Monday.com offers a flexible, visual workspace that makes it surprisingly easy to manage OKRs without the overhead of specialized tools. Its customizable boards, progress tracking, and team collaboration features align perfectly with how product teams need to define, monitor, and iterate on objectives and key results.
Why Monday.com
Monday.com works well for OKR management because it bridges the gap between spreadsheets and dedicated OKR software. You get visual progress tracking through status columns and timeline views, automated updates via formulas, and smooth collaboration through comments and notifications. The platform's flexibility means you're not forced into a rigid framework, allowing you to adapt the structure to match your team's workflow and reporting cadence.
Product managers particularly benefit from Monday.com's ability to connect OKRs to actual work items. You can link your key results directly to tasks, features, and initiatives, creating a clear line of sight from strategic goals down to execution. This integration reduces context-switching and keeps your team aligned without maintaining separate systems.
Step-by-Step Guide
1. Create a Dedicated OKR Board
Start by building a new Monday.com board specifically for OKRs. Log into your Monday.com workspace and click the plus icon next to "Boards" in the left sidebar. Name it something clear like "2024 OKRs" or "Q1 OKRs" depending on your planning cycle.
Once created, you'll see a blank board. Change the board type from "List" view to "Board" view first to get a kanban-style interface, though you may want to switch between views later. This gives you flexibility in how you visualize your OKRs. You can access view options by clicking the eye icon in the top toolbar next to your board name.
Name your first column "Objective" and set it to a Text column. This column will contain your actual objectives, which are the qualitative outcomes you're pursuing. For example: "Improve user onboarding experience" or "Establish market leadership in enterprise segment."
2. Set Up Essential Column Structure
Create the following columns to support your OKR framework. After "Objective," add these columns in order: "Owner" (Person column), "Key Results" (Text or Long Text), "Target Value" (Number), "Current Value" (Number), "Progress %" (Formula), "Time Period" (Date), and "Status" (Status dropdown).
The "Key Results" column should be a Long Text column since key results need space to breathe. Each key result should be measurable and specific, like "Achieve 40% reduction in onboarding time from signup to first value" or "Increase retention rate to 85% for month-2 cohorts." Avoid vague language here.
For the "Progress %" column, use a formula that divides "Current Value" by "Target Value" and multiplies by 100. In Monday.com, click on the "Progress %" column header, select "Formula," and enter: {Current Value}/{Target Value}*100. You can format this as a percentage by changing the column to "Percent" after creating the formula.
3. Add Status and Priority Indicators
Insert a "Status" column by clicking the plus icon in the column headers. Select "Status" as the column type, which gives you dropdown options. Create these status options: "On Track," "At Risk," "Off Track," and "Complete." This lets you quickly see which OKRs need attention during team syncs.
Add another column called "Priority" using the Status column type with options "Critical," "High," and "Medium." This helps when you have competing initiatives and need to deprioritize certain OKRs mid-quarter. Some teams also add a "Category" status column to group related OKRs, such as "Growth," "Retention," "Infrastructure," or "Product Quality."
These status columns integrate with Monday.com's automation features and reporting. You can later create automations that send Slack notifications when an OKR moves to "At Risk," ensuring visibility across your team without manual check-ins.
4. Connect OKRs to Work Items
Create a second board called "Initiatives" or "Projects" that will contain the actual work driving your OKRs. This board should have columns like "Initiative Name," "Assigned Team," "Start Date," "End Date," "Owner," and critically, "Related OKR."
In the "Related OKR" column, set the column type to "Link to item." This creates a bidirectional relationship between your initiatives and your OKRs. When you add a new initiative row, click on the "Related OKR" cell and link it to the corresponding OKR row from your OKR board. This creates transparency around which work actually drives which outcomes.
The relationship flow works like this: your Q1 OKR might be "Increase API adoption by 50%," and you'd link three separate initiatives to it (documentation improvements, developer event, integration templates). When someone views the OKR in your primary board, they can see all connected initiatives, and vice versa. This prevents work from happening in isolation.
5. Establish a Status Update Workflow
Create a "Status Updates" board or use a calendar view on your main OKR board to track weekly or biweekly progress reviews. Add columns for "Week," "Highlights," "Challenges," "Actions Needed," and "Confidence Level."
