What Makes a Strong Key Result: A Practical Formula
A weak Key Result is easy to spot but surprisingly hard to fix on instinct alone. Teams know "improve customer satisfaction" isn't measurable, but rewriting it into something genuinely useful is a different skill. Harvard Business Review has pointed out that popular goal-setting shortcuts often let people set goals that sound specific without actually being measurable. The good news is that a strong Key Result almost always follows the same underlying shape. Once you know the formula, writing good ones gets a lot faster.
The Formula
A strong Key Result generally fits this pattern:
[Verb] [metric] from [baseline] to [target] by [date]
That's it. It sounds almost too simple, but each piece is doing real work. Drop any one of them and the Key Result gets noticeably weaker.
Why Each Part Matters
The verb sets direction: increase, reduce, grow, cut. Without it, it's unclear whether the metric should go up or down.
The metric is the actual thing being measured, a number that exists somewhere and can be checked. If you can't name where the number comes from, it's probably not a real metric yet.
The baseline is where things stand today. This is the piece teams skip most often, and it's the one that matters most. Without a baseline, "increase signups to 500 a month" tells you almost nothing. Is that a huge stretch or barely a change from last month? The baseline gives the target meaning.
The target is the specific number that defines success. Not "improve," a number.
The date creates urgency and makes it possible to check status midway through. Without a deadline, a Key Result can drift indefinitely.
Good and Bad Examples
Weak: Improve website performance.
Strong: Reduce average page load time from 4.2 seconds to under 2
seconds by the end of Q3.
Weak: Grow the sales pipeline.
Strong: Increase qualified pipeline value from $200K to $500K by
June 30.
Weak: Make customers happier.
Strong: Increase customer satisfaction score from 7.2 to 8.5 by the
end of the quarter.
Weak: Ship the new onboarding flow.
Strong: Increase new-user activation rate from 40% to 60% by
launching the redesigned onboarding flow before April 30.
Notice that the last example mixes an activity (shipping the flow) with an outcome (activation rate). That's intentional and fine, the outcome is still the actual Key Result. Shipping the flow alone, with no measurable effect attached, would be an activity dressed up as a Key Result, not a real one.
When You Don't Have a Baseline Yet
Sometimes a metric genuinely doesn't exist yet, there's no dashboard tracking it, no historical number to point to. In that case, the first quarter's Key Result can legitimately be "establish a baseline for [metric] and set a target for the following quarter." That's a real, honest Key Result. It's far better than guessing at a target number with no basis for it, or skipping measurement altogether.
Watch for Metrics That Can Be Gamed
A strong Key Result should also resist being gamed in ways that hurt the business. "Increase support tickets closed from 100 to 200 a week" can be hit by closing tickets prematurely without solving anything. Pairing it with a quality metric, like a customer satisfaction score on closed tickets, keeps the incentive honest. It's worth a quick gut check on any new Key Result: is there an easy, lazy way to hit this number that wouldn't actually reflect real progress?
Making the Formula Easy to Apply
The formula is simple enough to use in the moment, right when someone is drafting an Objective, rather than something that needs a training session to remember. It's a close cousin of the format John Doerr describes in Measure What Matters, just written as a single sentence instead of two separate fields. When setting up Key Results in Easy OKR, the baseline and target fields are separate and required, which nudges people toward the full formula naturally instead of leaving a vague sentence where a measurable number should be.