Align OKRs with Your Product Roadmap for User-Driven Growth

We’ve seen teams burn the candle at both ends developing new features sprint, after sprint, and later realize that they didn’t drive the business forward. It’s not due to lack of effort, it’s a lack of alignment. 

Product teams are tracking towards execution while the business objectives are evolving elsewhere, creating a silent but expensive disconnect and misalignment of efforts. 

That’s where OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) come in. OKRs help change vague aspirations into something measurable and direct every product decision back to what truly matters – impact on users, and driving business outcomes.

In this blog, I’m going to outline how OKRs can evolve your product roadmap to be more focused, collaborative and outcome-driven. If you are a product manager, founder, or business leader, you’ll understand how to convert goals into execution with clarity and confidence.

What is the role of OKRs in a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is simply your plan for execution. It is clear about the features, enhancements, and timeline that turns your vision into reality. However, without OKRs, it is merely a list of activities you want to engage upon. 

OKRs provide an important function in ensuring that the roadmap has direction.

Objectives – clarify the destination and the impact you hope to achieve. Examples include: “Improve user engagement” or “Broaden our business into new markets.” 

Key Results – demonstrate progress, those specific, quantifiable results. Examples include: “Increase monthly active users by 20%” or “Reduce churn by 15%.” 

When your roadmap is derived from your OKRs, each release has meaning associated with it. Teams will stop asking “What do we build next?” and will start asking “What will accelerate our key metrics?” 

That alignment turns your roadmap from merely a list of features into a strategy.

How are OKRs and product roadmaps different?

Consider OKRs as your guiding star, and the product roadmap as the way to get there.

OKRs specify why you are building something. A roadmap specifies how you will do it.

For example:

Objective: Improve performance.

Key Results: Average load time reduced by 30%, uptime improved to 99.9%.

Roadmap: Prioritize backend optimization in Q1, deploy performance monitoring tools in Q2.

Both are critical. Working from OKRs without a roadmap is a wish list; working from a roadmap without OKRs is just movement without meaning.

Using OKRs to make a customer-centric product roadmap

Many of your best ideas for a product will come from your users, through feedback, analytics, and observations. OKRs provide a way to focus those observations into organized objectives that inform your roadmap. Here is how to do it:

1. Define Your Product Vision and Priorities

Get input from stakeholders across product, marketing, sales, and support teams. Look for trends in customer pain points, feature requests, and possible enhancements.

Then, prioritize your intentions aligned to the company vision. For example:

Make onboarding easier to improve user activation.

Improve product usability or performance to improve retention.

These priorities should connect back to OKRs to ensure that every initiative on your roadmap has a measurable reason for being there.

2. Write High-Quality Product OKRs

Once you identify your most relevant inputs, convert those priorities into OKRs. Example:

Objective: Improve customer satisfaction and retention.

Key Results:

Increase NPS from 7 to 8 in one quarter.

Decrease support response time from 24 hours to 12 hours.

Achieve 90 percent customer retention by year-end.

Next, connect your roadmap initiatives to OKRs by creating objectives such as redesign user interface or improve violability or performance to achieve NPS.

3. Get All Teams Aligned to Common Goals

Product outcome isn’t only determined by product teams—marketing, sales, and customer success have a role.

Use cross-functional OKRs (or objective key results) to get everyone aligned.

Example:

Marketing Objective: Increase adoption of product.

KRs: Increase website visitors by 20%, acquire 500 new leads/month, improve sign up by 10%.

If all teams align their OKRs to the same roadmap priority, the collaboration is easy and measurable.

4. Use the Most Appropriate OKR Tool for Transparency

An OKR tool like JOP, Profit.co, or Workboard keeps everyone aligned. It’s useful for teams to help each other see progress, ask for assistance, visualize dependencies, and hold each other accountable.

Find a tool that is easy to learn from and integrates into how you work already, and has the option to scale as your organization grows.

5. Remain Agile and Iterate Based on Feedback

OKRs are not static—there is always room to change. Use user feedback and analytics to regularly review and refine your OKRs as needed.

Incorporate a quarterly OKR review process, collect feedback through a survey and/or user interviews, and revise your roadmap based on their input. This approach ensures your product continues to evolve with your users—not your assumptions.

Learn from Example: How Prezi Scaled with OKRs

Several years ago, Prezi—the visual-based presentation mechanism that many of us used for presentations in class or business meetings—found itself at an inflection point. 

After a decade of growth, its growth was beginning to slow down. There was a permanent shift in how we communicated because of the pandemic; video and remote collaboration became a reality. Therefore, Prezi needed to rethink its strategy and pivot in a radical direction, not just come out with some new experiences. 

