Rock Your Strategy

Category: Strategy Execution

Posts and articles about strategy deployment and implementation

  • 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.

  • The AI Strategy Audit: How to Use AI Tools to Keep Your OGSM on Track

    The AI Strategy Audit: How to Use AI Tools to Keep Your OGSM on Track

    You built a solid OGSM. You ran the launch meeting, shared the document, set a review cadence. And then life took over, and six weeks later you’re not sure which Goals are on track, which Measures haven’t been updated, and whether the strategy you committed to is still the right one.

    An AI strategy audit uses AI tools — Claude, ChatGPT, or similar — to systematically review your OGSM: flagging stale Measures, testing whether your Goals are still realistic, stress-testing your Strategies against current conditions, and generating specific questions for your next review meeting. A thorough AI audit takes 30 minutes and surfaces issues a standard review often misses.

    Here’s how to run one — and the exact prompts to use.

    Why AI Makes a Good Strategy Auditor

    AI tools don’t have the same blind spots you do. When you review your own OGSM, you see it through the lens of what you know, what you’re hoping for, and what feels uncomfortable to confront. An AI tool has none of those filters. Ask it the right questions, and it will push back on your assumptions with the consistency of a very patient, very well-read advisor who has no stake in the outcome.

    The key is knowing what to ask. Used poorly, AI just produces generic strategy advice. Used with the right prompts and your actual OGSM data, it becomes a genuinely useful thinking partner for the review process.

    What You Need Before You Start

    Before running an AI strategy audit, gather:

    • Your current OGSM document (or a typed summary of Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures with current RAG status)
    • Any recent performance data relevant to your Goals (revenue figures, traffic numbers, customer counts — whatever your Goals track)
    • The date your OGSM was last formally reviewed

    You don’t need to share the full document at once. The prompts below are designed to work section by section.

    The Five-Part AI Strategy Audit

    Part 1: Objective Clarity Test

    Paste your Objective into the AI tool and use this prompt:

    “Here is our strategic Objective: [paste Objective]. Please assess this against three criteria: (1) Is it specific enough to guide real decisions, or is it too vague? (2) Does it suggest a clear timeframe? (3) Would someone outside our organisation understand what we’re trying to achieve? Please flag any weaknesses and suggest a sharper version if needed.”

    A well-written Objective should pass all three. If the AI struggles to understand what you’re aiming for, your team probably does too.

    Part 2: Goal Integrity Check

    Paste each Goal (with baseline and target) and use this prompt:

    “Here are our strategic Goals: [paste Goals with baselines and targets]. Please assess each one against the SMART criteria — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Flag any Goals that are missing elements, and identify any that appear too safe (unlikely to stretch the team) or too ambitious (unrealistic without a step-change in approach).”

    Ask a follow-up: “Given these Goals, what would need to be true about our business for us to achieve all of them simultaneously? Are there any that might conflict with each other?”

    This second question often surfaces tensions the planning process missed — for example, a Goal to grow volume while simultaneously improving margin, without a Strategy that explicitly addresses the trade-off.

    Part 3: Strategy Stress Test

    Paste your Strategies and use this prompt:

    “Here are the Strategies we have committed to this year: [paste Strategies]. For each one, please: (1) Identify the key assumption it relies on. (2) Describe what would have to be true in the market for this Strategy to succeed. (3) Flag any Strategy where the assumption seems weak or where an alternative approach might be more effective.”

    You can also ask: “Are there any obvious strategic options we appear not to have considered, given our Objective and Goals?”

    This prompt works especially well when you share some context about your market or competitive situation. The more specific you are, the more useful the output.

    Part 4: Measures Audit

    Paste your Measures and use this prompt:

    “Here are the Measures we are tracking: [paste Measures with targets and current status]. Please assess each one and tell me: (1) Is this a leading indicator (predicts future Goal performance) or a lagging indicator (reports past results)? (2) Does this Measure have a plausible causal connection to the Goal it’s meant to support? (3) Are there any Measures that appear to be output metrics rather than outcome metrics?”

    Then ask: “If all of these Measures were consistently green, which of our Goals would you be most confident will be achieved — and which Goals do you think would still be at risk? Why?”

    This last question tests whether your Measures actually cover your Goals — a common gap in OGSM design.

