you build an HR OGSM that cascades directly from the corporate OGSM — so every people initiative traces back to a strategic bet the organisation has already made.

    This guide shows you how to build an HR OGSM that cascades directly from the corporate plan — with worked Goal examples, HR-specific Strategies, and a section on how to use it in budget and leadership conversations.

    HR strategy has a credibility problem. Not because HR leaders lack strategic thinking — it’s because the formats HR typically uses to communicate strategy (the 40-slide annual deck, the values posters, the competency framework) don’t connect to how the rest of the business plans. The CFO has a financial plan. The CPO has a product roadmap. The CHRO has a presentation.

    OGSM changes that. A one-page HR OGSM, built from the same framework the board uses for corporate strategy, is something every executive in the room can read, challenge, and hold the HR function accountable to. That shift — from HR as a support function with a deck to HR as a strategic function with a plan — is what most people-leaders are actually trying to achieve.

    Why Does HR Need a Strategy Framework at All?

    The honest answer: because people decisions are strategic decisions, and right now most organisations don’t treat them that way.

    Think about what’s actually inside an HR strategy: hiring plans, capability development, culture, performance management, compensation. These aren’t administrative choices — they’re the mechanisms by which a company builds the capacity to execute its strategy. Hire the wrong profiles and your growth plan stalls. Let attrition go unmanaged and your institutional knowledge walks out the door.

    The problem is that annual HR decks tend to list activities — programmes, initiatives, policies to update — rather than outcomes. The result is that HR leadership spends a lot of time defending budget for things that are hard to connect to business results.

    OGSM solves this by forcing the HR function to answer the same questions every other part of the business answers: What are we trying to achieve? How will we know if we’ve achieved it? What are we doing to get there? Expressed in a format that sits comfortably next to the corporate plan, not in a separate binder that only gets opened at the annual people review.

    I’ve seen HR teams go from defending headcount in budget reviews to setting the strategic agenda, simply by putting a one-page OGSM in front of the leadership team. The framework doesn’t change what HR does — it changes how clearly HR can show why it matters.

    How Do You Build an HR OGSM?

    The process follows the same four-layer logic as any OGSM, but each layer is interpreted through the lens of the people function. If your leadership team needs a shared grounding in the framework first, the full OGSM guide is the right starting point — then come back here for the HR-specific application.

    Step 1: Derive your HR Objective from the company Objective.

    Your HR Objective should be a direct expression of what the HR function needs to achieve for the company to hit its corporate Objective. If the company Objective is “become the most responsive B2B software provider in the UK mid-market,” the HR Objective might be: “Build the hiring engine and talent capability to power our scale — attracting, developing, and retaining the people the company needs to win.”

    The Objective is qualitative and aspirational, but it should be specific to your planning horizon. “Attract and retain great people” is not an Objective — it’s a job description. In my experience, the most common mistake at this stage is writing an HR Objective that sounds inspirational but doesn’t trace back to anything specific in the corporate plan.

    Step 2: Set Goals in people metrics.

    Goals in an HR OGSM are the quantified outcomes you’re committing to by year-end. They should be directly measurable and clearly linked to business impact. Good HR Goals typically come from three categories:

    • Acquisition: time-to-hire, offer acceptance rate, quality-of-hire scores
    • Retention and engagement: attrition rate, employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), regrettable loss rate
    • Capability: internal promotion rate, learning and development hours, performance distribution

    Aim for three to five Goals. Too many and the function loses focus. Too few and you’re probably not capturing the full scope of what’s at stake.

    Step 3: Define Strategies as people programmes and directional choices.

    HR Strategies are the choices you’re making about how you’ll move the needle on your Goals. They should be specific enough to brief a programme against, and they should map back to the company Strategies — each HR Strategy is the people-function response to a business-level strategic bet.

    For a company scaling aggressively into a new market, an HR Strategy might be: “Build a structured talent acquisition capability, shifting from reactive hiring to a proactive talent pipeline in our three key skill families.” That’s a directional choice that implies resourcing, tooling, and process decisions.

    Step 4: Set Measures as the KPIs you’ll track to know if the Strategies are working.

    Measures in an HR OGSM are the leading indicators — the data points that tell you whether your Strategies are executing before you can see it in the Goal outcomes. If your Strategy is building a talent pipeline, the Measure isn’t “time-to-hire” (that’s the Goal) — it’s “number of qualified candidates in active pipeline by role family” or “percentage of hires from proactive pipeline vs. reactive posting.”

    What Do Good HR OGSM Measures Look Like?

    This is where many HR OGSMs stall — not for lack of data, but for lack of agreed benchmarks. Here are five HR KPIs that work well as OGSM Measures, with the ranges I’d treat as credible targets for a scaling organisation.

    Time-to-hire: ≤21 days. Measured from job approval to accepted offer. Anything above 30 days in a competitive talent market is costing you candidates. The benchmark tightens for senior roles, but 21 days is a solid target for the majority of hires.

    Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): ≥30. Measured quarterly via a simple survey (“How likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work? 0–10”). A score of 30 puts you in the “good” range for most industries. Above 50 is excellent. Below 0 is a serious retention risk.

    Internal promotion rate: ≥25%. The percentage of open roles filled by internal candidates. Below 20% is a signal that either your development programmes aren’t working or your hiring managers don’t trust internal talent. Above 40% may indicate you’re not bringing in enough external perspective.

    L&D hours per employee per year: ≥20 hours. Twenty hours is roughly one learning day per quarter — achievable without dedicated learning infrastructure. Below 10 hours suggests learning is something the organisation talks about but doesn’t fund in practice.

    Retention rate: ≥88%. Equivalently, voluntary attrition below 12%. Above 15% in most sectors becomes structurally expensive — replacement costs typically run 50–150% of salary when you factor in hiring, onboarding, and lost productivity.

    These are starting points, not universal standards. Industry, company stage, and role mix all affect what “good” looks like in your context. But having explicit targets agreed at the start of the year changes the nature of the people review from a discussion about activity to a review of performance against plan.

    How Do You Connect Your HR OGSM to the Company OGSM?

    The connection is through cascade logic: every HR Strategy should trace back to a company Strategy. If you can’t make that link, the HR Strategy either doesn’t belong in the current year’s plan, or you need to go back to the corporate OGSM and ask whether it’s capturing the right things.

    In practice, the cascade works like this. The corporate OGSM includes a Strategy: “Scale our commercial team to triple revenue in the DACH region.” That Strategy implies a set of people requirements: specific hiring profiles, a different onboarding model, possibly new compensation structures for a European market. The HR OGSM captures those requirements as HR Strategies and Goals — not in a generic way, but in direct response to the specific business bet.

    This is the mechanism that gives HR strategy its credibility. When the CFO asks “why are we investing in this capability development programme?”, the answer isn’t “because L&D is important” — it’s “because Strategy 2 in the corporate OGSM requires us to build the product capability our current team doesn’t have, and this programme is the specific bet we’re making to close that gap.” That’s a different conversation.

    For a deeper look at how cascade logic works across the whole organisation, the OGSM cascade guide is worth reading before you build the first draft of your HR OGSM. And if you want a template to work from, the OGSM template includes a format that translates directly to HR use.

    The people function doesn’t need a separate strategy process. It needs to be built into the same one everyone else is using.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM for Startups: Does It Work Before Product-Market Fit?

    OGSM for Startups: Does It Work Before Product-Market Fit?

    There’s a version of OGSM that works before product-market fit — and it fits on a whiteboard.

    Most strategic frameworks were built for organisations that already know what they’re doing. OGSM is no exception — it was designed for Procter & Gamble, not for a two-person team pivoting every 90 days. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless before you hit product-market fit. It means you have to strip it back.

    This post walks through what pre-PMF OGSM looks like in practice, what to cut, and when you should forget OGSM entirely.

    Can OGSM Work Before You Have Product-Market Fit?

    Yes — with significant caveats.

    OGSM’s strength is alignment. It forces a team to agree on one Objective, a small number of Goals that define what success looks like, a handful of Strategies that describe how you’ll get there, and Measures that tell you whether your Strategies are working.

    At the pre-PMF stage, the alignment problem is real. Co-founders argue about whether to prioritise the enterprise deal or the self-serve funnel. The first engineer builds for scale while the founders are still testing whether anyone wants the product. A one-page strategic document can cut through that noise faster than any amount of Slack discussion.

    But here’s where it gets complicated. In a mature organisation, every element of an OGSM is grounded in data — historical performance, market research, validated positioning. Pre-PMF, you don’t have that. Your Objective, Goals, and Strategies are all hypotheses. Nothing is validated. The market may tell you in month three that your core assumption was wrong, and you’ll need to rewrite the whole thing.

    That’s fine. The OGSM is not a contract — it’s a shared bet. The value is the alignment it creates now, not the accuracy it guarantees later. But to get that value without the overhead, your pre-PMF OGSM needs to feel less like a three-year plan and more like a focused hypothesis for the next six months. Horizon matters enormously here. Cut it to 90–180 days maximum and commit to reviewing it at the end of that window.

    What Does a Pre-PMF OGSM Actually Look Like?

    Here’s a worked example for a pre-revenue B2B SaaS startup building a compliance automation tool for SMEs.

    Objective: Become the compliance automation tool that professional services SMEs trust to manage their audit trails.

    Goals:

    1. Achieve 10 paying customers (minimum £99/month) by end of month five
    2. Reach NPS > 50 among pilot users after 60 days of use

    Strategies:

    1. Direct outreach to compliance managers in legal and accounting firms via founder-led LinkedIn outreach — 20 targeted messages per founder per week, no automation
    2. Ship fortnightly based on pilot feedback — biweekly releases tied directly to the highest-friction moments identified in customer interviews
    3. Run a 30-day free pilot with white-glove onboarding — reduce time-to-value so pilots convert before fatigue sets in

    Measures:

    • Outreach response rate (target: ≥15%)
    • Pilot-to-paid conversion rate (target: ≥40%)
    • Weekly active users among pilot cohort (target: ≥70%)

    Notice what this OGSM is doing — and what it isn’t.

    The Objective is qualitative and directional. It describes the position you want to own in your market, not a number you want to hit by a date. That logic belongs in Goals. Goals are where the measurable commitments live — 10 customers, NPS above 50. They tell you whether you’re on track to reach the Objective.