Set up an automation in Monday.com to remind OKR owners when it's time to update progress. Click the "Automations" button in the top toolbar, then select "When date arrives" trigger. Create a rule that sends a notification on your chosen update day (e.g., every Friday) to owners reminding them to update Current Value and Status columns.
During these status updates, owners should update the "Current Value" column with the latest metric data. Monday.com will automatically recalculate your "Progress %" formula column. This keeps your dashboards current without requiring manual percentage updates.
6. Build a Dashboard for Executive Visibility
Monday.com allows you to create dashboards that aggregate data from multiple boards. Click "Dashboards" in the top navigation, then create a new dashboard. Name it "OKR Dashboard Q1" or similar.
Add a "Status Summary" widget that shows how many OKRs are in each status category. Configure it to pull from your Status column on the OKR board. This gives executives a quick health check. Add a "Progress by Objective" widget showing which OKRs are closest to their targets using bar charts.
Create a table widget that displays all OKRs with their owner, current progress percentage, status, and due date. This becomes your single source of truth that you can share in executive meetings. Link this dashboard from your team Slack channel or embed it in your internal wiki so stakeholders can check progress anytime.
7. Implement a Review and Calibration Process
Use Monday.com's comments feature to create a discussion thread on each OKR row during mid-quarter reviews. Click into an OKR item and use the Comments section to document decisions about whether to keep, modify, or abandon the OKR based on market changes or new information.
At the end of each quarter, create a snapshot of results by using Monday.com's export feature. Go to your OKR board, click the three dots menu, and select "Export as CSV" to save a record of what you achieved. Use this data to inform next quarter's OKR setting and to review trends in what types of OKRs your team typically achieves.
Consider creating a "Retrospective" column where teams can summarize learnings from each OKR. This becomes institutional knowledge that helps you set better OKRs over time. For reference on best practices around OKR design and management, check out this guide on OKR frameworks that covers theory and practical examples.
8. Customize Views for Different Audiences
Monday.com's views feature lets you create multiple perspectives on the same data. Create a "By Owner" view by grouping your OKR board by the Owner column. This lets each person see their specific OKRs without distraction.
Create a "By Time Period" view by grouping by the Time Period column if you're running concurrent OKRs across different quarters. Create a "By Status" view grouped by Status so you can immediately see which OKRs need attention.
Set different view permissions through Monday.com's sharing settings. Engineering leaders might see the Engineering view, while executives see the full dashboard view. This prevents context confusion and ensures people see only relevant information for their role.
Pro Tips
- Use Monday.com's mobile app to update Current Value during your week, reducing the gap between when metrics change and when they're reflected in your system. The mobile interface makes quick updates much faster than desktop.
- Create a template row in your OKR board that shows the ideal structure of an objective and key result. This serves as a reference for new team members and ensures consistency in how OKRs are written across your organization.
- Set up recurring automations to create new OKR rows at the start of each planning cycle. This saves setup time and ensures you maintain historical OKR data by creating new rows rather than overwriting existing ones.
- Link your Monday.com workspace to Slack using the native integration so that status changes and upcoming due dates automatically post to a dedicated channel. This creates ambient awareness without requiring manual updates.
- Use custom fields to track additional metadata like "Strategic Theme," "Business Area," or "Customer Impact," which helps you analyze OKR distributions and ensure balanced portfolio coverage across initiatives.
When to Upgrade to a Dedicated Tool
Monday.com works well for product teams under 50 people with straightforward OKR structures, but certain scenarios suggest moving to specialized tools. If you need complex goal cascading across multiple organizational levels or you run multiple concurrent goal-setting cycles with different calendars, dedicated OKR software like 15Five or Lattice offers more sophisticated hierarchy management.
If you require sophisticated forecasting and predictive analytics based on historical OKR data, or if you need to correlate OKR achievement with financial outcomes across multiple business units, Monday.com's capabilities become limiting. Similarly, if you're managing OKRs across deeply distributed teams across multiple time zones with complex compliance requirements, the overhead of managing it in Monday.com increases significantly.
However, for most product teams getting started with OKRs or those with straightforward annual and quarterly cycles, Monday.com provides 80% of the functionality at 30% of the cost. You can always export your data and migrate to a dedicated tool later if needs change. Compare your options using our PM tools directory to see what other teams are using.
For a side-by-side comparison of Monday.com with similar all-purpose tools, check out Monday.com vs. Asana to understand trade-offs between them.