Draft OKRs

To: Hannah Iyer, CPO From: Staff PM Subject: Align next quarter’s product goals to retention and expansion

Recommendation

Give each team one focused objective, supported by two or three measurable results. Replace acquisition and shipping commitments with customer outcomes that support 108% NRR, 10% annual gross churn, and 25% Payroll attach.

The strongest signals favor fixing Payroll and improving useful integration adoption. Payroll errors or complexity account for 38% of surveyed departures; missing integrations account for another 19%. Price, at 24%, also warrants attention to perceived value and commercial policy.

Payroll customers and customers with three or more integrations churn less, but these are correlations—not proof that attaching either product causes retention. We should improve adoption and reliability while testing their effect on retention, not force adoption to hit a number.

Revised team OKRs

Core HR: Help existing customers realize enough value to stay

Keep: CSAT improvement as a supporting indicator. Change: “Build the best HR platform” is too broad. Remove the org-chart redesign and custom fields v2 from the KRs; retain them as candidate initiatives only if evidence connects them to renewal risk or meaningful customer value.

Revised KRs: 1. Reduce annual gross churn from 14% to 10%, as a shared company result. Core HR is the coordinating product owner, not the sole contributor. 2. Raise CSAT from 4.2 to 4.5, using the same question, sampling approach, and customer population. 3. Improve retention at renewal by 10 percentage points in a pre-defined price/value-risk cohort, versus its baseline. Lock cohort criteria before intervention, include every eligible account, and establish the baseline in week one.

The third target is a proposed stretch target, not a forecast. Core should work with Customer Success and Finance on value realization and price objections. Product improvements alone may not address price sensitivity; unrestricted discounting would also undermine NRR.

Payroll: Make Payroll reliable and easy enough to adopt and keep

Keep: The objective’s intent and the focus on errors. Change: Make the error measure volume-adjusted, add a direct measure of complexity, and move accountability for attach to Growth. Payroll remains responsible for readiness and activation quality.

Revised KRs: 1. Reduce payroll-error tickets per 100 payroll runs by 40% against the previous-quarter baseline, with consistent ticket classification. 2. Reduce median customer time to complete a payroll run by 20%, comparing similar payroll complexity; establish the baseline in week one.

Track error severity and support-contact behavior alongside ticket volume. Fewer tickets are not success if errors persist or customers stop reporting them. Growth should not scale attach ahead of Payroll’s ability to deliver a dependable experience.

Integrations: Make the connections customers need dependable and useful

Keep: Investment in integrations. Change: Replace “connect everything” and “ship 12 integrations.” Twelve low-demand releases could satisfy the proposal without retaining anyone. Prioritize missing connections linked to renewal risk and demand among existing customers.

Revised KRs: 1. Increase by 20% the share of active customers using at least three healthy integrations, relative to a week-one baseline. “Using” must require successful recurring data exchange, not merely installation. 2. Reduce failed scheduled syncs per 1,000 sync attempts by 30%, versus the previous quarter.

Treat both numerical targets as planning proposals to validate against the baseline and capacity. Report retention for newly adopting customers against a comparable cohort. The observed 6% churn rate among customers with three or more integrations is a useful signal, not a guaranteed outcome for new adopters.

Growth: Expand revenue from existing customers through successful Payroll adoption

Keep: Experimentation and conversion discipline. Change: Replace “win more customers,” new-logo growth, and trial conversion. They support acquisition, not this quarter’s stated company objective. Necessary acquisition work can continue as business-as-usual; it should not dominate these OKRs.

Revised KRs: 1. Increase Payroll attach from 18% to 25%, measured on the same active-customer denominator as the company metric. 2. Increase NRR from 101% to 108%, as a shared company result, with Growth accountable for coordinating the expansion plan.

Growth owns targeting, commercial conversion, and the adoption funnel; Payroll owns product readiness. Track successful first payroll and subsequent usage so paid-but-unused attachments do not masquerade as progress. Evaluate incentives against margin, cancellations, and net retained revenue.

Make the goals add up financially

In week one, Finance and Analytics should produce a single retained-revenue bridge: opening recurring revenue, churn, contraction, expansion, and closing retained revenue. Size Payroll expansion and other expansion opportunities against the gap to 108% NRR.

We cannot infer that moving churn down four points and attach up seven points automatically achieves NRR. We lack account revenue, Payroll pricing, contraction, and the precise churn definition. Do not treat customer churn and revenue churn as interchangeable.

Preserve the company metrics’ existing definitions and reporting windows. Annual churn and NRR will respond slowly; review renewal outcomes, payroll quality, and adoption weekly without substituting those leading indicators for the company targets. Shared KRs should appear once on the executive scorecard, with named coordinating owners—not be counted repeatedly as independent contributions.