    Part 5: Review Meeting Preparation

    Once you’ve completed the first four parts, use this prompt to prepare your next strategy review:

    “Based on everything we’ve discussed about our OGSM — our Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures — please generate: (1) The five most important questions our leadership team should discuss at our next strategy review. (2) The two or three areas where you think we are most at risk of being off track. (3) One provocation — a question designed to challenge a core assumption we might not be examining.”

    The provocation question is often the most valuable output. Strategy teams have a tendency to examine tactics while leaving core assumptions unquestioned. A good provocation makes the meeting more honest.

    How to Use the Output

    An AI strategy audit produces observations, not decisions. The output gives you better questions to take into the review meeting, not answers to replace the meeting.

    Treat it as pre-work. Share the AI audit output with your leadership team 24 hours before the review. Ask them to come prepared to discuss the two or three risks the audit flagged. This shifts the meeting from information-sharing to genuine strategic dialogue.

    Running the Audit Quarterly

    The AI strategy audit works best as a quarterly habit — done two or three days before each major strategy review. It takes about 30 minutes to run, and the discipline of preparing your OGSM data to share with the AI tool is itself valuable: it forces you to update the document before the review rather than improvising status in the meeting.

    You can also run a lighter version monthly — just Part 4 (the Measures audit) — to catch any Measures that are drifting without being addressed.

    What AI Can’t Do

    AI tools are useful strategy thinking partners. They are not strategy consultants, and they’re not a substitute for genuine organisational knowledge.

    AI doesn’t know your specific market dynamics, your team’s actual capacity, or the political realities that shape what’s truly possible in your organisation. The audit questions are most useful when you’re specific about context — “we operate in a market where…” or “our main constraint is…” — and when you treat the output as input to human judgment rather than a replacement for it.

    The best strategy is still made by people who understand the business. AI helps them think more rigorously about what they already know.

    Ready to Audit Your Strategy?

    If you want to run an AI strategy audit on your OGSM, the first thing you need is an OGSM that’s properly structured — with clear Goals, connected Strategies, and trackable Measures. The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel give you that structure from the start, so when you bring the AI into the review process, you’re working from a solid foundation rather than trying to retrofit one.

    And if you would rather not run the audit prompt by prompt, the OGSM Strategy Builder has both the stress test and the review built in as phases: it runs the mechanical checks, challenges the judgement calls, says plainly what it cannot verify, and prepares your review agenda with the at-risk items first. More on how it works.

  • Is Your Strategy Off Track? 10 Warning Signs and How to Fix Them

    Is Your Strategy Off Track? 10 Warning Signs and How to Fix Them

    Strategies don’t usually fail dramatically. They drift — quietly, gradually, until the gap between where you said you’d be and where you actually are is too wide to close without a serious conversation.

    Your strategy is off track if two or more of these warning signs are present: review meetings focus on activity rather than results, Goals haven’t been updated in months, your team can’t articulate the strategy in a sentence, you keep adding initiatives without removing others, or your Measures are consistently green while your Goals are red. Each sign points to a specific fix.

    Here are ten warning signs to look for — and what to do about each one.

    1. Your Review Meetings Have Become Status Updates

    If strategy reviews are mostly slide decks of “what we did last month” rather than “are we on track and what needs to change,” your review process has become a reporting exercise rather than a decision-making one.

    The fix: Restructure your next meeting around questions, not slides. Start with: “Which Measures are amber or red, and why?” Require anyone presenting a Measure to also propose an action.

    2. Nobody Can Summarise the Strategy in One Sentence

    Ask three people in your organisation to describe the strategy. If you get three different answers — or three blank looks — the strategy hasn’t landed.

    A strategy that can’t be summarised isn’t a strategy. It’s a planning document.

    The fix: Write a single strategy sentence that everyone at leadership level agrees on. Something like: “We are focusing on [target market] with [key approach] in order to [Objective].” Test it until it’s short enough to remember and specific enough to actually guide decisions.

    3. Your Measures Are Green but Your Goals Are Red

    This is one of the most common — and most dangerous — patterns in strategy reviews. Your leading indicators look healthy, but your lagging outcomes are not improving. This means either your Measures aren’t actually measuring what matters, or the connection between your Strategies and your Goals is weaker than you thought.

    The fix: Audit the connection between each Measure and the Goal it supposedly predicts. Are they genuinely linked? If a Measure has been green for three months and the related Goal hasn’t moved, that Measure isn’t a leading indicator — it’s a comfort metric. Replace it.

