Episode 45: The 10-Point Scorecard for Choosing OKR Software

So let me start with one thing that matters most, because if you take nothing else from this episode, take this. Most OKR programs that fail don't fail because the tool was missing a feature. They fail around week 4 or 5 because the objectives are still sitting there and nobody deleted them. They just stopped moving. The check-ins stopped happening.

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The numbers went stale. And after 3 quiet weeks, nobody trusts them enough to bother updating anymore. So when you're shopping for OKR software, the question underneath every feature demo is really just one question: will my managers actually open this on a Monday? Everything I'm going to walk through today is a way to answer that before you sign, instead of finding out about it in week 4.

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This one comes straight from Bora Unur, our co-founder and CEO, and his team. They spent months testing OKR platforms and built a 10-criterion scorecard out of it. I'm going to walk you through the whole thing, what carries the most weight, and why. So let's get into it. Before you compare a single feature, you have to settle one thing because it splits the whole market in half.

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What kind of tool is your program actually asking for? And there are 3 shapes. The first is a dedicated OKR tool. Think Tability, Perdoo, Cascade. Goals are the entire product, so the cascade and the check-in engine tend to run deeper than anything else.

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This is the shape for a company where OKRs are the main event and you want the mechanics done properly. The second is the all-in-one suite model. This is where TeamFlex sits alongside LeapSum and 15Five. OKRs show up as one piece wired into reviews, one-on-ones, and feedback. The connection is the whole point.

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Goal Progress lands next to the rest of the performance system, so a completed objective can feed into a review cycle without anyone exporting anything. This fits teams who want OKRs feeding a year-round performance management system. And the third is a project management add-on. Think Asana Goals, ClickUp Goals, Notion. Goals live inside the software your team already works in for their projects.

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Right next to the tasks that drive them. The closeness is the appeal, and it's also the ceiling. So these tools store your OKRs than actually running the OKR process. No real check-in cadence, no alignment tree, and most of them start to strain past about 50 people. So the deciding question underneath all 3 of these is this: where does the update actually happen?

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A tool that puts the weekly check-in where your team already works will hold a rhythm that a more powerful tool sitting in its own tab quietly loses. Answer that and you've already moved half the weight around before you've scored anything. Now let's move on to the actual scorecard. 10 Criteria, and Bora's team weighed every single one of them. 2 Of them carry more than a quarter of the whole score between them, so let's spend real time there.

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Number 1, and they put it at 14%, the heaviest thing on the list: check-in and update infrastructure. This is the machinery that keeps goals current between the day you set them And the day the quarter closes. So think automated reminders, how few steps it takes to log an update, whether the cadence runs on its own or leans on one diligent person pinging everybody every Monday. What good looks like here is specific. Reminders that land in Teams or Slack or email on a schedule the admin sets, so the prompt arrives without anyone sending it.

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An update you can log in a couple of clicks straight from that reminder, measured in seconds rather than A login and 4 screens. And progress that's visible the moment it's entered, rolling straight up into the dashboards. Criterion number 2 at 13%, right behind it: Goal and Cascade Architecture. This is how goals connect across levels— company to department to team to individual— with a visible line of sight, so a person can trace their own Key Result up to the company Objective it serves. And here's why Cascade sits so high.

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It's what gives weekly habits something worth maintaining. A goal you can trace upward feels like it belongs to something. A goal floating on its own gets updated once and then forgotten. So you want real parent-child links, not a flat list of goals tagged by a team. You want different metric types— numeric, percentage, currency— so a goal maps to how you actually measure it.

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And you want a live alignment map anyone can open. The next 3 criteria sit in the middle. They're where your specific situation starts to matter. Integration depth at 11%, and 2 layers here. The first is where the check-in lands, like I told you.

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Can an owner update a Key Result right inside Teams or Slack? Or does the notification just hand them a link out to a browser tab nobody opens? The second is the plumbing underneath. 2-Way syncs with Jira and your work tools, HRS feeds for your org chart, single sign-on. The strong tools don't just notify you.

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They let progress flow from the work itself. So the key result can be linked to a live document, a Power BI report, or some, you know, Planner tasks or Jira updates. Also at 11%, we have customization. No tool matches your process out of the box. What matters is whether your real terminology, your goal types, and your cadence survived the move into the product.

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Can you rename the core objects to your own vocabulary? Can one program run OKRs alongside KPIs and SMART goals? Can you switch off the parts you don't actually use? If you're going to test one thing during your trial, I would suggest actually trying to imitate your goal-setting methodology within the tool without trying to conform to the tool itself. Then we have scalability at 10%.

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This is the one buyers postpone until it's a bit too expensive to reconsider. Per-user pricing that looks cheap at 10 people becomes a growth tax at 100. Governance that works for one team breaks across 20. So as you're evaluating your next OKR software, don't just evaluate it for where you are now, but where you will be in the coming years. Now, the last 5 criteria I will be covering all carry the weights of 8 or 9%.

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They matter, but most decent vendors already clear this bar, so the gaps between them are narrower. Let's start with AI and automation. Our testing team scores this on 2 jobs only: getting a first-cycle team past the blank page with goal drafting and catching a goal that's slipping before the quarter ends. Everyone and their grandmothers are shipping AI features these days, and it is your job in the vendor demo to separate the hype from the actual real-money features. Next up, we have reporting and analytics.

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And like I said, almost all top tools have excellent reporting and analytics. Can leadership see progress at a glance without someone rebuilding it in a spreadsheet every single quarter. You want dashboards that work on day 1 and exports that are clean enough that you can just drop into Power BI as delivered. Then we have ownership and accountability controls. A key result with no named owner is just a wish.

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You want ownership required on every single result, edit permissions tied to a role, and audit trails so a moved target is traceable rather than invisible. Early on, a small team runs on trust, but once enough people can change enough numbers without a record, the goals drift and nobody can say who moved what. Coming in at number 9, we have implementation and support. A tool only pays off when it gets used. Onboarding speed and support quality decide whether you reach a live second cycle or stall after the first.

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And the teams running these programs are usually often small or even single people, which makes vendors' onboarding process extra important. And last but not least, and this is almost always part of our software testing criteria, it is pricing transparency. Can you predict the real cost before the sales call? Public per-seat rates, honest trial terms, disclosed minimums— these are all important. Maybe not so much in the enterprise case, that's why this criterion sits so low, but for SMBs and startups, this one still matters.

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Now, that is the criteria, but here's the real neat thing. We have an entire article covering this entire criteria and how you can move these weights around to fit your needs. And that article even comes with a free template that will allow you to adjust the weights and add your criterion with the formulas already baked into it. And you can find that article in the description of this episode. Speaking of which, that about wraps it up for this episode of the Team Check-In.

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If you're listening to us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts, leave us a like, subscribe. It really helps the show out. And if you want to try the highest-rated OKR software in the Microsoft Teams App Store, TeamFlick, for absolutely free, you can always click the link in the description. Have a good one. Have a good one.

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