Why Overlapping Objectives Quietly Wreck Your OKRs
Two Objectives can have completely different titles and still measure almost the same underlying thing. An Objective about "reducing time to first value" and one about "getting customers to adopt features early" sound like separate priorities, but if you strip away the wording, both are really about the same early-customer-experience problem. This kind of overlap is one of the quietest ways an OKR set falls apart. It doesn't look broken at planning time, the titles are different enough to pass a first read, but it causes real damage once the quarter is underway.
Why Overlap Is So Costly
When two Objectives cover the same ground, three problems show up at once. First, prioritization gets harder, because a team can't tell which Objective should win their attention when both are, in practice, asking for the same work. Second, ownership gets murky. A new Key Result about onboarding emails could plausibly sit under either Objective, and whoever drafts it ends up guessing. Third, evaluation gets messy at the end of the cycle. If one overlapping Objective lands at 80% and the other at 50%, nobody can say with confidence what actually happened, because they were never really two separate stories to begin with.
How Overlap Creeps In
Overlap rarely happens on purpose. The most common cause is that Objectives get drafted independently by different people or teams who never see each other's drafts before they're finalized. A product lead and a customer success lead can both identify "early customer experience" as a priority and each write their own Objective around it, unaware they're describing the same thing from two angles. The second common cause is a broad theme getting split in two for optics, so the organization can point to more Objectives on the board, when really one well-scoped Objective would have covered the same ground more cleanly. Neither cause is a sign of bad intent. Both are a sign that Objectives were finalized before anyone compared them side by side.
A Simple Test for Spotting Overlap
There's a quick way to check any pair of Objectives that feel like they might be circling the same problem. Cover up the titles and look only at the Key Results listed under each one. If you can't tell, from the Key Results alone, which Objective is which, they're overlapping, no matter how different the titles sound. This test works because titles are where ambiguity hides. A title can be written broadly enough to sound distinct while the actual measurable work underneath is identical. What actually aligns an organization is the concrete work being measured, not the language used to describe it, so the Key Results are always the more honest signal.
How to Fix It
Once overlap is confirmed, there are two ways to resolve it, and the right one depends on how much distinct work is really there. If the two Objectives are, in substance, one Objective wearing two names, merge them into a single Objective with a combined set of Key Results. If there's genuinely enough distinct work to justify two Objectives, sharpen each one's scope until a reader could tell them apart from the Key Results alone, no title-covering test required. The goal isn't to have fewer Objectives for its own sake, it's to make sure every Objective on the board is measuring something no other Objective is already covering.
A Worked Example
Before: "Reduce time to first value," with Key Results including faster onboarding completion and quicker setup of the first project, sits alongside "Increase early feature adoption," with Key Results including more customers trying the reporting dashboard in week one and more customers inviting a teammate in week one. Run the title-covering test and the four Key Results are indistinguishable, they're all measuring how quickly a new customer gets meaningfully active. After: the organization merges the pair into two clearly distinct Objectives instead. "Get new customers to their first meaningful outcome faster" owns everything about the first-time setup and onboarding completion. "Deepen usage among customers past their first 30 days" owns feature adoption and expansion behavior for customers who are already established. Now every Key Result has exactly one obvious home, and a team deciding where to spend an afternoon knows immediately which Objective their work belongs to.
Build the Check Into Planning
The cheapest time to catch overlap is before Objectives are finalized, not after the quarter has started. Adding one step to the planning process, a shared review where every draft Objective is read against every other draft Objective before sign-off, catches most overlap before it costs anyone a wasted quarter. It takes an hour. The alternative is discovering the overlap in week eight, when two teams are quietly doing the same work and neither one realizes it.
References
- Set Goals with OKRs — Google re:Work
- Measure What Matters — John Doerr