    4. You Keep Adding Priorities Without Removing Anything

    Every time a new idea or external pressure arrives, it gets added to the strategy. Nothing ever gets removed. The result is a list of twelve “priorities” and a team that quietly does whatever it was already doing.

    The fix: Apply a simple rule: for every new initiative added to the strategy, one existing initiative must be explicitly paused or removed. This forces real prioritisation rather than the illusion of it.

    5. Your Strategies Haven’t Changed, Even Though the Market Has

    A strategy that made sense in January may not make sense in October. If the external environment has shifted — new competition, changing customer behaviour, a technology disruption — and your Strategies look exactly the same as they did at the start of the year, either you’ve genuinely assessed the situation and decided to stay the course, or you haven’t been paying attention.

    The fix: At each quarterly review, spend ten minutes explicitly asking: “What has changed in our environment since we set this strategy? Does our approach still make sense?” This isn’t about rewriting the strategy every quarter — it’s about confirming that the strategy remains valid.

    6. The OGSM Hasn’t Been Updated Since It Was Created

    If your OGSM document looks exactly like it did on the day you built it — same numbers, same RAG status, no updates — it’s become a wall decoration rather than a working tool.

    A living OGSM changes at every review. Status gets updated. Actions get added. Occasionally a Strategy changes. If none of that is happening, the document isn’t being used.

    The fix: Assign a single owner for the OGSM document. That person is responsible for updating it after every review meeting and circulating the updated version within 48 hours.

    7. Your Team Doesn’t Know How Their Work Connects to the Strategy

    If individual contributors or team leaders can’t explain how their work connects to the overall Objective and Goals, the strategy isn’t guiding day-to-day priorities. It’s operating in parallel to the real work.

    The fix: This is a cascade problem. Each team should have a clear line of sight from their tasks to the company’s Goals. If that connection doesn’t exist, either build it through a cascade OGSM or simplify the strategy until the connection becomes obvious.

    8. You’re Consistently Hitting Targets That Require No Change

    If every Goal comes in at exactly 100% every quarter with no significant course corrections, one of two things is true: either your execution is genuinely exceptional, or your targets aren’t stretching enough to drive growth.

    Comfortable targets feel good. They also tend to correlate with stagnant results.

    The fix: Revisit your Goal-setting methodology. A well-set Goal should require your team to do things differently, not just more of the same. If you’ve hit your revenue Goal every year for five years without fundamentally changing your approach, it’s probably time to raise the bar.

    9. Ownership of Goals and Strategies Is Unclear

    In a review meeting, you discuss a red Goal and nobody in the room feels specifically responsible for fixing it. Everyone is vaguely accountable. Nobody is actually accountable.

    The fix: Every Goal and every Strategy on your OGSM should have a single named owner — not a team, not a department, a person. That person presents the status at every review and proposes actions when it’s off track. Diffuse ownership is how strategies die quietly.

    10. You’re Measuring Outputs Instead of Outcomes

    “We published fifteen articles this quarter.” “We ran twelve sales calls.” “We delivered the training programme.” These are outputs — things you did. Outcomes are what changed as a result: traffic increased, pipeline grew, team capability improved.

    A strategy tracked only by outputs is a strategy that can look busy while going nowhere.

    The fix: For every Measure on your OGSM, ask: “Does this tell us about what we did, or about what changed?” Wherever possible, replace output Measures with outcome Measures. “Articles published” becomes “organic sessions generated.” “Sales calls made” becomes “qualified meetings booked.”

    What to Do If Several Signs Are Present

    One warning sign is a flag. Three or more is a signal that your strategy process needs a reset, not just a tune-up.

    A reset doesn’t mean scrapping the strategy. It usually means running a one-day strategy health check — bringing the leadership team together to honestly assess the OGSM against each of these warning signs, and agreeing on three specific changes to make within the next 30 days.

    It also means revisiting your review cadence and format. If the process isn’t working, the problem is usually the structure of the meeting, not the people in it. And it means reassigning ownership explicitly — if accountability has drifted, it needs to be re-established directly, not hinted at.

    The goal isn’t a perfect strategy. It’s a strategy that’s genuinely guiding decisions, being reviewed, and adapting to what you learn.

    A Tool That Makes Off-Track Visible

    One reason strategies drift unnoticed is that the OGSM isn’t in a format that makes status easy to see at a glance. When your Goals and Measures are in a clearly structured, RAG-coded template, it’s much harder to ignore what’s red.