    Each Strategy is a real bet: a specific channel, a specific cadence, a specific go-to-market mechanism. There’s no hedging. If you chose LinkedIn outreach, you chose it over cold email, paid ads, and inbound SEO. That trade-off is the strategy. If every option still looks equally valid, you haven’t made a decision yet.

    The Measures are leading indicators, not lagging ones. Outreach response rate tells you whether your messaging is resonating before you know whether it converts. Pilot-to-paid conversion tells you whether the product earns its price before you’ve closed enough deals to know if the model works. That’s the point — Measures should give you signal early enough to change course.

    That’s it. One Objective. Two Goals. Three Strategies. A handful of Measures. It fits on one page. It could fit on a whiteboard. Nothing here requires a planning retreat or a strategy consultant — just a shared answer to the question: what are we actually trying to prove, and how?

    What Should You Strip Out of a Pre-PMF OGSM?

    Cascading Measures. In a full OGSM implementation, every Strategy has its own Measure set, and you may cascade further down into team or function-level Measures. Skip this entirely. You don’t have enough stable KPIs yet, and you’ll spend more time debating which metric belongs to which Strategy than you will running experiments. At this stage, pick three to five Measures that collectively tell you whether the Objective is on track — and leave it there. (For reference on what strong Measures look like at a later stage, see 7 OGSM Mistakes That Kill Your Strategy — the most common one is Measures that are outputs, not leading indicators.)

    More than three Strategies. If you have five or six Strategies pre-PMF, you’re either hedging or you haven’t made a real bet yet. Three Strategies is a hard cap. Preferably two. Each Strategy should represent a real trade-off — something you’re choosing to do instead of something else. If every option looks equally valid, you haven’t done the hard prioritisation work. Pick the bets with the most signal-per-effort and cut the rest.

    More than three Goals. Your Goals define what success looks like. Two to three Goals forces you to get specific about what actually matters in the next 90–180 days. More than that and you’re writing a wish list, not a strategy. If you have five Goals and they’re all “critical,” none of them are. Ruthlessly narrow it down to the two outcomes that would genuinely change what you do next.

    Long time horizons. Don’t write a three-year OGSM at the pre-PMF stage. You don’t have the data to justify it, and it will be out of date before the ink is dry. Stick to 90–180 days. Review it at the end of that period. If your hypothesis has changed — and it probably will — update your Objective and reset.

    How Do You Build Your First Pre-PMF OGSM?

    You don’t need a facilitated off-site. You need a half-day session with your co-founders and a shared document. Here’s a simple sequence that works.

    Start with the Objective. Before anything else, spend 30–45 minutes on the Objective alone. Write it individually, then compare. The Objective should describe the strategic position you’re trying to own — qualitative, directional, no dates. If you and your co-founder write different Objectives, that’s the most important conversation you’ll have all quarter. Don’t paper over it by merging both into a long sentence. Decide.

    Draft the Goals together. Once the Objective is agreed, Goals follow relatively quickly. Goals answer: what does success look like in numbers, by when? Aim for two Goals maximum at this stage. If you find yourself wanting a third, ask whether it’s really a Measure in disguise.

    Challenge every Strategy. For each proposed Strategy, ask: what is this instead of? If you can’t answer that, it’s not a Strategy — it’s a preference. A genuine Strategy has an opportunity cost. Write the alternative you rejected next to each Strategy you kept, and make sure the team understands why you chose this one.

    Set your Measures last. Measures are often written first because they feel concrete and comfortable. Write them last. Start from your Strategies and ask: what would tell us, within 30 days, whether this Strategy is working? The answer to that question is your Measure. If you can’t answer it, your Strategy isn’t specific enough yet.

    The whole session should take three to four hours maximum. If it’s taking longer, you’re probably arguing about the Objective — which means you skipped the most important step.

    What If You Don’t Know Your Objective Yet?

    This is the real test.

    OGSM’s entire structure hangs on the Objective. Everything else — Goals, Strategies, Measures — is in service of that one sentence. If you can’t write a clear Objective that your co-founders agree on, you’re not ready for OGSM yet.

    And that’s not a failure. It’s useful information.

    If you and your co-founder spend 45 minutes trying to write the Objective and can’t agree, you’ve just uncovered a misalignment that would have derailed any planning process. The OGSM template has done its job without you completing it.

    Common pre-PMF blockers to a clear Objective:

    • Disagreement about whether you’re targeting enterprises or SMEs
    • Uncertainty about whether you’re selling a product or a service
    • No shared view of the time horizon you’re planning against
    • An Objective that’s really a Goal (“grow to 100 customers”) rather than a directional statement (“become the default compliance tool for UK professional services firms”)

    That last one trips up a lot of founding teams. An Objective describes a position — where you want to be in the market, and for whom. A Goal describes a result — what you will achieve by a specific date. If your Objective has a number in it, it’s probably a Goal. For worked examples of how to write a strong OGSM Objective at different stages, see OGSM Objectives Examples.

    If you’re still stuck, don’t force the OGSM. Work on the Objective first — even if that means a half-day offsite with your co-founders before you open the template.

    What’s the Alternative at the Very Earliest Stage?

    If your team is fewer than five people, you’ve spoken to fewer than twenty potential customers, and you’re still testing your core value hypothesis — you might not need OGSM at all yet.

    Two simpler tools worth trying first:

    A one-pager. One sentence on the problem you’re solving, one sentence on the customer you’re solving it for, one sentence on your hypothesis about the solution, and three bullet points on what you’ll do in the next 30 days to test it. Fits in Notion. Can be updated in five minutes. Does not require a planning process.

    A hypothesis map. A simple visual structure: your assumption (customers in segment X will pay for Y to solve Z), the experiments you’re running to test it, and what you’ll conclude from each outcome. This is close enough to strategic planning for the very early stage without the overhead of a full OGSM structure.

    Neither of these replaces OGSM. They’re pre-OGSM — the planning work you do before you have enough signal to build a real strategy. Think of them as the foundation you lay so that, when you do write your first OGSM, it’s grounded in real customer understanding rather than founder assumptions.

    When Should You Graduate to a Full OGSM?

    Watch for three signals:

    1. A validated Objective. You know who your customer is, what job they’re hiring your product to do, and you have paying customers (not just pilots) who confirm it. Your Objective is no longer a hypothesis — it’s a direction the business has already started moving in.

    2. Stable KPIs. Your core metrics aren’t changing every sprint. You’ve settled on the two or three numbers that actually tell you whether the business is working — churn, CAC payback, NRR, whatever fits your model. Stable Measures are the prerequisite for a meaningful Measures cascade. If your definition of a “good week” changes month to month, you’re not there yet.

    3. A team that needs alignment. If it’s two co-founders and a contractor, informal alignment is probably fine. Once you’re hiring fast enough that people are making decisions without full context, OGSM starts earning its overhead. The first sign is usually when you realise two team members have conflicting assumptions about the strategy — and neither of them is wrong, they just never compared notes.

    Once you hit those three signals, you’re ready for the full version — Goals that cascade into team-level goals, Measures for each Strategy, and a quarterly planning process that involves the whole leadership team. For a detailed guide to what that looks like at the 20–100 person stage, see Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up?.

    OGSM is a focused tool. Used at the pre-PMF stage, it works best when it’s small, honest about uncertainty, and reviewed often. The goal isn’t to have a perfect strategy. It’s to have a shared bet — one that everyone on the founding team can recite from memory and hold each other accountable to.

    Rock on.

  • The OGSM Measures Column: Two Types, One Big Mistake Most Teams Make

    The OGSM Measures Column: Two Types, One Big Mistake Most Teams Make

    The OGSM Measures column does two jobs at once — and most teams only see one of them.

    The Measures column holds two fundamentally different types of content: Dashboard Measures (KPIs that tell you whether your strategy is working) and Action Plan Measures (specific initiatives with owners and deadlines that will make it work). Most teams treat the column as a single unified list and end up with a document that is neither a useful dashboard nor a credible action plan. Separating the two is the single clearest way to make your Measures column actually useful.

    This article explains both measure types in detail, shows you what each looks like in practice, and gives you a clear test for which type belongs where in your Measures column.

    OGSM Measures Explained: What Is the Measures Column Actually For?

    If you’ve read a standard OGSM explanation, you’ve probably seen the Measures column described as “how you’ll know you’re succeeding.” That’s true, but incomplete. In practice, the column carries two fundamentally different types of information — and they serve different masters.

    One type answers: Is our strategy working?
    The other answers: What are we doing to make it work?

    These are not the same question. Conflating them is how an OGSM ends up as a project plan dressed up as a strategy.

    What Are Dashboard Measures?

    Dashboard Measures are the KPIs that track whether a Strategy is delivering results. They’re lagging or leading indicators — numbers you monitor regularly to diagnose health, not manage tasks.

    What they look like:

    • Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth: +8% quarter-on-quarter
    • Customer retention rate: ≥ 87%
    • Net Promoter Score: ≥ 42 (tracked monthly)
    • Time to hire: ≤ 21 days

    These measures exist to answer one question: is the Strategy producing the outcome we predicted? They’re visible on a dashboard, reviewed in monthly or quarterly business reviews, and owned by whoever is accountable for the Strategy.

    Dashboard Measures should be outcome-oriented, quantified, and time-bound. If a measure can’t be plotted on a trend line over time, it probably isn’t a Dashboard Measure.

    The review cadence for Dashboard Measures aligns with your strategic review rhythm — typically monthly for fast-moving strategies, quarterly for longer-horizon objectives. For more on building that rhythm, see our guide to OGSM review cadence.

    What Are Action Plan Measures?

    Action Plan Measures are the specific initiatives, workstreams, and milestones that will cause the strategy to succeed. They’re not metrics — they’re commitments.

    What they look like:

    • Launch new onboarding email sequence — Owner: Head of CX — Due: 30 June
    • Complete competitive pricing review — Owner: Commercial Director — Due: 15 May
    • Pilot referral programme in 3 accounts — Owner: Sales Lead — Due: Q3

    Action Plan Measures carry three essential components: what is being done, who owns it, and by when. Without all three, it’s a wish, not a measure.

    These are reviewed in operational rhythm — weekly or fortnightly in execution meetings. They’re not strategic indicators; they’re the levers you’re pulling to move the strategic indicators.

    What’s the Difference Between Dashboard and Action Plan Measures?

