OKRs appear in 14% of the product postings behind this site and experimentation in 16%. The measurement culture the product literature assumes is a minority practice, which means bringing it credibly is a differentiator — provided you also know how it fails.

• Prefer a metric the user has to do something real to move. Sign-ups are cheap; second-week usage is not.
• Always pair it with a counter-metric. Speed paired with quality, engagement paired with complaints, conversion paired with refunds. A single metric with no counterweight will be bought at the expense of something you did not measure.
• Beware ratios. They improve when the denominator falls, so a conversion rate can rise because you lost the hard traffic.
• Name the lagging and the leading indicator separately. Revenue is lagging and unactionable within a quarter; the leading indicator is what you can actually work on.

Two failure modes, and they are opposite. Sandbagging — targets set at what will certainly happen, so the exercise measures nothing. And OKRs as a task list — key results that are deliverables (‘ship the new onboarding’) rather than outcomes (‘raise activation from 34% to 45%’), which reintroduces output as the goal under a new name. The second is far more common and much harder to argue against, because the deliverables are real work.