You Don't Need OKRs Yet (And That's Okay)

Every startup advice column says the same thing: set OKRs early, build good habits, and you'll scale smoothly. It sounds reasonable. It's also probably wrong for you.

If you're running a team of five to ten people, formal OKRs are likely overkill. You don't need quarterly planning ceremonies, cascading objectives, or a tool to track key results. You need to ship fast and talk to each other. The good news is: you already know how to do that.

You are the alignment layer

At five people, you're in every conversation. You know what everyone is working on because you were probably in the room when they started. Alignment isn't a system problem; it's a lunch conversation.

OKRs exist to solve a coordination problem that small teams don't have. They create shared language and visibility when the founder can't be everywhere. But when you can be everywhere, the system adds overhead without solving anything.

At this stage, you are the alignment layer. Your attention is the thing that keeps the team pointed in the same direction. Adding formal goals doesn't help; it just creates one more thing to maintain while you're trying to find product-market fit.

What actually works at this stage

Small teams thrive on focus and speed, not ceremony. Here's what you actually need:

• One clear goal per quarter. Not three objectives with twelve key results. One sentence that everyone can repeat from memory. "Ship the beta." "Get to 100 paying customers." "Close the seed round." Write it down. Share it. Done.
• A regular shipping cadence. Weekly demos or show-and-tells beat weekly status meetings. Show the work, talk about what's next, keep moving. If something is stuck, you 'll know because the demo won't happen.
• Founder attention on what matters. Your job is to stay close to the two or three things that will determine whether the company succeeds this quarter. Everything else is noise. Don't track it; ignore it.
• Lightweight async check-ins. A Slack thread on Friday afternoon. A shared doc you update as you go. Nothing that requires a meeting or a dedicated tool. If someone's blocked, they'll say so.

This isn't less rigorous than OKRs. It's more appropriate. Rigor at this stage means shipping quickly and learning fast, not maintaining a goal-tracking system.

The ceremony trap

Here's what happens when small teams adopt OKRs too early:

• You spend a week doing "quarterly planning" when you already know the plan.
• People set key results they think sound good instead of the one thing that actually matters.
• You hold check-in meetings where everyone says "still on track" because nothing has changed since yesterday.
• The OKRs drift from reality by week three, but nobody updates them because it feels like admin.
• End of quarter, you either grade generously to feel good or realize the goals were irrelevant and skip it entirely.

This is OKR theatre. The form without the function. It makes small teams feel professional while actively slowing them down.

Worse, it can create a false sense of structure that masks real problems. If your startup is wandering, OKRs won't fix it. Clear founder vision will. If your team is misaligned, a Notion table won't help. Direct conversations will.

Signs you're outgrowing this

The informal approach works until it doesn't. Here's how you'll know:

• You can't be in every important conversation. There are now decisions happening that you hear about after the fact. Information flows through people, not through you.
• Teams start making assumptions about priorities. Two people are working on conflicting things because each thought their work was the priority.
• "What are we working on?" becomes a real question. When you ask, people give different answers. Not wrong answers, just different ones.
• Weekly syncs take 90 minutes and still miss things. You're doing round-robin updates to compensate for lack of visibility. It's exhausting and incomplete.
• You feel out of touch with execution. You know strategy and direction, but you're not sure what shipped last week or what's stuck.

These are symptoms of a coordination problem. Now you need a system.

What changes at 20 or 30 people

The informal approach breaks when the founder stops being the router for every decision. At some point, you have to trust other people to make calls without running them by you. That requires shared context about what matters.

This is where OKRs start to earn their keep. Not as a planning ritual, but as shared language for priorities. When a product manager decides to cut a feature, they can point to the objective and say, "This is why." When an engineer pushes back on scope, they can say, "This doesn't move the key result."

OKRs become useful when they reduce the need for you to be in the room. They're coordination infrastructure, and coordination infrastructure matters when you have enough people to coordinate.

But here's the thing: the transition is harder if you've been using a heavyweight system too early. You'll have trained the team that OKRs are bureaucracy, something to check off rather than something to use. Starting simple and adding structure when needed is easier than backing out of structure that never fit.

The honest answer

If you're reading this as a founder of a five-person startup wondering if you need OKRs: you probably don't. Focus on your customers, ship your product, and talk to your team. That's the work.

When you grow, you'll need something different. You'll need a way to connect company goals to what teams are actually shipping without manually reconciling everything yourself. You'll need weekly reviews that produce decisions instead of status updates. You'll need visibility without micromanagement.

That's why we built Runsheet for 25 to 75 person companies, not startups of five. At that scale, the founder can't be the alignment layer anymore. The company needs a system that connects goals to delivery without adding bureaucracy.

But you're not there yet. And that's okay. Ship the product. Hit the milestones. When you outgrow the informal approach, you'll know. And we'll be here.