The Problem with Self-Reported OKRs

Here's a question every founder should ask: When your team reports that a key result is "70% complete," how do you know that's true?

In most OKR systems, you don't. You're trusting that the person responsible has accurately assessed their own progress. And while trust is essential in a healthy organization, self-reported progress has a fundamental flaw: it measures intent, not reality.

The optimism problem

People aren't lying when they report inflated progress. They're being human. We're wired to be optimistic about our own work. We round up. We count effort as progress. We believe the thing we're working on is almost done — right up until it isn't.

This optimism bias compounds across an organization. Each person rounds up a little. Each team aggregates those rounded numbers. By the time it reaches leadership, you're looking at a dashboard full of green that doesn't match reality.

Why traditional OKR tools make this worse

Most OKR software is essentially a structured spreadsheet. You define a goal, assign a number, and periodically update that number manually. The tool trusts whatever you type.

This creates three problems:

1. No connection to actual work. The OKR lives in one system; the work happens in another. Progress updates are a translation exercise, not a reflection of reality.
2. Updates become a chore. When updating progress feels like paperwork, people do it quickly and move on. Quick updates mean less accurate updates.
3. No way to verify. Leadership has to trust the numbers because there's no underlying data to check against.

The gap between intent and delivery

Here's what actually happens in most companies: goals are set with good intentions, work happens in delivery tools like Linear or Jira, and someone has to manually reconcile the two. That reconciliation is where truth gets lost.

The person doing the reconciliation is usually the same person being measured. They have every incentive — conscious or not — to present progress favorably. Not because they're dishonest, but because they're human.

By week four of a quarter, most OKRs have drifted from reality. By week eight, leadership is making decisions based on data that's essentially fiction.

What grounded progress looks like

The alternative to self-reported progress is grounded progress — progress that's anchored to real, verifiable data. Instead of asking "how do you think it's going?", you ask "what does the data show?"

This means:

• Connecting goals to delivery systems. When a key result is linked to actual shipped work, progress updates itself.
• Using metrics that can't be gamed. Revenue from Stripe. Deployments from GitHub. Customer conversations from your CRM. Data that exists independent of anyone's opinion.
• Separating confidence from progress. Let people express how they feel about a goal (confident, worried, blocked) without conflating that with objective progress.

The shift from trust to verify

This isn't about distrusting your team. It's about building systems that don't require trust to function. Good systems make it easy to do the right thing. They surface truth automatically instead of requiring someone to report it.

When progress is grounded in reality, weekly reviews become conversations about direction and priorities — not forensic exercises in figuring out what's actually happening. Leadership can focus on leading instead of verifying.

Self-reported OKRs were the best we could do with spreadsheets. We can do better now.

Learn more

Want to understand how to build credibility into your goal tracking? Explore more in our Signal: Credibility vs Intent series, or learn about Runsheet integrations that connect your OKRs to real data sources.