    Dashboard Measures Action Plan Measures
    What it tracks Outcome / health of the strategy Activities / execution progress
    Who owns it Strategy owner Initiative lead
    Review cadence Monthly / quarterly Weekly / fortnightly
    Format Number + target + trend Task + owner + deadline
    Retail example Like-for-like sales growth ≥ 5% Launch loyalty card pilot — Head of Retail — Q2
    SaaS example Logo churn rate ≤ 1.5% / month Redesign in-app onboarding — Product Lead — May
    Services example Client satisfaction score ≥ 4.2/5 Roll out quarterly account reviews — CS Director — Q1

    The key distinction: Dashboard Measures tell you how you’re doing. Action Plan Measures tell you what you’re doing. Both belong in the Measures column, but they should never be confused with each other.

    What’s the Most Common Mistake Teams Make with Measures?

    Here’s what I see most often when I audit an OGSM: the Measures column is filled entirely with activities.

    “Run leadership training programme.”
    “Implement new CRM.”
    “Review supplier contracts.”

    These aren’t measures. They’re tasks. And when the entire Measures column looks like this, the OGSM has lost its strategic function. You can tick every box and still have no idea whether your strategy is working.

    The underlying cause is usually one of two things: the team found Dashboard Measures hard to define (it requires knowing what “success” actually looks like, which is uncomfortable), or they copied Action Plan items into the Measures column without adding the corresponding KPIs.

    The result is an OGSM that answers what are we doing but never asks is it working. That’s a project plan. A strategy document needs both.

    This connects directly to the most common pattern of OGSM failure. If you’re diagnosing a broader OGSM that feels off, the full OGSM guide covers the framework end-to-end and explains how each column should relate to the others.

    How Do You Tell Dashboard Measures from Action Plan Measures?

    If you’re staring at your Measures column and not sure what you’ve got, run each entry through these three questions:

    1. Can you plot it on a graph over time?
    If yes, it’s probably a Dashboard Measure. If not — if it’s an event that happens once — it’s an Action Plan Measure.

    2. Does it have a named owner and a deadline?
    If it has both, it’s an Action Plan Measure. If it’s tracked at team level without a single accountable person, it’s likely a Dashboard Measure.

    3. Does it tell you if the strategy is working — or just that someone is working on it?
    This is the most important question. A Dashboard Measure tells you about outcomes. An Action Plan Measure tells you about activity. Both are necessary. Neither substitutes for the other.

    For a deeper look at how Measures relate to Goals in the framework, the OGSM Goals vs Measures explainer covers the structural logic in full.

    How Do You Fix Your Measures Column Without Starting Over?

    If your existing OGSM is live and you want to fix the Measures column without rebuilding from scratch, here’s the simplest approach:

    1. Separate the two types. Create two sections within the Measures column: one for Dashboard Measures (KPIs), one for Action Plan (initiatives). Even just labelling them helps.
    2. Check every Dashboard Measure for a number, unit, and timeframe. “Improve retention” is not a measure. “Retention rate ≥ 88% by Q4” is.
    3. Check every Action Plan item for an owner and a deadline. If either is missing, it’s incomplete. No owner means no accountability. No deadline means no urgency.

    This audit takes less than an hour for most OGSMs and tends to surface uncomfortable conversations that were previously hidden inside vague language — which is exactly the point.

    For a complete list of what good Measures look like across different types of organisations, the OGSM Measures examples article covers retail, SaaS, professional services, and public sector in detail.

    Why Does Getting This Distinction Right Actually Matter?

    The OGSM framework works because it forces alignment between intent and action. The Objective captures where you’re going. The Goal quantifies it. The Strategies define how you’ll compete to get there. The Measures column — when it works — shows both whether the strategies are producing results and what the team is doing to execute them.

    When the column collapses into a flat task list, that connection breaks. You lose the feedback loop that makes the OGSM useful as a management tool, not just a planning artifact.

    Get both types of Measures right, and your OGSM becomes something you actually want to open at the start of every review meeting.

    Rock on.

  • The Most Common OGSM Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

    The Most Common OGSM Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

    The OGSM template looks deceptively simple — four boxes — and most teams fill it in wrong in exactly the same predictable ways.

    The most common OGSM mistakes aren’t about formatting — they’re about thinking. Most teams fill in the template correctly but miss the logic underneath: one clear Objective, a single measurable Goal, Strategies that genuinely guide decisions, and Measures that tell you whether the strategy is working. Fix the thinking, and the template takes care of itself.

    If you’ve read our complete OGSM guide, you already know what a well-built OGSM looks like. But knowing the framework and executing it cleanly are two very different things. I’ve reviewed hundreds of OGSMs over the years — from scrappy startups to global multinationals — and the same mistakes show up again and again. Here are the seven I see most often, and exactly how to fix them.

    Are you confusing Strategies with Goals?

    This is the mistake that derails more OGSM sessions than anything else. Teams write their Strategies as if they’re Goals — big aspirational statements with no clear direction — or they write their Goal as if it’s a Strategy, detailing how they’ll achieve it before they’ve defined what success looks like.

    Here’s the distinction in plain English: your Goal is the specific, quantifiable outcome you’re aiming for this year. Your Strategies are the few critical choices you’re making about how to get there.

    “Grow revenue by 20%” is a Goal. “Focus exclusively on enterprise accounts in financial services” is a Strategy. “Launch a digital marketing programme” is not a Strategy — it’s a tactic pretending to be one (more on that shortly).

    If your Strategy could have been written by any company in your industry, it’s not a strategy. It needs to reflect a genuine choice — one that implies you’re not doing something else.

    Are your Measures tracking activity instead of outcomes?

    This one is subtle and absolutely kills the usefulness of your OGSM.

    Activity metrics tell you what your team did. Outcome metrics tell you whether it worked. “Number of customer meetings held” is activity. “Pipeline value generated from new customer meetings” is outcome. “Blog posts published per month” is activity. “Organic traffic from target keyword cluster” is outcome.

    I see teams build Measures columns full of activity metrics and then wonder why their OGSM doesn’t feel connected to real performance. It’s because they’re measuring effort, not impact.

    The fix is simple but requires honesty: for every Measure on your OGSM, ask “could we hit this number while the strategy completely fails?” If yes, it’s an activity metric. Find the outcome it’s supposed to drive and measure that instead.

    Your Measures should make you slightly uncomfortable — they should be the honest test of whether your Strategies are actually working.

    Do you have too many Goals?

    OGSM stands for Objective, Goal (singular), Strategies, Measures. Not Goals. One Goal.

    I know — you have a lot of priorities. So does every leadership team I’ve ever worked with. But the discipline of committing to a single, primary Goal for the year is precisely where the OGSM earns its keep. If you have five Goals, you don’t have a strategy — you have a list.

    The Goal should be the one number that tells you, at year end, whether you succeeded. Everything else — margin, customer satisfaction, team engagement — should either roll up into that Goal or show up as Measures: the guardrails that confirm the Goal was achieved the right way.

    When a leadership team pushes back and says “we can’t possibly have just one Goal,” I ask them: if you could only hit one of your five goals, which would it be? That’s your Goal. The rest are constraints or secondary measures.

    Are you cascading your OGSM by copying instead of translating?

    One of the most powerful things about OGSM is how it cascades through an organisation. The executive team’s OGSM becomes the brief that each function uses to build their own. But there’s a mistake I see constantly: teams just copy the parent OGSM and change the header.

    That’s not a cascade. That’s a photocopy.

    When you cascade an OGSM, each team needs to ask: “Given our parent’s Strategies, what is our contribution? What does our team uniquely need to achieve, and what choices do we need to make to deliver it?” The team-level OGSM should look different from the company-level one — different Goal, Strategies specific to that function, Measures that track what that team can actually control.

    If your sales team’s OGSM and your marketing team’s OGSM have the same Strategies, something has gone wrong. See our guide to OGSM measures for examples of how this plays out in practice at the team level.

    Does each Measure have a named owner?

    A Measure without an owner is a wish, not a commitment.

    This is the accountability gap I see in almost every OGSM that’s struggling to get traction. The team agrees on Measures in the planning session, everyone nods, the document gets saved to the shared drive — and then three months later, nobody can tell you where those numbers stand because nobody was specifically responsible for tracking and reporting them.

    Fix it in the planning session itself: before you leave the room, every Measure gets a name next to it. That person is accountable for knowing the number, updating it in your quarterly review, and flagging when it’s off track. It doesn’t mean they’re doing all the work to move the number — it means they’re the one making sure it doesn’t get forgotten.

    Are you setting it and forgetting it?

    This is the OGSM mistake that makes all the others worse.

    An OGSM built in January and reviewed in December isn’t a strategic management tool — it’s an expensive planning exercise. The value of the OGSM is in the quarterly rhythm: stopping to ask “are our Strategies still the right ones?”, “what are our Measures telling us?”, “do we need to adapt?”

    I built the discipline of quarterly OGSM reviews into every leadership team I’ve worked with, and it consistently changes the quality of conversation. Instead of “how are we doing against targets?”, the question becomes “is our strategy working?” Those are very different conversations, and the second one is where the real leadership thinking happens.

    Build your quarterly review into the calendar on day one. Protect it. Use the Measures column as your agenda. If a Measure is green, move fast. If it’s red, dig into whether you have an execution problem or a strategy problem — that distinction matters enormously, and the OGSM is the tool that surfaces it.

    Are your Strategies actually tactics in disguise?

    Strategies that are really just big tactics — this is the OGSM common mistake that makes me wince most often.

    A Strategy should answer the question: “What is the critical choice we’re making about how we compete or operate?” A tactic answers: “What specific action are we taking?” The problem is that tactics masquerade as strategies all the time.

    “Invest in digital marketing” is a tactic. “Own the consideration phase of the buyer journey through content, before competitors engage” is a Strategy. “Hire three enterprise sales reps” is a tactic. “Win by relationship depth rather than price competition” is a Strategy.

    The test I use: if your Strategy still leaves the question “but how will you do that?” unanswered, you’ve got a real Strategy. If it fully describes the execution, it belongs in your project plan, not your OGSM.

    Getting this right takes practice. The first time most leadership teams write Strategies, they come out as tactics. That’s fine — the conversation about the difference is itself valuable. Push through it.

    OGSM common mistakes are almost always thinking mistakes, not template mistakes. The format is simple. The discipline — the honest single Goal, the real Strategies, the outcome Measures, the ownership, the review cadence — that’s what separates teams who use OGSM as a living management tool from those who treat it as an annual ritual. Start with our complete OGSM guide if you’re building from scratch, and use this list as your quality check before you hit publish.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM vs Balanced Scorecard: Which Strategy Framework Actually Fits Your Organisation?