    The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel are designed to make status visible — so the conversation at your next review starts with the right question: “Why is this red, and what are we going to do about it?”

  • 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 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.

  • How to Cascade Your OGSM Across Your Organisation

    How to Cascade Your OGSM Across Your Organisation

    A strategy that only lives at the top of the organisation isn’t really a strategy — it’s a set of senior leadership intentions that nobody else acts on.

    Cascading your OGSM means translating the company-level Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures into department-level OGSMs that support the parent plan. Each department keeps the same Objective, then builds its own Goals, Strategies, and Measures that contribute directly to the company’s. Done well, every team member can trace their work back to the organisation’s direction.

    Here’s how to cascade without losing alignment — or your team’s sanity.

    Why Cascading Matters

    Most strategy failures aren’t failures of planning. They’re failures of translation. The executive team agrees on an excellent strategy, it gets presented, and then people go back to their desks and continue doing more or less what they were already doing.

    The OGSM cascade solves this by creating a direct line of sight between the company’s Objective and every team’s day-to-day work. When someone in operations can look at their team’s OGSM and see exactly how it connects to the company-level Goals, strategy stops being something that happens in boardrooms and starts being something that shapes how people prioritise their week.

    The Structure of a Cascade

    Think of it as a tree:

    Level 1 — Company OGSM: The overall Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures for the organisation.

    Level 2 — Division or Function OGSMs: HR, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Operations each build their own OGSM. Same Objective. Different Goals and Strategies that reflect what their function contributes.

    Level 3 — Team or Project OGSMs (optional): In larger organisations, individual teams or major projects may have their own sub-OGSMs cascaded from the division level.

    The cascade doesn’t require all three levels. Many organisations work well with just two. What matters is that every level’s Goals visibly contribute to the level above it.

    How to Build the Cascade

    Step 1: Lock the Company OGSM First

    Don’t start building department OGSMs until the company-level plan is finalised. This sounds obvious, but cascading before the top-level plan is locked leads to department Goals that point in slightly different directions.

    The company OGSM is the fixed point. Everything below it aligns to it — not the other way around.

    Step 2: Identify Each Department’s Contribution

    For each department, ask: which company Goals does this function directly influence?

    Marketing influences awareness, traffic, and pipeline Goals. Sales influences revenue and customer acquisition Goals. Operations may influence quality, retention, and cost Goals. HR influences capability and culture Goals that underpin almost everything else.

    A department doesn’t need to contribute to every company Goal — just the ones where it genuinely has influence. A cascaded OGSM with three relevant Goals is better than one with six watered-down contributions.

    Step 3: Write the Department Goals

    Department Goals should be outcomes that directly feed the company-level Goals above them.

    If the company Goal is “Grow annual recurring revenue from €5M to €8M by December 2026,” the Sales department Goal might be “Close €2.4M in new ARR from inbound leads by December 2026.” The Marketing department Goal might be “Generate 1,200 qualified leads for the sales team by year-end.”

    Both contribute to the same company Goal. Neither duplicates the other.

    Step 4: Define Department Strategies

    Department Strategies are the specific choices that department will make to hit their Goals. These are usually more operational and specific than the company-level Strategies.

    Company Strategy: “Invest in content marketing to drive inbound demand.”

    Marketing’s Strategy (cascaded): “Publish two SEO-targeted articles per week; run monthly LinkedIn campaigns to drive article traffic; build a lead magnet to convert organic visitors.”

    Step 5: Set Department Measures

    Department Measures track progress on the department’s Strategies — and should be reviewed at the same cadence as company Measures (usually monthly).

    The head of the department owns the department OGSM review. The company-level review draws from these department inputs.

    Making the Cascade Visible

    One of the most powerful things you can do with a cascade is make the connections visible — literally. In your OGSM template, cross-reference department Goals back to the company Goal they support.

    For example, in the Marketing OGSM, next to each Goal, note the company Goal it feeds: “Feeds: Company Goal 2 — Revenue €8M.” This keeps the alignment explicit rather than assumed, and it gives every review a natural “so what” test: if we hit this department Goal, which company Goal moves?

    Common Cascade Mistakes

    Building department OGSMs in silos. If departments build their own OGSMs without referencing the company-level plan, you get local optimisation rather than aligned execution. Heads of department should build their plans in a facilitated session, ideally with the company OGSM on the wall.

    Allowing too much divergence. Some flexibility in department-level Goals is fine. But if a department’s Goals don’t clearly contribute to any company Goal, they’re not cascading — they’re operating a separate strategy.