Process decisions

Reject three objectives per team. Coverage belongs in roadmaps and operating plans. A mandatory count encourages teams to invent goals and dilute attention. One objective per team is sufficient here.

Do not tie next-quarter PM bonuses mechanically to OKR scores. Teams share outcomes, annual metrics lag, and direct compensation linkage encourages sandbagging and metric manipulation. Use OKRs as evidence in a broader performance review covering impact, judgment, collaboration, and learning. Keep incentive decisions separate from stretch-goal scoring.

Investigate last year’s 0.95 average. It may indicate conservative targets, output-heavy KRs, or generous scoring—not exceptional performance. Calibrate committed versus stretch goals and review supporting evidence rather than imposing an arbitrary desired average score.

Time-box planning to two weeks. Five weeks consumed 38% of the quarter. Use week one for baselines, the revenue bridge, dependencies, and target feasibility; week two for trade-offs and Hannah’s approval. Review progress monthly and adjust initiatives as evidence changes, without quietly rewriting targets or definitions.

MEMORANDUM

TO: Hannah Iyer, Chief Product Officer FROM: Staff Product Manager DATE: October 24, 2023 SUBJECT: Q1 Product OKR Alignment & Planning Governance

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Executive Summary

The CEO’s Q1 mandate is clear: grow through retention and expansion (NRR 101% → 108%, Gross Churn 14% → 10%, Payroll Attach 18% → 25%).

However, our product teams have largely proposed business-as-usual, output-driven goals. Most critically, Growth is running in the opposite direction (hunting new logos instead of retention/expansion), Integrations is measuring shipping volume instead of adoption, and Core HR has defaulted to feature delivery.

Below is an analysis of what each team must keep and change, their revised OKRs, and recommendations to resolve the three executive governance bottlenecks.

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Part 1: Team-by-Team OKR Revisions

#### 1. Payroll * Keep: Focus on error reduction. Exit surveys show payroll errors/complexity cause 38% of all churn. Cutting error tickets is directly tied to saving revenue. * Change: Remove pure attach rate as Payroll’s sole downstream KR. Product cannot own GTM distribution alone; Payroll must focus on the product friction that unlocks adoption and prevents churn within the first 90 days. * Revised OKR: * Objective: Deliver a zero-defect payroll experience that drives expansion and retention. * KR 1: Reduce payroll-related support tickets / error reports by 40% (churn mitigation). * KR 2: Reduce time-to-first-run for newly activated payroll accounts from X days to Y days (activation velocity). * KR 3: Maintain monthly payroll run success rate at 99.5%+ across all active payroll customers.

#### 2. Integrations * Keep: Focus on ecosystem connectivity. Customers with 3+ integrations churn at just 6% (vs. 14% company average). * Change: Kill the output metric ("Ship 12 new integrations"). Integrations have zero ROI if unadopted. The team must optimize for depth of adoption—specifically pushing accounts to the 3+ threshold—and target the specific missing integrations driving the 19% churn response. * Revised OKR: * Objective: Deepen customer stickiness by embedding Quarry into the customer’s core toolstack. * KR 1: Increase % of total customers with 3+ active integrations from X% to Y% (driving toward the 6% churn cohort). * KR 2: Deliver the top 3 requested integrations identified in churn exit surveys (accounting/time-tracking). * KR 3: Increase weekly active sync volume / data exchange by 25%.

#### 3. Growth * Keep: Growth's experimentation velocity and funnel mechanics. * Change: Completely pivot away from top-of-funnel acquisition (new logos / trials). Acquisition is GTM-heavy and contradicts the company’s explicit retention/expansion strategy. Growth must be deployed against in-app cross-sell (Payroll attach) and per-seat expansion. * Revised OKR: * Objective: Accelerate revenue expansion across the installed customer base. * KR 1: Drive self-serve/assisted Payroll attach rate from 18% to 25% (CEO target). * KR 2: Increase in-app expansion qualified leads (PQLs) for Payroll passed to Sales by 35%. * KR 3: Increase customer employee invite/seat-activation rate from X% to Y% in accounts with >100 employees.

#### 4. Core HR * Keep: Focus on platform satisfaction (CSAT). * Change: Eliminate roadmap feature-shipping milestones ("Ship org-chart", "Ship custom fields v2") as Key Results. Features are inputs; the outcome is reducing platform-switching churn (11% leave for all-in-one competitors) and protecting the base. * Revised OKR: * Objective: Establish Core HR as the indispensable daily system of record for mid-market admins. * KR 1: Increase core platform CSAT among HR Admins from 4.2 to 4.5. * KR 2: Increase WAU/MAU engagement of company admins on core workflows (org management, employee records) from X% to Y%. * KR 3: Reduce voluntary logo churn of non-payroll accounts from 16% to 12%.