    OGSM vs Balanced Scorecard: Which Strategy Framework Actually Fits Your Organisation?

    Both frameworks promise strategic clarity — but they’re solving completely different problems, and using the wrong one will cost you a full planning cycle.

    OGSM (Objective, Goals, Strategies, Measures) is a one-page strategy framework built for clarity and speed — best suited to scale-ups, SMEs, and brand-led organisations that need fast, visible alignment. The Balanced Scorecard, developed by Kaplan and Norton in 1992, is a multi-perspective performance management system that tracks performance across four dimensions: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning & Growth — best suited to complex enterprises that risk optimising for one metric at the expense of everything else. If you need one page and fast alignment, OGSM wins. If you need systemic coverage across a multi-divisional organisation, the Balanced Scorecard earns its complexity.

    Below you’ll find a head-to-head comparison table, an analysis of how each framework handles execution, the most common implementation pitfalls for both, and a clear verdict by organisation type.

    What’s the core philosophical difference between OGSM and the Balanced Scorecard?

    OGSM was designed for clarity under pressure. It fits on one page. Every element earns its place by answering a single coherent question: how does this connect to where we’re going? The framework is linear and intentionally constrained — it forces trade-offs rather than accommodating every priority.

    The Balanced Scorecard was built for a different problem: large organisations that were measuring success almost entirely through financial lagging indicators and missing the signals that predicted future performance. Kaplan and Norton’s answer was four perspectives — each generating its own objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives. The result is a multi-dimensional picture of organisational health, not a single page, but a strategic management system.

    The philosophical gap is real: OGSM asks “what are we doing and how will we know it’s working?”, while the Balanced Scorecard asks “are we measuring our organisation across every dimension that drives sustainable performance?”

    How do the two frameworks actually compare in practice?

    Dimension OGSM Balanced Scorecard
    Origin Procter & Gamble (1950s–60s), popularised in brand management Kaplan & Norton, Harvard Business Review, 1992
    Structure One page: Objective → Goals → Strategies → Measures Four perspectives with linked objectives, measures, targets, initiatives
    Typical length 1 page Multi-page scorecard; often supported by Strategy Maps
    Primary use case Annual planning, brand/product strategy, team alignment Enterprise performance management, board reporting, cross-functional alignment
    Measurement philosophy A small set of critical measures directly tied to strategies Balanced set of leading and lagging indicators across all four perspectives
    Cascade potential Strong — each business unit can hold its own OGSM Strong — designed to cascade from corporate to business unit to team
    Implementation complexity Low–medium Medium–high
    Best fit Scale-ups, SMEs, brand teams, fast-moving environments Enterprises, complex organisations, public sector, multi-divisional firms
    Risk Oversimplification if Objectives are too vague Bureaucracy and metric proliferation if not disciplined

    Does the Balanced Scorecard measure more than OGSM?

    Yes — and that’s both its strength and its danger.

    The Balanced Scorecard’s four perspectives ensure organisations don’t optimise for profit at the expense of customer experience, or win on customer satisfaction while the internal processes quietly erode. The Learning & Growth perspective in particular is often undervalued: it forces companies to ask whether they are building the capabilities and culture needed to execute the strategy, not just reporting on what happened last quarter.

    But more measurement isn’t automatically better. Many organisations that adopt the Balanced Scorecard end up with 40–60 KPIs spread across four perspectives, which produces reporting overhead without strategic clarity. The Balanced Scorecard’s designers anticipated this: Kaplan and Norton recommended no more than 20–25 measures per scorecard and introduced the Strategy Map to make the causal logic between perspectives explicit. In practice, discipline is frequently lost.

    OGSM sidesteps this by design. The Measures column in an OGSM is intentionally sparse — typically three to five metrics that directly validate whether the strategies are working. There’s less systemic coverage, but what’s there is directly actionable.

    Which framework handles strategy execution better?

    Both frameworks are built for execution, not just planning — but they approach it differently.

    OGSM aligns execution through simplicity. When the whole organisation can hold the strategy in their head because it fits on one page, decision-making closer to the frontline improves. Teams can ask: “does this action serve our strategies?” and get a clear answer. Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Mars have used it effectively precisely because it cuts through the noise in complex, multi-brand environments.

    The Balanced Scorecard aligns execution through structural linkage. When a Strategy Map makes visible how Learning & Growth drives better Internal Processes, which improves Customer outcomes, which produces Financial results, senior leaders can track where execution is breaking down at a systemic level. This is particularly powerful when the root cause of underperformance is organisational capability, not strategy choice.

    If you’ve worked through the OKR vs OGSM comparison, you’ll recognise a familiar tension: OKRs share OGSM’s bias toward simplicity and alignment; the Balanced Scorecard shares more DNA with enterprise performance management systems. The right choice depends on what problem you’re actually solving.

    What are the implementation pitfalls for each?

    OGSM pitfalls:

    • Writing an Objective that is really a Goal (specific outcome vs directional ambition)
    • Treating Measures as a reporting exercise rather than a live decision tool
    • Failing to cascade: a corporate OGSM with no team-level OGSMs beneath it stays at the boardroom level and doesn’t change behaviour on the ground

    Balanced Scorecard pitfalls:

    • Metric proliferation: adding measures until the scorecard becomes unmanageable
    • Perspective imbalance: most organisations over-index on Financial and Customer, under-develop Internal Processes and Learning & Growth
    • Strategy Map neglect: building the scorecard without the causal map means you’re reporting data rather than testing strategic hypotheses

    Which framework should your organisation choose?

    Scale-ups and growth-stage companies (50–500 people): OGSM almost always wins here. You need alignment speed, not comprehensive measurement infrastructure. Your leadership team is small enough to hold the strategy in their heads. One page is a feature, not a compromise. Build your OGSM, cascade it to functional leads, and revisit it quarterly. If you’re still weighing whether OGSM is the right fit at your stage, Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up? works through the decision in detail.

    Enterprises and complex multi-divisional organisations (500+ people, multiple business units): The Balanced Scorecard earns its complexity. When you have divisions with genuinely different value drivers, when the board needs a structured view of risk and performance across dimensions, and when strategy execution spans multiple years and organisational layers, the four-perspective structure pays for itself. Invest in a proper Strategy Map before building the scorecard.

    SMEs and owner-managed businesses: OGSM is typically the better fit — fast to build, easy to communicate, and practical to update. Unless your business has board-level governance requirements or operates in a regulated sector where multi-dimensional reporting is mandatory, the Balanced Scorecard’s overhead will slow you down more than it helps.

    Consultants and strategists working across clients: Know both. Use OGSM as your default intervention framework for alignment work; reach for the Balanced Scorecard when a client genuinely needs a performance management system rather than a strategic alignment tool. They are solving different problems.

    Is OGSM better than the Balanced Scorecard?

    Not better — different. OGSM is a better tool for strategic alignment and annual planning in environments where clarity and speed matter. The Balanced Scorecard is a better tool for systemic performance management in complex organisations where the risk is blind spots, not overcomplication.

    The practical test: if you can tell someone your entire strategy on a whiteboard in under five minutes and have them walk away with it, OGSM is working. If you need your leadership team to understand not just where you’re going, but why the organisation is or isn’t capable of getting there across every dimension, you need the Balanced Scorecard.

    For most readers of this site, OGSM is the working framework. But understanding the Balanced Scorecard makes you a sharper strategist — you can borrow its perspective logic to sense-check whether your OGSM is covering enough ground, or whether you have a blind spot hiding behind a simple one-pager.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM Measures: The Complete Guide to Dashboards, KPIs, and Action Plans

    OGSM Measures: The Complete Guide to Dashboards, KPIs, and Action Plans

    Most OGSM plans fall apart in the same place.

    OGSM Measures is the column that answers “how will we know if this is working?” — and it contains two distinct sub-elements that most teams never separate: a Dashboard (KPIs and indicators that track whether each Strategy is on track) and an Action Plan (the specific initiatives, owners, and deadlines that execute each Strategy). Done right, Measures turns your OGSM from a strategy document into a live management system — one that tells you, in a single glance, what’s working, what’s stalling, and exactly what to do about it.

    Here you’ll get the complete picture of what the Measures column actually contains, why the Dashboard and Action Plan distinction matters, how to choose KPIs that connect to real strategy, and the exact mistakes that make Measures columns useless. You’ll also see a full worked example for a B2B SaaS company so you can build yours with confidence.

    If you’ve read our overview of the Measures column or worked through the OGSM template, this is the deep-dive companion that covers everything else.

    Table of Contents

    What Does the OGSM Measures Column Actually Contain?

    Not at the Objective. Not at the Goals. Not even at the Strategies. They fall apart in the Measures column — the one element that’s supposed to tell you whether any of it is actually working.

    The Measures column is the most misunderstood, most abused, and most underbuilt part of any OGSM. Practitioners stuff it with vanity metrics they can’t act on, KPIs borrowed from a competitor’s dashboard, or a wall of numbers that nobody reviews. Then they wonder why their OGSM dies in a drawer by February.

    Open up almost any OGSM template — including the ones sold as “complete” — and you’ll see the Measures column described as a single thing: metrics. KPIs. Numbers.

    That’s wrong. Or rather, it’s incomplete in a way that causes real operational damage.

    The Measures column is not a metrics column. It’s a management column. It contains two structurally different sub-elements that serve two completely different purposes:

    1. The Dashboard — indicators that tell you whether a Strategy is on track
    2. The Action Plan — the specific initiatives, projects, and tasks that execute the Strategy

    Most teams build one or the other. The few who build both often stack them on top of each other as if they’re the same thing. They’re not. Conflating them is the single most common reason OGSM Measures columns become useless decoration.

    Before we go further: if you’re new to OGSM altogether, start with our complete OGSM guide to get grounded in the full framework. Come back here for the deep dive on Measures.

    The Two Jobs of the Measures Column

    Think about what a Strategy actually needs to be managed:

    Job 1 — Tracking: You need signals that tell you, on an ongoing basis, whether your Strategy is working. These are leading and lagging indicators. They answer: Is this Strategy moving us in the right direction?

    Job 2 — Executing: You need a concrete set of actions that implement the Strategy. Plans, owners, deadlines. They answer: What are we actually doing to move the needle?

    The Dashboard handles Job 1. The Action Plan handles Job 2. You need both.