    Treating the cascade as a one-time exercise. The cascade is a living system. When the company OGSM changes mid-year because of market conditions, the department OGSMs need to update too. Build in a review trigger: whenever the company-level plan changes significantly, review department plans within the following month.

    Cascading too deep too soon. For most organisations, two levels is enough. A third level of team-level OGSMs makes sense only when teams are large and distinct enough to genuinely need their own planning. Don’t create complexity for its own sake.

    Cascade in a Small Business

    Cascading isn’t only for large organisations. Even a three-person business benefits from making the connection explicit between the business-level strategy and each person’s role.

    If your business OGSM has a Goal of growing revenue 40% this year, a simple cascade might mean:

    • Person A’s individual plan focuses on sales and client relationships.
    • Person B’s plan focuses on delivery quality and retention.
    • Person C’s plan focuses on operations and cost efficiency.

    Each person knows exactly how their work contributes to the shared Goal, and the monthly review becomes a two-level check: are we hitting our individual Measures, and is that moving the business Goal?

    The Right Format for a Cascade

    Cascading works best when all levels use the same template format. If the company OGSM is in PowerPoint, department OGSMs should be in the same template. If it’s in Excel, same. Consistency of format makes it easy to review across levels and keeps the visual alignment clear.

    The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel are built for exactly this — you can use the same template at company and department level, adjust the Goals and Measures for each, and keep the whole cascade on the same page layout. That consistency makes cascade reviews much faster and alignment much more visible.

  • 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.

  • OGSM for Non-Profits: How to Build a One-Page Strategy When Your Mission Is the Bottom Line

    OGSM for Non-Profits: How to Build a One-Page Strategy When Your Mission Is the Bottom Line

    Most strategy frameworks are designed to help companies succeed. But what if your organisation is non-profit?

    OGSM works exceptionally well for non-profits, because it gives you a single page that translates your mission into concrete goals, clarifies your programme and fundraising priorities, and gives your board something they can actually use to hold leadership accountable.

    If your current strategic plan is a 40-page document that nobody reads, OGSM is the antidote. This article explores what makes non-profit organisation strategies unique and how to adapt the OGSM approach to suit your organisation.

    Why Non-Profit Strategic Plans So Often Fail

    I’ve sat in rooms with non-profit leaders who are brilliant at their mission and completely exhausted by their strategy process. They’ve spent months producing a beautiful bound document — and by the time it’s printed, it’s already out of date.

    The problem isn’t commitment. It’s format. Traditional strategic plans for non-profits are designed to satisfy funders and boards, not to guide daily decisions. They’re too long, too vague, and too rarely reviewed. Nobody can tell you on a Tuesday afternoon what the top three priorities are this quarter.

    The result? Strategy happens at the senior leadership level and stops there. Programme staff, fundraising teams, and volunteers operate on instinct rather than shared direction.

    Why OGSM Works for Mission-Driven Organisations

    OGSM — Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures — was designed to fit on one page. That constraint is a feature, not a limitation. It forces you to make choices.

    For non-profits, that discipline is especially valuable. You are almost always resource-constrained. You have more good ideas than capacity, more causes worth funding than money to fund them. OGSM forces the question: what are we actually prioritising this year?

    The one-page format also makes it boardroom-friendly. A trustee with a full-time job elsewhere can read it in five minutes and come to a meeting prepared. That changes the quality of your governance conversations entirely. For a deeper look at how OGSM works as a framework, start with our complete OGSM guide.

    How to Adapt Each OGSM Element for a Non-Profit Context

    OGSM adapts to the non-profit world well, but you need to think through each element carefully. Here’s how to frame them.

    Objective: Anchor It to Mission

    Your Objective is your one-sentence statement of strategic ambition for the next one to three years. For a non-profit, this should sit right at the intersection of your mission and your current phase of growth.

    Avoid vague aspirations like “make a difference in our community.” Write something that tells you when you’ve succeeded: “Become the leading provider of food security support in the Greater Manchester region, sustainably funded and recognised by local authorities as an essential service.”

    That’s a real objective. You can test every strategic decision against it.

    Goals: Mix Impact and Sustainability

    Goals are the four to six quantified outcomes that define success. This is where non-profits often make a critical mistake — they write only mission impact goals and ignore financial sustainability.

