The Framework Is Not Enough
Choosing OKRs, or any other strategic framework, is a good start. Getting people to actually think and work strategically takes more than that. There are three things you have to build on top of it.
A few weeks ago, my husband and I got talking about his work. He works at a large organization, and these days he’s doing some strategic work there on how they should operate. One thing in particular drives him crazy: people don’t really look at whether the projects that get funded actually bring the results they were supposed to bring. It’s a classic output vs. outcome conflict. Some of his discomfort comes directly from his profession, but I suspect some of it comes from being married to a strategy mentor who loves talking about her work 🙂
Somewhere along the way, they decided that the right thing for them is to implement OKRs. He wanted to talk through how to build them, and we did, but I also told him that much more than that is needed.
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether it’s OKRs, a strategic thinking process or anything else. To make it work, you need more than just implementing the framework. There are three layers on top of it that you can’t do without.
I’ve seen it time and again with my clients. If you’re bringing a framework into your organization, choosing it is an important decision. But on its own, it won’t get people thinking and working more strategically. Here is what you have to include on top.
Shared language
In many of the organizations I work with, conversations happen at two distinct heights. There’s the vision and the goals, discussed at a very high level (and often without enough detail), and there’s what we’re doing tomorrow morning: the features and their status. Everything in between is not discussed, primarily because they don’t have the proper language for it. When there are no words for something it’s hard to even think at that level, let alone talk about it with others. It all happens in people’s heads, intuitively, if at all.
Think about your discussions with management. In most cases the language doesn’t include the why. It doesn’t include the reasoning, or the fundamental assumptions behind any plan. So all people can talk about is features and status. Delivery becomes the focus, not because that’s what people care about most but because it’s the only way they know.
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As soon as we start laying out what’s behind it, people can discuss it. They can question the reasoning, challenge an assumption, suggest a better way to get there. A framework like OKRs can help define that language, but it doesn’t have to come from OKRs. What matters is that the middle stops being invisible, and your people can start working on it together.
Ongoing process
When people talk about the process around a framework, they usually mean the process of defining it: how we build the OKRs, who writes them, when they’re due. That process gets a lot of attention, and once it’s done, it feels like the hard part is behind you.
But defining the OKRs (for example) is only a small part of the process. To make them a reality, you need an ongoing one. People need to know about them, someone has to track against them, and there has to be a way to check that what we’re doing is actually aligned with them: how far down they go, who approves what, which status meetings they come up in. It’s mostly made of ordinary things like meetings, documents and gates, and it keeps going long after the planning is over.
Very often companies stop right after defining the OKRs and never get back to them, because nobody defined even the next touchpoint. If we want a monthly review, someone needs to set it up. Honestly, if a full ongoing process feels too heavy for you, this is the one thing I would start from.
Managerial commitment
Even once the language exists and the process is running, there’s a steady pull back toward the way things have always been done. People tend to go back to their old habits, and that’s only natural. The change you’re asking for is a cultural one, a change in how people think more than in how the work is organized, and meetings, gates and documents can only carry part of it. The rest is carried by managers who keep holding the new way, sometimes by repeating the same things over and over.
For example, when I work with companies on elevating their product thinking, we often talk about the plans ahead. It could be a sprint or a yearly plan, it doesn’t matter. People often lay out the plan (this is what we are going to do), and I keep asking why. Why these items over others, are they tied to our goals, and so on. After they have been grilled a few times, they start with the background themselves, because they know I would ask for it whether they raised it or not.
The larger the organization, the more this matters. It’s great to start with a framework, it makes things easier. But to make a real change, the framework isn’t enough. It takes you, asking why, until people come with the answer before you ask.
Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook
Originally published at https://infinify.com on October 14, 2026.