    Without the Dashboard, you’re flying blind — executing away without knowing if anything is working.

    Without the Action Plan, you have targets but no engine to hit them.

    This two-part structure is what separates OGSM from simpler frameworks like OKRs, where Measures and Actions are often collapsed into “Key Results” and left ambiguous. OGSM forces you to be explicit about both.

    What Is the Difference Between the Dashboard and the Action Plan?

    Let’s break these down precisely.

    The Dashboard

    The Dashboard is your monitoring system. For each Strategy in your OGSM, your Dashboard contains a small set of KPIs (typically 2–4) that reflect whether that Strategy is working.

    What it includes:

    • The indicator name and definition
    • Current baseline value
    • Target value (linked to the Goal it serves)
    • Measurement frequency (weekly, monthly, quarterly)
    • Data owner (who pulls the number and confirms accuracy)

    What it does NOT include:

    • Tasks or projects
    • Vague aspirations (“improve NPS”)
    • Metrics you can’t act on

    The Dashboard is passive in the sense that it reflects reality — it doesn’t create it. A good Dashboard tells your leadership team, in a 60-second glance, whether each Strategy is working or stalling. It enables intelligent conversation at your OGSM review cadence without requiring anyone to hunt through spreadsheets.

    Think of it like a car dashboard. The speedometer doesn’t make the car go faster — it tells you how fast you’re going so you can decide whether to press the accelerator or ease off.

    Characteristics of a good Dashboard indicator:

    • Measurable with current tools — You can actually pull this number today, not “once we set up the new reporting system.”
    • Owned — One person is responsible for the accuracy of this number.
    • Sensitive to the Strategy — If the Strategy is working, this number moves. If it’s not, it stays flat or deteriorates.
    • Actionable — When the number goes red, you know what lever to pull.
    • Leading or lagging with intent — Lagging indicators confirm what happened; leading indicators predict what’s coming. A great Dashboard includes both.

    Example Dashboard for a customer retention Strategy:

    Indicator Baseline Target Frequency Owner
    Monthly churn rate 3.2% < 1.5% Monthly VP Customer Success
    NPS (Promoters only) 28 50+ Quarterly Head of CX
    Product adoption score (feature X) 34% 65% Monthly Product Analytics

    The Action Plan

    The Action Plan is your execution system. It’s the list of specific initiatives, projects, and milestones that will cause the Strategy to work. If the Dashboard tells you how you’re doing, the Action Plan tells you what you’re doing.

    What it includes:

    • Initiative name (clear and specific)
    • Owner (person accountable for delivery)
    • Deadline or target quarter
    • Current status (not started / in progress / complete / at risk)
    • Dependency flags (what this blocks or is blocked by)

    What it does NOT include:

    • Vague activities (“increase customer focus”)
    • Aspirations with no owner
    • Everything you could possibly do — only the priority actions for this Strategy in this planning cycle

    The Action Plan is your commitment layer. It’s what you said you’d do. It’s what gets reviewed. It’s what people are accountable for delivering.

    Example Action Plan for the same customer retention Strategy:

    Initiative Owner Deadline Status
    Launch in-app onboarding flow for Feature X Product Lead Q2 In Progress
    Implement automated churn-risk alert system CS Ops Q1 Complete
    Build customer health score model Data Team Q3 Not Started
    Run quarterly Executive Business Reviews for top 50 accounts Head of CS Ongoing In Progress

    Why Conflating Them Breaks Everything

    When teams mix Dashboard and Action Plan into one undifferentiated list, several things go wrong:

    Reviews become chaotic. Nobody knows whether they’re discussing a metric or a task. Conversations jump between “our NPS is 28” and “we need to hire someone” without structure.

    Accountability disappears. KPIs don’t have owners; they have watchers. Initiatives do have owners. When they’re blended, the owner question gets muddy.

    Progress is invisible. You can’t tell if a Strategy is executing (Action Plan running well) but not working (Dashboard flat). That distinction matters enormously because the response is different.

    Leadership loses confidence. When the Measures column looks like a random list of numbers and activities, senior leaders disengage. They don’t trust the document because it doesn’t give them clarity.

    Keep them separate. Label them explicitly. It’s one of the highest-leverage improvements you can make to your OGSM.

    How Do You Choose the Right KPIs for Each Strategy?

    This is where most OGSM efforts go sideways. Teams either pick too many KPIs, pick the wrong KPIs, or copy KPIs from an industry list that has nothing to do with their specific Strategy.

    Here’s a structured approach.

    Step 1: Anchor to the Strategy Intent

    Every KPI in your Dashboard must connect to a specific Strategy. The question to ask is: If this Strategy is working, what would we expect to see change?

    Write the Strategy at the top of a blank page. Then brainstorm what observable, measurable change that Strategy should produce — in the short term (leading) and the medium-to-long term (lagging).

    For a Strategy like “Expand into the Enterprise segment via direct sales”:

    • Leading: Number of enterprise-qualified opportunities in pipeline, outbound meetings booked
    • Lagging: Enterprise ACV, Enterprise customer count, Enterprise win rate

    If you can’t identify what should change when the Strategy works, the Strategy itself is probably too vague. That’s a useful diagnostic.

    Step 2: Apply the “So What?” Filter

    For every candidate KPI, ask: If this number moves, so what?

    If the answer is “we’d know the Strategy is working/not working and we’d know what to do next” — keep it.

    If the answer is “we’d have an interesting data point” — cut it.

    This is how you eliminate vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are KPIs that feel meaningful because they’re easy to measure (website visits, social followers, email list size) but don’t connect to strategy execution. They don’t pass the So What filter.

    Step 3: Balance Leading and Lagging

    Every Dashboard should include at least one leading and one lagging indicator per Strategy.

    Lagging indicators (outcome metrics): Revenue, profit, customer count, NPS, market share. These confirm whether the Strategy worked — but they tell you after the fact.

    Leading indicators (activity or input metrics): Sales calls per week, content pieces published, feature releases shipped, proposal volume. These predict what the lagging metrics will do — but they require judgment to interpret.

    A Dashboard with only lagging indicators leaves you reacting. A Dashboard with only leading indicators leaves you guessing whether activity is translating to results. You need both.

    Step 4: Limit the Set Ruthlessly

    The maximum for any one Strategy’s Dashboard is 4 KPIs. Ideally 2–3.

    More than 4 is almost always a sign that the team is hedging: they don’t know which indicators actually matter, so they measure everything and hope something rises to the surface. That’s not strategy. That’s data collection.

    Force the conversation: If we could only track two things for this Strategy, which two would tell us the most? Those are your Dashboard KPIs.

    Step 5: Confirm Measurability Today

    Before any KPI makes it into the Dashboard, someone on the team must confirm: Can we actually pull this number right now, with our current tools and data?

    If the answer is “we’d have to build a new report” — put it in the Action Plan as an initiative, then revisit the Dashboard once the data infrastructure exists.

    A KPI you can’t measure is not a KPI. It’s a wish.

    Step 6: Assign an Owner

    Every Dashboard KPI needs one owner — the person who is responsible for pulling the number, validating its accuracy, and presenting it at each review. Not a team. One person.

    Without an owner, numbers get forgotten, miscalculated, or gamed. With an owner, you create accountability for the integrity of the data — separate from accountability for the results.

    What Are the Most Common Mistakes in the Measures Column?

    After working through dozens of OGSM builds, the same mistakes show up again and again. Here are the most damaging ones — and how to fix them.

    Mistake 1: Using Vanity Metrics

    What it looks like: Dashboard filled with website pageviews, social media followers, email subscribers, press mentions, or app downloads.

    Why it happens: These metrics are easy to track, they usually go up, and they feel like progress. Leadership likes seeing green.

    Why it fails: Vanity metrics don’t connect to strategic outcomes. You can have 100,000 Instagram followers and declining revenue. The metric creates a false sense of momentum that masks real strategic stagnation.

    The fix: Apply the So What filter (see above). If the metric rises 20% and you can’t articulate what strategic outcome that causes, it’s a vanity metric. Cut it.

    Mistake 2: Too Many Indicators

    What it looks like: A Measures column with 15–30 KPIs spread across all Strategies, often presented as a comprehensive “metrics framework.”

    Why it happens: Committees and cross-functional input. When multiple stakeholders contribute their preferred metrics, the Dashboard expands to include everyone’s favorites. Nobody wants to be the one who removed a metric.

    Why it fails: When everything is measured, nothing is prioritized. Leaders spend review meetings discussing every number instead of diagnosing what matters. Decision-making slows. Signal drowns in noise.

    The fix: Hard cap at 4 KPIs per Strategy. Present this as a design principle, not a preference. Fewer, sharper metrics create faster, better decisions.

    Mistake 3: Conflating Dashboard and Action Plan

    We’ve covered this above, but it deserves its own spot in the mistakes list because it’s the most common failure mode.

    What it looks like: A Measures column that mixes KPIs (“Churn rate < 2%") with tasks ("Hire CS Manager") and milestones ("Launch new onboarding flow by Q3") in one undifferentiated list.

    Why it happens: Teams try to keep the OGSM document simple by collapsing both elements. The intention is efficiency; the result is confusion.

    Why it fails: See the section above. Reviews become chaotic, accountability disappears, and leadership disengages.

    The fix: Create two explicit sub-sections in each Strategy’s Measures column — one labeled Dashboard, one labeled Action Plan. Even a visual separator (a line or a different background color) helps.

    Mistake 4: Action Plans Without Owners or Deadlines

    What it looks like: An Action Plan that lists initiatives like “Improve the onboarding experience” or “Build out the sales team” — with no owner named and no deadline specified.

    Why it happens: Teams list aspirations rather than commitments. They treat the Action Plan as a brainstorm rather than a contract.

    Why it fails: Without an owner, nobody is accountable. Without a deadline, there’s no urgency. The initiative stays “in progress” indefinitely while the Strategy stalls.

    The fix: Every action in the Action Plan must have a named owner and a specific deadline or target quarter. If you can’t name an owner, the initiative isn’t real yet — it’s an idea. Leave it off the OGSM until it is.

    Mistake 5: Setting Targets Without a Baseline

    What it looks like: Dashboard KPIs with targets like “Achieve NPS of 60” or “Reach $5M ARR” but no recorded baseline — what the number is today.

    Why it happens: Teams are excited about where they want to go and skip the uncomfortable step of documenting where they are.