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OKR Alignment Matrix

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Part 2: Governance & Process Recommendations

#### 1. CEO Request: "Three Objectives per team to cover everything" * Recommendation: Decline firmly. * Rationale: A product team with 3 objectives across 4 teams creates 12 competing product priorities for 420 staff. When everything is covered, nothing is prioritized. Objectives are strategic shifts, not operational check-lists. * Counter-Proposal: Enforce one single Objective per team with 2–3 measurable, outcome-based Key Results. Day-to-day maintenance, technical debt, and minor bugs should be managed via standard SLAs and operational run-rate dashboards, not masqueraded as quarterly OKRs.

#### 2. CFO Request: Tie OKR scores to PM bonuses (Historical avg: 0.95) * Recommendation: Reject this proposal. * Rationale: A historical average of 0.95 is an alarming indicator of extreme sandbagging. Healthy OKR frameworks target an average score of 0.70 ("stretch goals"). If bonuses are linked to OKR achievement: 1. Teams will negotiate unchallenging, output-based metrics (e.g., "Ship custom fields" or "Ship 12 integrations") to guarantee 1.0 payouts. 2. Cross-team collaboration will break; teams will refuse shared accountability for complex metrics like Attach Rate or Churn. * Counter-Proposal: Separate evaluation from OKRs. Measure OKR outcomes as a lagging input into broader performance reviews, but assess PMs on holistic impact: strategic execution, product discovery quality, and business outcome delivery. Reset the target score expectations so that achieving 0.70 is celebrated as exceptional execution against ambitious goals.

#### 3. Planning Cadence: Reducing the 5-week overhead * Diagnosis: Spending 5 out of 13 weeks (38% of the quarter) planning is an unsustainable productivity drain. It signals an overly bottom-up, consensus-driven process with insufficient top-down constraints. * Prescription (2-Week Maximum Planning Cycle): * Week -2 (Day 1–3): Top-Down Mandate. Exec team delivers locked company OKRs and operational boundaries. * Week -2 (Day 4–7): Draft Team OKRs. Product squads define 1 Objective and 3 outcome-based KRs directly mapped to executive metrics. * Week -1 (Day 8–10): Cross-Dependency & CPO Review. Hannah and tech leads conduct a single cross-functional review to resolve dependencies (e.g., Growth ↔ Payroll attach). * Week -1 (Day 11–14): Final Approval & Lock. OKRs published before the start of the quarter; zero changes permitted thereafter.

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Immediate Action Items for Hannah

1. Schedule an Executive Alignment Session with the CEO: Present the unified 1-Objective model, demonstrating how 4 hyper-focused product goals cover Gross Churn, NRR, and Attach Rate far more effectively than 12 diluted objectives.
2. Align with the CFO: Share the risk analysis regarding metric inflation (the 0.95 score reality) and present the alternative performance compensation model.
3. Issue Directive to Product Leads: Reject Growth, Core HR, and Integrations' current drafts. Instruct them to submit revised KRs based on the outcome targets above by end of week.

MEMO To: Hannah Iyer, CPO From: Staff PM Re: Aligning team OKRs to the company OKRs, and the process questions

Bottom line

Only Payroll's proposal is close to the company objective (keep and expand existing customers). Core HR and Integrations propose output goals (features and integrations shipped). Growth targets new logos, which move none of the CEO's three key results. I recommend one objective per team, no mechanical link between OKR scores and bonuses, and planning capped at two weeks.

The logic behind the changes

Applying the exit-survey shares to 14% annual churn gives roughly:

• Payroll errors/complexity: 5.3 points
• Price: 3.4 points
• Missing integrations: 2.7 points
• All-in-one competitor: 1.5 points
• Other: 1.1 points

Getting to 10% means removing about 4 points.

Payroll attach alone won't get there. Moving attach from 18% to 25% is about 180 more customers. Payroll customers churn at 8% against 16% for the rest, so even if the gap were entirely causal, attach is worth about 0.6 points of churn. Much of the gap is probably selection, because engaged customers adopt more. The same caution applies to the 6% churn among customers with three or more integrations.

Attach could also backfire. Payroll errors are the top exit reason, so pushing a flawed product onto more customers risks creating more of the churn we are trying to prevent.

The bulk of the churn reduction has to come from fixing Payroll quality and integration gaps. I suggest this split, as a planning assumption rather than a forecast:

Together these come to about 4 points, which is 14% to 10%.

The exit data has limits. We have 212 responses against roughly 360 annual churners, and "payroll complexity" may include non-users who left for a payroll-capable competitor. Week one should confirm the cuts by segment.