That’s when they decided to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to reset alignment, clear out the backlog, and create purpose with their roadmap. 

The Problem 

Prezi’s leadership team had realized that their product roadmap was busy with activities, but ultimately unfocused. There were designers that wanted to redesign the UI, engineers were trying to improve speed, and marketing was going out and developing campaigns for their features that didn’t necessarily connect back to business goals. 

Everyone was working on valuable ideas, but it wasn’t in a collaborative-focused direction. 

To compound the challenge, it acquired Infogram, a data visualization company, the challenge became bigger. They had the need to create a single team out of two teams, a single product out of two products, a single vision out of two visions, all while serving their then 100 million customers. 

Realigning aligning product roadmap with company goals

On his first day as Prezi’s CEO, Jim Szafranski announced the new way of thinking for Prezi, the OKR based roadmap. The first company-wide Objective based roadmap is simple, but very powerful:

“Launch a single product that helps users visualize their ideas, and grow our monthly active users.”

To make this Objective measurable, Jim and the other leadership team members agreed on three Key Results:

• Integrate Infogram’s design capabilities into Prezi implementation within 6 months
• Achieve 90% satisfaction with the experience for users launching the new product
• Increase Monthly Active Users by at least 25% after launch

Suddenly the roadmap was not just a list of features, it was a story.

Quarter 1 became focused on the backend integration of Prezi and Infogram.

Quarter 2 became focused on UI designs and consistency.

Quarter 3 became focused on user feedback, tutorials, and start marketing rollout.

Every team was now prioritizing work based upon these OKRs, creating a common mission to align what was previously divided into unrelated work.

The Results:

Within 6 months, Prezi Design was launched — an amazing new product that combined Infogram’s visual tools with Prezi’s magical storytelling.

The results speak for themselves:

• Monthly Active Users in the first quarter increased by 22%, totaling 140,600
• User experience satisfaction from 66% to 88% the highest we had seen in years

User experience between the old and new team members became seamless, because we embodied two teams living in OKRs together  instead of two competing teams with business goals and OKRs.

Even more importantly, teams could finally see how they could contribute their daily efforts to a larger purpose. Meetings were quicker, decisions were clearer, and execution was more assured.

The Takeaway

Prezi’s experience illustrates what happens when OKRs and product roadmaps are combined, clarity takes the place of confusion, and collaboration becomes the reason to grow.

Your roadmap tells you what to build. OKRs remind you to care.

As a result, they can turn product planning into meaningful progress that you can measure, and an entire company believes is a narrative.

Why OKRs Change Your Product Roadmap

Most teams don’t fail from lack of effort – they fail from fragmented attention. The product roadmap builds into a long list of “good ideas” – with no success metric in sight, it can be easy to lose focus. Enter the OKRs.

When you sync up your OKRs with the product roadmap, every initiative is connected to an objective. You stop building for the sake of building, and you start building to create impact.

So what does this look like in action:

Clarity: Teams know exactly why they are working on something. Each item on the roadmap maps to an objective with a measurably defined outcome – -be it retention, performance or UX. This clarity eliminates debate about what are the criteria for an ongoing prioritization.

Focus: OKRs help differentiate between what is important and what is merely urgent. Your roadmap used to consist of ten competing priorities; now you focus on the few high-impact goals that actually build the business.

Transparency: OKRs make your progress visible. Teams are able to see how each milestone feeds into overall company objectives. You can reduce the number of surprises when milestones are closed at the end of a quarter. You can spot roadblocks earlier and celebrate wins quicker. 

Agility: Market shifts, user needs, or simply the fact that your ideas did not work. The benefit of OKRs is that they provide structure and a bigger picture. When you want to readjust your roadmap mid-cycle based on data or feedback you can do that while also being reminded how they impact your overall objectives. 

Motivation: When people see how their daily work directly impacts real results, such as user satisfaction or increased revenue, it creates a greater sense of ownership. Now, not only are people executing tasks, but they are also a part of the company and its growth story. 

In summary, OKRs flip your roadmap from a to-do list into a living strategy, one that keeps your team aligned and inspired, while driving measurable success for the entire organization.

Final thoughts

Your roadmap isn’t replaced by OKRs – they help provide one. Together, they serve to connect strategy and execution, leading you to build products that truly meet users’ needs and grow your business.

If you’re just getting started, begin small: one objective, some key results, and a focused roadmap. Track progress, learn, and iterate. Over time, you will begin to see how clarity creates momentum and momentum creates growth.

Every great product has a story. Let OKRs make yours one of purpose, data, and direction.