    Why it fails: Without a baseline, you can’t measure progress. You also can’t calibrate whether the target is ambitious, realistic, or absurd. And in reviews, you end up in arguments about what “good” looks like because there’s no agreed starting point.

    The fix: Record the baseline for every Dashboard KPI before the OGSM goes live. If you don’t know the baseline, measure it immediately. The OGSM document shouldn’t be finalized until baselines are documented.

    Mistake 6: Never Reviewing the Action Plan

    What it looks like: Organizations that review financial metrics monthly but check Action Plan status only at the annual review — by which point half the initiatives are stale or abandoned.

    Why it happens: Leaders are more comfortable discussing numbers than discussing whether initiatives are on track. The Dashboard feels objective; the Action Plan requires accountability conversations.

    Why it fails: Strategies execute through the Action Plan. If nobody is checking whether initiatives are on track, the Strategy isn’t being managed — it’s being wished for.

    The fix: Your Action Plan review cadence should match your Dashboard review cadence. Both get reviewed at the same session. Both get the same level of leadership attention. See our guide to OGSM review cadences for how to structure these sessions.

    What Does a Complete OGSM Measures Column Look Like?

    Here’s a complete, realistic Measures column for a mid-market B2B SaaS company. The Objective is to become the category leader in workflow automation for professional services firms.

    The example covers two Strategies with full Dashboard and Action Plan for each.

    Objective: Become the undisputed workflow automation platform for professional services firms with 50–500 employees.

    Goal: Reach $15M ARR by end of fiscal year, with NPS > 55 and gross revenue retention > 92%.

    Strategy 1: Win the mid-market segment through verticalized outbound sales

    Dashboard:

    Indicator Baseline Target Frequency Owner
    Enterprise-qualified opportunities created (monthly) 12 35 Monthly VP Sales
    Mid-market win rate 18% 28% Monthly Sales Ops
    Average Sales Cycle (days) 67 45 Monthly Sales Ops
    Mid-market ACV $42K $55K Quarterly VP Sales

    Action Plan:

    Initiative Owner Deadline Status
    Hire 3 Mid-Market AEs with professional services vertical experience Head of Talent Q1 Complete
    Build vertical-specific sales playbooks (legal, consulting, accounting) Revenue Enablement Q2 In Progress
    Launch outbound sequence targeting firms 50–500 employees in top 5 verticals SDR Lead Q1 Complete
    Implement deal inspection process for all opportunities > $30K ACV VP Sales Q2 In Progress
    Develop ROI calculator for professional services segment Sales Ops Q2 Not Started

    Strategy 2: Reduce churn by deepening product adoption in year 1

    Dashboard:

    Indicator Baseline Target Frequency Owner
    90-day feature adoption rate (core workflows) 34% 65% Monthly Product Analytics
    12-month gross revenue retention 84% 92% Quarterly VP CS
    Time to first value (days) 28 14 Monthly CS Ops
    Customer health score (% at “healthy” or above) 51% 72% Monthly VP CS

    Action Plan:

    Initiative Owner Deadline Status
    Redesign onboarding flow with role-based paths for 3 personas Product Lead Q2 In Progress
    Build automated customer health scoring model Data Team Q2 In Progress
    Launch 60-day “First 90 Days” success program for all new customers CS Lead Q1 Complete
    Implement churn-risk early warning system with automated CS alerts CS Ops Q2 Not Started
    Create library of vertical-specific workflow templates (5 per vertical) Product + CS Q3 Not Started

    Notice what this example demonstrates:

    • Each Strategy has its own Dashboard and Action Plan — kept cleanly separate
    • Dashboard KPIs have baselines, targets, frequencies, and owners
    • Action Plan initiatives have owners, deadlines, and status — no vague activities
    • Leading indicators (opportunities created, time to first value, health score %) sit alongside lagging indicators (win rate, ACV, gross revenue retention)
    • No more than 4 KPIs per Dashboard
    • No vanity metrics anywhere

    This is the structure. Customize the content for your business, your Strategies, your Goals. The structure should stay consistent.

    For more on this — including the specific Measures column format we use in our OGSM Measures guide and our downloadable OGSM template — those resources give you the exact format to copy.

    How Do You Connect OGSM Measures to Your Review Cadence?

    A Measures column that nobody reviews is a filing exercise, not a management system.

    The entire point of the Dashboard is to enable fast, fact-based conversation at your review sessions. The entire point of the Action Plan is to create accountability between those sessions.

    Here’s the minimal review structure that makes the Measures column earn its keep:

    Monthly review (60–90 minutes):

    • Dashboard: Review all KPIs. Flag anything off-track. Identify root causes for underperforming Strategies.
    • Action Plan: Review status of all initiatives. Identify blockers. Update status.
    • Decision: For each Strategy, is it on track, needs adjustment, or needs escalation?

    Quarterly review (half-day):

    • Everything above, plus:
    • Are targets still appropriate given market conditions?
    • Are the right KPIs in the Dashboard? Are we measuring what actually matters?
    • Do Action Plans need to be refreshed for the next quarter?
    • Are any Strategies no longer viable? Should resources shift?

    Annual review:

    • Full OGSM reset. New Objectives, new Goals, new Strategies — and with those, new Measures.
    • Capture lessons: which Dashboard KPIs were genuinely predictive? Which Action Plan initiatives moved the needle? Which didn’t?

    For a complete breakdown of how to structure each type of review session, including who should attend and what decisions should come out of each, read our OGSM review cadence guide.

    What Do Teams Most Often Ask About OGSM Measures?

    What’s the difference between a KPI and a metric?

    A metric is any number you track. A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a metric that is tied to strategic performance — it tells you whether a key part of your strategy is working. All KPIs are metrics. Not all metrics are KPIs. Your OGSM Dashboard should contain KPIs only.

    How many KPIs should be in the entire OGSM?

    Depends on how many Strategies you have — but the math is simple. With 2–4 KPIs per Strategy and typically 3–6 Strategies per OGSM, you should have somewhere between 6 and 20 Dashboard KPIs total across the entire plan. If you have more than 20, you’re over-measuring. Cut until you feel slightly uncomfortable with how few you have. That’s usually about right.

    Can the same KPI appear in the Dashboard for multiple Strategies?

    Yes, but do it deliberately and sparingly. If a single KPI is sensitive to multiple Strategies, it’s likely a top-level Goal metric rather than a Strategy-specific Dashboard indicator. Consider moving it up to the Goals section and choosing more specific, Strategy-level indicators for each Dashboard.

    What’s the right frequency for Dashboard reviews?

    Monthly is the minimum for most organizations. Weekly is appropriate for early-stage companies or Strategies in critical execution phases. Quarterly is too infrequent — it doesn’t give you enough signal to course-correct during the year. Your dashboard review cadence should match the pace at which you can meaningfully take corrective action.

    Do Action Plans need to be in the OGSM document itself, or can they live in a separate project management tool?

    They should be referenced in the OGSM, even if they’re managed in a separate tool (Asana, Jira, Monday, etc.). The OGSM document should at minimum show the top 3–5 initiatives per Strategy, their owners, and their deadlines. The detailed task management can live in your project tool. What matters is that the two are linked — someone looking at the OGSM should be able to see what’s being done, not just what’s being measured.

    How is the OGSM Measures column different from OKR Key Results?

    Both aim to define “how we know we’re succeeding.” The key difference is that OGSM explicitly separates monitoring (Dashboard) from execution (Action Plan), while OKRs often conflate them in Key Results. OKRs also tend to operate on shorter cycles (quarterly) and are more bottom-up; OGSM is typically annual and top-down. Neither is inherently better — the right choice depends on your organization’s planning culture. OGSM’s Measures structure is more prescriptive, which is both its strength (clarity) and its challenge (requires discipline to maintain).

    What if I can’t measure something that clearly matters to a Strategy?

    Put a measurement initiative in your Action Plan. “Build capability to measure [X]” is a legitimate action. In the Dashboard, note the KPI as “under development” and use the closest available proxy until the real measurement is in place. Don’t leave the Dashboard slot empty — a proxy is better than nothing, and the action to build better measurement keeps the team honest.

    How do I handle Strategies that are inherently hard to quantify — like culture or brand?

    Every Strategy has some observable outcome you can measure, even if imperfectly. Culture: employee engagement score, retention rate, internal promotion rate, management effectiveness rating. Brand: aided awareness (survey), share of voice, earned media mentions, branded search volume. The KPIs won’t be perfect. That’s fine. The discipline of choosing something measurable forces strategic clarity and prevents culture/brand from becoming a catch-all for initiatives that don’t need to justify their results.

    The Measures column is where your OGSM lives or dies. Get it right — with a clean separation between Dashboard and Action Plan, KPIs tied directly to each Strategy, and a review rhythm that keeps everyone accountable — and your OGSM becomes a genuine management system. Get it wrong, and it becomes a very well-formatted wishlist.

    If you’re building your Measures column for the first time, start with the OGSM template. If you want a deeper look at the column structure specifically, the OGSM Measures overview is the right next step.

    Rock on.

  • Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up? A Practical Guide (With Worked Example)

    Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up? A Practical Guide (With Worked Example)

    Yes — if you’re between 30 and 200 people and your strategy is starting to slip through the cracks, OGSM is almost certainly the right framework for where you are right now.

    OGSM is a one-page strategic planning tool that forces alignment across a leadership team that can no longer hold the entire company direction in their heads. The OGSM framework perfectly suits small businesses for its simplicity, clarity, and ease of use.

    Here’s how to know for sure, and what building one looks like in practice.

    When does OGSM actually fit a scale-up?

    OGSM — Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures — is a one-page strategic planning framework originally developed at Procter & Gamble. It’s since become widely used across SMEs and multinationals that want every team member reading from the same page of strategy, literally.

    For scale-ups specifically, OGSM fits well when three conditions are true:

    You’re in the £5M–£50M revenue range (or roughly 30–200 people). Below this, the founder’s instincts and weekly all-hands meetings do the job. Above it, you typically need something more sophisticated. In the middle, OGSM’s single-page constraint forces clarity without adding bureaucratic weight.

    You’re transitioning from founder-led intuition to structured strategy. The classic scale-up inflection point is when the leadership team can no longer hold the entire strategy in their heads. Decisions start getting made in silos. Sales pursues a segment the product team isn’t building for. Marketing campaigns features that engineering has de-prioritised. OGSM gives you a shared document that every department head can point to when making trade-offs.