    You need both. A food bank that reaches 10,000 families but runs out of unrestricted reserves in eighteen months has not succeeded. Your goals should reflect that tension honestly:

    • Reach 10,000 unique households with food support by December 2026
    • Maintain at least 6 months’ unrestricted reserves at all times
    • Grow individual donor base by 40% over two years
    • Achieve 85% volunteer retention year-on-year
    • Secure 3 multi-year statutory funding relationships

    Notice the mix: programme reach, financial health, fundraising pipeline, operational resilience. That’s a complete picture.

    Strategies: Programme Priorities AND Income

    Strategies are the choices you’re making about how to achieve those goals — typically three to six statements. For non-profits, your strategies should cover two areas: programme delivery and income generation.

    Programme strategies might include expanding your referral network with GP surgeries, launching a weekend distribution model, or building a volunteer training programme.

    Income strategies are equally critical: developing a corporate partnership programme, launching a major donor campaign, or applying for a specific statutory funding stream. If your OGSM only covers the work you do and ignores how you fund it, it’s incomplete.

    Measures: The Metrics That Tell You If It’s Working

    Measures are your leading and lagging indicators — the dashboard that tells you if your strategies are on track before you reach year-end.

    For non-profits, strong Measures typically include:

    • Donor retention rate (month-on-month, not just annual)
    • Programme reach (beneficiaries served per month)
    • Volunteer engagement (active volunteers vs. registered)
    • Unrestricted income as a % of total income (financial resilience indicator)
    • Grant pipeline value (forward visibility on income)
    • Referral conversion rate (if partnerships are a strategy)

    For more inspiration on building a strong measures dashboard, see our OGSM measures examples guide.

    What Does an OGSM Look Like for a Non-Profit?

    Here’s what a completed OGSM might look like for a mid-sized community food bank.

    Objective: Be the trusted food security safety net across the city, sustainably funded and embedded in every major referral network by the end of 2027.

    Goals:

    • Serve 8,000 unique households annually by end 2026, 12,000 by end 2027
    • Unrestricted reserves: minimum 6 months at all times
    • Individual donors: grow from 1,200 to 2,000 by December 2026
    • Volunteer retention: 80%+ annually
    • 4 active multi-year grant relationships

    Strategies:

    • Build a GP and social worker referral network covering 90% of local practices
    • Launch a weekend and evening distribution shift to serve working families
    • Develop a Friends of [Foodbank] individual giving programme with tiered benefits
    • Build a corporate volunteering programme targeting 10 local employers
    • Apply to National Lottery Community Fund for a 3-year core cost grant

    Measures:

    • Households served per month (target: 650+)
    • New referral partners added per quarter (target: 8+)
    • Donor retention rate (target: 65%+)
    • Monthly individual giving income (target: £8,000+ by Q4)
    • Unrestricted reserve level (reviewed monthly)
    • Active corporate volunteering relationships (target: 5 by year-end)

    That OGSM fits on one page. Every member of staff and every trustee can read it and understand exactly what success looks like.

    How to Present Your OGSM to the Board

    One of the biggest wins of OGSM for non-profits is what it does to your board meetings. Here’s a 20-minute agenda slot that works:

    Distribute the OGSM (in advance) — it’s one page, so there’s no excuse for trustees not to have read it.

    5 minutes: Measures update — RAG status each measure. No narrative, just numbers.

    10 minutes: Strategic discussion — pick the measures in amber or red and ask: “What are we missing? What’s the right response?”

    5 minutes: Decisions and actions — capture any changes to strategy or resources required.

    That’s it. Governance done.

    How Do You Get Started with OGSM in a Non-Profit?

    Here’s how to move from zero to OGSM in your organisation.

    Step 1: Get the leadership team in a room. You need your executive director, head of programmes, and head of fundraising (or equivalent). Half a day is enough. Come with your mission statement, last year’s accounts, and your current programme plans.

    Step 2: Draft the Objective and Goals first. Don’t start with Strategies — that’s where teams get stuck defending territory. Start with shared ambition. Agree on what success looks like in 2–3 years before you debate how to get there.

    Step 3: Use a template and iterate. Your first OGSM won’t be perfect. Write it anyway. Get it in front of your board and review it quarterly. The discipline of the review is where the real value lives. Download a free OGSM template to get started.

    OGSM for non-profits isn’t a compromise or a simplified version of “real” strategy. It’s a planning tool that respects your mission, your constraints, and your board’s time. One page. Clear trade-offs. A dashboard you actually review.

    Rock on.