Team by team

Payroll: keep most of it, tighten it. - Objective: Make payroll reliable enough that customers stay and others add it. - KR1: Payroll-error tickets per 1,000 pay runs down 40%. Normalise the metric. A raw ticket count will rise as attach grows, and it can also be gamed by making tickets harder to file. - KR2: Payroll-error/complexity-cited exits down about 40% (about 2 points of company churn). - KR3: Payroll attach from 18% to 25%, with a guardrail that churn among Payroll customers stays at or below 8%. Sequence the attach push so it leans on the error fixes, targeting segments with clean data first.

Integrations: change the unit of success. "Ship 12" measures output, and the number is arbitrary. The 19% of exits citing missing integrations tells us which ones matter. - Objective: Make Quarry the system customers can't easily unplug. - KR1: Share of customers with three or more integrations connected, up from [baseline needed] by an agreed number of points. - KR2: Integration-cited exits down about a third (about 0.9 points of churn). - Ship the integrations ranked by exit and lost-customer demand. That list is the initiative that serves the KRs, not a KR itself.

Growth: the biggest change. Point it at existing customers. New logos and trial conversion don't affect NRR, churn or attach. A 20% rise in new logos can even worsen churn if the new customers are poorly fit. - Objective: Grow revenue from customers we already have. - KR1: NRR from 101% to 108%. Growth owns the expansion motion, and the other teams contribute. - KR2: Price-cited exits down about 15% through packaging and bundling experiments (for example Core HR plus Payroll). Don't raise list prices this quarter, since price is already the second-largest exit reason. - KR3: Share of new customers with three or more integrations connected within 90 days (baseline to be set). This is a lifecycle problem, which is a growth skill. - Trial conversion (9%) stays on the dashboard with a floor, but it is not a KR. If you want new-logo growth kept as a goal, that is a conversation with the CEO, because it contradicts his objective.

Core HR: the weakest link to the company goal. "Best HR platform" can't be scored, and two of the three KRs are ship dates. I have no evidence that the org-chart redesign or custom fields v2 affect retention. They may be worth building, but they don't earn a KR slot without that link. - Objective: Make Core HR the reason customers don't need an all-in-one competitor. - KR1: All-in-one-cited exits down about a third (about 0.5 points of churn). - KR2: Share of customers whose employee data is complete enough to switch on Payroll, up from [baseline needed]. This makes Core HR a direct contributor to attach, and Core HR and Payroll should confirm the definition. - KR3: CSAT from 4.2 to 4.5, kept as a health metric. - Org chart and custom fields stay on the roadmap only if exit or customer data shows they close the competitor gap. Core HR should make that case in week one.

Process recommendations

1. Three objectives per team: decline, with a better answer to "covered." The company has one objective with three KRs. Four teams with three objectives each would create twelve objectives pulling in different directions, which is the problem this memo is fixing. It would also lengthen planning. I recommend one objective and two or three KRs per team. To address the CEO's concern about coverage, give each team a short health-metric list with floors, such as uptime, support SLAs and CSAT. Those get monitored without being goals. A team may request a second objective if it can show a distinct customer outcome that the company objective doesn't cover.

2. OKR scores setting PM bonuses: recommend against. Last year's average score of 0.95 means the goals weren't stretching or the scoring was generous. Either way, the scores carry little information. Tying pay to them would make this worse, because teams would sandbag, avoid ambitious outcomes and game the metrics (ticket counts being the obvious example). The revised KRs are outcome-based and only partly within a team's control, which makes mechanical payouts less fair still.

Instead: - Calibrate so a typical score is around 0.7, with explicit committed and stretch levels. - Use scores as one input to performance reviews, judged by the manager in context. - Revisit a compensation link after two quarters of calibrated scoring.

If the CFO needs something concrete, tie any variable pay to the three company-level KRs, not team scores. That gives a shared incentive to cooperate.

3. Planning took five of thirteen weeks (38% of the quarter): cap it at two. - The CEO fixes company OKRs at least two weeks before the quarter starts, so teams never plan in the dark. - Teams draft on a one-page template with one objective and no more than three KRs, each with a baseline, owner and target. - One 90-minute cross-team session reconciles overlaps, using the exit-reason allocation above as the starting point. - Planning overlaps the last two weeks of the prior quarter and ends with sign-off by day 5 of the new one. - Fewer objectives per team will itself shorten the cycle.

Decisions and next steps

1. Approve the reframing in this memo, and take the Growth change to the CEO before teams redraft, since it is the one most likely to be contested.
2. Ask Data for baselines this week: share of customers with three or more integrations, exit reasons by segment, and payroll tickets per pay run. Several KRs above can't be finalised without them.
3. Ask each team to resubmit within one week.
4. Take the bonus and three-objective positions to the CEO and CFO together, so we have one conversation rather than two.