    You’re hiring fast enough that alignment is becoming a friction cost. Onboarding a new Head of Finance or VP of Sales is dramatically faster when you can hand them a single page that captures the company’s direction, the three or four strategies you’re betting on, and the specific numbers you’re tracking to know if it’s working.

    If you recognise your company in those three conditions, OGSM is worth a serious look.

    When do OKRs make more sense?

    I’m not anti-OKR. They’re the right tool for the right context, and it’s worth being clear about when that context applies.

    OKRs work best when:

    • You need fast iteration cycles. OKRs run quarterly, which suits product organisations that ship continuously and need to recalibrate every 90 days based on user feedback.
    • Teams are largely self-organising. OKRs push goal-setting downward. Individual contributors write their own Key Results and align them to company-level Objectives. That’s energising in a high-autonomy culture.
    • You want bottom-up accountability. The OKR model is built on transparency — everyone can see everyone else’s goals. That fosters peer accountability in flat organisations.

    Where OKRs can struggle at scale-up stage: the quarterly cadence can create a wall of sticky notes that no one looks at after week three. Without a longer-horizon strategy document anchoring the OKRs, teams can hit their quarterly numbers and still drift from the company’s three-year direction. OGSM doesn’t replace the quarterly rhythm — but it provides the strategic spine that OKRs hang from.

    Many scale-ups that thrive with OGSM use it to set the 12–18 month strategic frame, then run OKRs within each strategy pillar for quarterly execution. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

    What does a scale-up OGSM look like in practice?

    Company: Findr — a 35-person B2B SaaS business helping professional services firms track project profitability. Revenue: £8M ARR. Growing at 40% YoY. Headcount doubled in 18 months.

    The problem: Three VPs were making independent resourcing decisions. The Head of Engineering was building an enterprise SSO integration. The Head of Marketing was doubling down on SME content. Sales was pitching mid-market. Nobody was wrong — but the company was pulling in three directions.

    Two half-day sessions with the seven-person leadership team produced this:

    Objective: Become the go-to profitability tool for professional services firms in the UK, trusted by 500 firms within three years.

    Goals:

    1. Reach £15M ARR by end of FY26
    2. Achieve NPS of 45+ across the customer base by Q4
    3. Reduce average time-to-value for new customers from 45 days to 20 days by end of FY26

    Strategies (the specific choices about where and how to compete):

    1. Double down on accountancy and legal verticals — not generic SME, not enterprise
    2. Build a referral-first growth model via existing customer champions
    3. Invest in onboarding, not acquisition, until time-to-value hits target

    Measures (leading indicators for each strategy):

    • % of new ARR from accountancy + legal (target: 70% by Q4)
    • % of new pipeline sourced from referrals (target: 35% by Q3)
    • Average onboarding completion rate (target: 85%)

    It fit on one page. Every leadership decision since has been tested against it: Does this serve Strategy 1, 2, or 3? If not, why are we doing it?

    The SSO integration was deprioritised. The SME content was refocused on accountancy and legal pain points. Sales aligned its ICP to match.

    What are the most common scale-up OGSM mistakes?

    1. Too many Strategies. A five-strategy OGSM is not a strategy — it’s a list of things you plan to do. OGSM forces hard choices. If you can’t cut it to three or four strategies, you haven’t made the choices yet. Go back to the Objective and ask which two or three bets would most directly deliver it.

    2. Objectives that are still Goals. “Grow revenue by 40%” is a Goal, not an Objective. An Objective is directional and qualitative: what kind of company are you becoming? Goals are the measurable milestones that prove you’re getting there. Mixing the two is the most common first-draft error. See the 7 OGSM Mistakes guide for a full breakdown.

    3. Measures no one owns. A Measure without an owner is a wish, not a metric. Every Measure in your OGSM needs a named person who updates it at your monthly leadership review. Without ownership, Measures become decorative — and the OGSM stops being a live management tool and starts being a document that lives in a Notion page no one opens.

    How do you get started with OGSM this quarter?

    Step 1: Download a template and run a draft solo. Before you book a team session, write a rough draft of your OGSM yourself. It doesn’t need to be right — it needs to surface the assumptions and gaps that will fuel the real conversation. The free OGSM template gives you the structure to do this in under two hours.

    Step 2: Book two half-day sessions with your leadership team. Don’t try to do this in one four-hour block. End the first session at the Goals. Sleep on it. Return for Strategies and Measures with fresh eyes — the overnight gap changes the conversation quality significantly.

    Step 3: Pick your first monthly review date before you leave the room. The OGSM is not a set-and-forget document. It works because leadership teams use it to run monthly strategy reviews. Book the first one before the session ends, assign each Measure an owner, and commit to a 60-minute review cadence.

    For more context on whether OGSM suits your specific company stage, compare it with the OGSM for Small Business guide. If you’re already running OKRs and wondering whether to switch, the OGSM vs OKR comparison lays out the trade-offs side by side.

    The framework is simple. The discipline is in the choices.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM for Marketing Teams: How to Build a One-Page Marketing Strategy That Actually Connects to the Business

    OGSM for Marketing Teams: How to Build a One-Page Marketing Strategy That Actually Connects to the Business

    If your marketing team runs on OKRs, you’ve probably noticed the problem: the objectives are inspiring, the key results are measurable, but six months in nobody can explain how the marketing plan connects to what the CEO is trying to achieve. OGSM fixes this.

    OGSM for marketing teams is a one-page strategic framework that cascades your marketing plan directly from the company strategy, giving every campaign and KPI a clear line of sight to business-level goals.

    It’s the one planning framework designed to cascade directly from the company strategy — which means your marketing plan stops floating free and starts pulling its weight where it matters. This article explores what a Marketing OGSM looks like, how to translate company goals into marketing goals, and how to get started on yours.

    Why Marketing OKRs Often Float Free of Company Strategy

    OKRs are a great personal productivity tool. They’re less great as a strategy alignment tool — because they don’t have a built-in mechanism for connecting upward.

    When a marketing team sets OKRs, they typically start with what marketing wants to achieve: brand awareness, MQL volume, content reach, social followers. These are legitimate goals. But they’re built from the inside out — from what marketing can control — rather than from the outside in, starting with what the company needs.

    The result is a marketing plan that’s busy, measurable, and largely disconnected from the business priorities that actually matter to the CFO and CEO. OGSM solves this by starting with the company-level plan and working down. If you haven’t already, read what OGSM actually means — it’s the foundation everything else sits on.

    What a Marketing OGSM Looks Like vs. a Company OGSM

    A marketing OGSM has the same four elements as a company OGSM — Objective, Goals, Strategies, Measures — but scoped to the marketing function.

    The key difference: a company OGSM sets the direction for the whole business. A marketing OGSM is built in response to the company OGSM. It identifies which company-level Strategies marketing owns, and builds a plan that directly supports those priorities.

    Think of it as a nested structure. The marketing Objective should be traceable to at least one company Strategy. The marketing Goals should feed into the company Goals. The marketing Strategies are the specific choices marketing is making to hit those Goals — not a restatement of the company plan, but a genuine marketing response to it.

    This is the design principle that makes OGSM different from OKRs for marketing teams. Alignment is baked in, not bolted on.

    How to Translate Company Goals into Marketing Goals

    Before you write a single word of your marketing OGSM, you need the company OGSM in front of you. Specifically, you need the Strategies — because those are the choices the company has made about how it will grow. Marketing’s job is to execute the Strategies that fall in its domain.

    Here’s the translation process:

    Step 1: Identify which company Strategies marketing owns (fully or in part). Common examples: “Grow market share in the SME segment,” “Build brand recognition in new geographies,” “Reduce customer acquisition cost by 20%.” Marketing might own one of these outright or share ownership with Sales.

    Step 2: Identify which company Goals marketing directly influences. Revenue, customer acquisition, market share, NPS — whichever Goals have a marketing lever. Be honest about this. Marketing influences some Goals heavily and others barely at all.

    Step 3: Set marketing Goals that are upstream contributors to company Goals. If the company Goal is £40m ARR, and marketing is responsible for inbound pipeline, your marketing Goal might be “Generate £15m in marketing-sourced pipeline.” If the company Goal is 85% retention, and marketing runs the customer communications programme, your Goal might be “Deliver a quarterly customer newsletter with 30%+ open rate.”

    The test: if marketing hits all its Goals, does the company get meaningfully closer to its Goals? If yes, you’re aligned. If not, rebuild.

    What Are the 4 OGSM Elements for a Marketing Team?

    Objective The marketing Objective is an inspirational, qualitative statement of what marketing is here to achieve in the planning period. It should connect naturally to the company Objective — same ambition, marketing-specific scope.

    Example: If the company Objective is “Become the most recognised name in sustainable workplace furniture,” the Marketing Objective might be: “Make our brand the obvious choice for design-conscious office buyers who care where their furniture comes from.”

    Goals Goals are quantified milestones that measure whether you’re hitting the Objective. They should be ambitious but achievable, with a clear time horizon.

    Example:

    • Generate 3,500 MQLs per quarter by Q4
    • Grow organic website traffic to 80,000 sessions/month
    • Achieve brand recall of 35% in target segment (measured annually)
    • Deliver £18m in marketing-sourced pipeline

    Strategies Strategies are the choices marketing is making — what you will focus on and, implicitly, what you won’t. Three to five is the right number. If you have ten Strategies, you have none.

    Example:

    • Build a content hub targeting mid-funnel buyers in the design and facilities management community
    • Launch a referral programme for existing customers
    • Invest in ABM for the top 50 target accounts
    • Run a co-marketing programme with three complementary brands

    Measures Measures are the metrics you track to know whether your Strategies are working. Each Measure should have an owner, a baseline, and a target.

    Example:

    • Content hub: unique visitors, time-on-page, content-sourced leads
    • Referral programme: referrals generated, referral conversion rate
    • ABM: account engagement score, pipeline from target accounts
    • Co-marketing: partner-sourced leads, event attendance

    What Does a Marketing OGSM Look Like in Practice?

    Example 1: Brand Marketing OGSM (fictional — Greenleaf Office Interiors)

    Objective: Make Greenleaf the most trusted name in sustainable workplace design for UK businesses.

    Goals:

    • 40% aided brand awareness in target segment by year-end
    • 25,000 newsletter subscribers
    • Earned media coverage in 5 tier-1 publications per quarter

    Strategies:

    • Launch “The Sustainable Office” editorial series (long-form content + social)
    • Partner with leading architects and interior designers as brand advocates
    • Sponsor the UK Sustainability in Business Awards category

    Measures: Brand awareness survey (quarterly) | Newsletter subscriber growth | Press mentions | Share of voice in target publications

    Example 2: Demand Generation OGSM (fictional — Clova SaaS)

    Objective: Fill the sales pipeline with high-intent buyers who already understand the problem Clova solves.

    Goals:

    • 800 MQLs per month by Q3
    • SQL conversion rate above 25%
    • Cost per MQL below £45

    Strategies:

    • Build an SEO programme targeting high-intent product comparison and “best [category] software” queries
    • Launch a free ROI calculator to capture mid-funnel buyers
    • Run monthly live demos for warm leads with product team presenters

    Measures: MQL volume | SQL conversion rate | Cost per MQL | Demo attendance | Organic traffic from target keywords

    Example 3: Content Marketing OGSM (fictional — Porthaven Financial)

    Objective: Become the go-to educational resource for first-time business owners navigating financial decisions.

    Goals:

    • 50,000 monthly organic visitors by Q4
    • 10 articles ranking on page 1 for priority keywords
    • 20% of new client enquiries cite content as a discovery source

    Strategies:

    • Publish two in-depth guides per month on core business finance topics
    • Build a “First-Year Finance” email course for new business owners
    • Optimise the top 20 existing articles for featured snippets and people-also-ask

    Measures: Organic sessions | Keyword rankings | Email course subscribers | Content-attributed enquiries | Average position for target terms

    These examples are deliberately varied in scope and industry — but the structure is identical. That’s the point of using the OGSM template: the framework travels across any marketing function without losing coherence.

    How to Run Your Monthly Marketing Strategy Review Using Your OGSM

    Writing the marketing OGSM is the easy part. Using it to actually run marketing is where most teams fall short.

    Set a monthly review rhythm. In each review, work through your OGSM top to bottom:

    Objective check: Is the team’s work this month clearly oriented toward the Objective? If the answer is “sort of,” something is drifting.

    Goals check: Track each Goal against target. For any Goal that’s behind, name the cause — not the symptom. “MQL volume is down 15% because our paid channel underperformed, which is because we haven’t refreshed our ad creative since March” is a useful diagnosis. “MQL volume is down” is not.

    Strategies check: Are your Strategies still the right choices? Markets move. If a Strategy is no longer generating results after a fair trial, make the decision to change it — explicitly, in the OGSM — rather than quietly deprioritising it while it clutters the plan.

    Measures check: Is each Measure moving in the right direction? Which Measures are leading indicators of success, and are they pointing the right way? If your content strategy is working, organic traffic should be climbing before MQL volumes follow. The lag matters.

    For teams just getting started, the OGSM review also connects to how you cascade the marketing plan into team-level work. Read how to cascade OGSM through your organisation to see how the content team, demand gen team, and brand team each build their own OGSM from yours.

    OGSM for Marketing Teams: What to Do Next

    Building a marketing OGSM is a half-day exercise if you have the company OGSM in front of you. Here’s the sequence:

    1. Pull out the company Strategies that marketing owns
    2. Write the marketing Objective — one sentence, qualitative, ambitious
    3. Set 3–5 Goals with numbers and timelines
    4. Choose 3–5 Strategies — the real choices, not a laundry list of tactics
    5. Define Measures with owners, baselines, and targets
    6. Review monthly and update quarterly

    The one-page constraint is the discipline. If your marketing plan doesn’t fit on a single page, it’s not strategic — it’s operational. OGSM forces you to make choices, and choice is what strategy actually is.

    Rock on.

  • 20 OGSM Objectives Examples (And How to Write One That Actually Works)

    20 OGSM Objectives Examples (And How to Write One That Actually Works)

    The most important part of the OGSM to get right is the Objective statement. And that’s more difficult than you’d think.

    The Objective in an OGSM is the single qualitative statement at the top of your strategy — the directional, aspirational sentence that describes where your organization is going, without a number attached.

    Good OGSM objectives examples sound like: “Become the most trusted fitness brand in the US” or “Lead the shift from product supplier to solutions partner.” They’re inspiring, durable, and number-free. If yours has a percentage or a deadline in it, you’ve written a Goal, not an Objective.

    In this article we explore what makes a good Objective statement for OGSM, what mistakes to avoid, and provide you with 20 examples for inspiration.

    What Makes an OGSM Objective (And What Doesn’t)

    The Objective is the hardest line to write in an OGSM. Not because the thinking is complex — but because most leaders have been trained to make everything measurable, and an Objective is deliberately not measurable. That friction is where mistakes happen.

    A strong OGSM Objective has three characteristics:

    • Qualitative. No numbers, percentages, or time-bound targets. Those belong in your Goals row.
    • Directional. It points your organisation toward a specific destination — not a distance.
    • Durable. The best Objectives remain meaningful for three to five years, even as the Goals beneath them are refreshed annually.

    Think of the Objective as the answer to: “What kind of company are we becoming?” It’s not about what you’ll achieve by a date. It’s about what you’re building toward.

    The Number One OGSM Objective Mistake

    I’ve reviewed hundreds of OGSMs, from start-ups to global businesses. The error I see most often: writing a Goal in the Objective row.

    Here’s what that looks like:

    “Grow our customer base by 30% and achieve £50m revenue by 2027.”

    That’s two Goals masquerading as an Objective. The moment you attach a number, a percentage, or a deadline, you’ve left Objective territory.

    Here’s how that same strategic intent looks written correctly:

    “Become the first-choice brand for small business owners in our region.”

    The direction is identical. The inspiration is higher. And it gives your leadership team room to set stretching Goals beneath it — which is exactly how OGSM is supposed to work.

    If you find yourself reaching for a spreadsheet while writing your Objective, stop. Go qualitative. Save the measurement for the Goals row where it belongs.

    20 OGSM Objectives Examples by Industry

    These examples span seven sectors. Use them as inspiration — adapt the language to your market, your team, and your ambition. What matters is that each is directional, qualitative, and motivating. Not a single number in sight.

    Retail

    Retail Objectives tend to focus on brand position, customer loyalty, or market leadership. The challenge is avoiding vague mission-statement language and keeping genuine strategic direction.

    1. Become the destination of choice for sustainable everyday essentials in the UK.
    2. Transform from a transactional retailer into a trusted lifestyle brand that customers return to weekly.
    3. Establish ourselves as the most convenient and personalised shopping experience on the high street.

    SaaS / Technology

    In SaaS, Objectives often reflect a shift in how the product is perceived — from tool to platform, from feature to workflow anchor.

    1. Be the platform that growing teams trust to run their operations from day one.
    2. Shift from a point solution to the central nervous system of our customers’ workflows.
    3. Become the most recommended project management tool in the professional services sector.

    Professional Services

    Consultancies and agencies anchor Objectives in reputation and trust — because that’s ultimately what drives their pipeline.

    1. Be recognised as the go-to partner for mid-market companies navigating transformation.
    2. Build a reputation as the most trusted advisory firm in our niche — where clients come for the hard conversations.
    3. Become the consultancy that ambitious founders call first.

    Manufacturing

    Manufacturing Objectives frequently signal a strategic shift — from commodity supplier to valued partner, or from local player to category leader.

    1. Lead our category through a shift from product supplier to full-service solutions partner.
    2. Build a manufacturing operation that competitors benchmark themselves against.
    3. Establish our brand as synonymous with precision and reliability in European industrial markets.

    Non-Profit / Social Enterprise

    Non-profit Objectives should be grounded in mission — but ambitious. Avoid the trap of writing something that sounds like your existing service description.

    1. Become the most trusted voice for marginalised young people in our city.
    2. Transform from a service provider into a movement that changes how our community thinks about mental health.
    3. Build the most accessible and impactful financial literacy programme in our region.

    Healthcare

    Healthcare Objectives often focus on patient experience, workforce quality, or the shift from reactive to proactive care models.

    1. Create a patient experience that people in our community actively recommend to each other.
    2. Lead the shift from reactive care to proactive health management in our practice network.
    3. Become the employer of choice for clinical talent in our county.

    Education

    Education Objectives focus on outcomes, access, and institutional reputation — the things that define an organisation’s identity over a generation.

    1. Build an institution where every student — regardless of background — believes they can succeed.
    2. Become the regional benchmark for innovative, employer-linked curriculum design.

    How to Stress-Test Your OGSM Objective

    Once you’ve written a draft, run it through these three questions before it gets locked into the framework:

    1. Is it qualitative?

    Remove every number and deadline. Does it still make sense? Does it still have direction? If yes, you’re in the right territory. If stripping the numbers leaves you with nothing, you’ve written a Goal, not an Objective.

    2. Does it have a three-to-five-year feel?

    Your Objective should be stable while your Goals evolve annually. If it would feel outdated in 12 months, it’s too tactical. If it could mean anything indefinitely, it’s too generic. Aim for the sweet spot: specific enough to have a point of view, broad enough to outlast your next planning cycle.

    3. Does it move your team?

    Read it aloud. Does it land? Would a new joiner immediately understand what kind of organisation this is trying to become? A great Objective creates a feeling, not just a direction. If you get blank stares, rewrite it.

    Most first drafts don’t pass all three. That’s normal — the Objective usually takes the longest to settle in any OGSM I’ve worked on.

    Objectives vs Goals: The One-Line Distinction

    An Objective tells you where you’re going. A Goal tells you whether you’ve arrived.

    “Become the most trusted brand in our market” is an Objective. “Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 72 by Q4 2027” is the Goal that proves it. They are two different instruments doing two different jobs, and conflating them is how strategies lose their structure.

    If your OGSM has numbers in the Objective row and aspirational language in the Goals row, you’ve flipped them. Swap them back and the whole framework will feel more coherent immediately.

    For a deeper look at how Goals and Measures work together — and the confusion that arises when they’re treated as the same thing — see OGSM Goals vs Measures: What’s the Difference?.

    Writing Your Own OGSM Objective

    Start with this prompt: “In three to five years, we want to be known as the company that ________.”

    Fill in the blank without using a number. Strip the jargon. Run it through the three stress-test questions above. Then check it against your complete OGSM guide to make sure your Goals, Strategies, and Measures build coherently beneath it.

    If you want to see complete OGSM examples across all four components in action, 30 OGSM Strategy Examples is a good next stop. And for the Measures row — the other notoriously tricky component — OGSM Measures Examples walks you through it in the same format.

    Rock on.