Achieving Cross-Team Alignment: Best Practices for Synchronizing OKRs

Unlock seamless collaboration and accelerate product success with Craft.io. One of the greatest strengths of the OKR prioritization framework, and a key reason we brought OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) into Craft.io, is its ability to align teams and drive meaningful progress toward shared goals, helping product managers and their teams do their best work together.

Why Cross-Team Alignment Matters in B2B Product Management

Most of the other prioritization frameworks you’ve heard of – weighted scoring, the MoSCoW method, RICE, etc. – are designed primarily to evaluate product-specific objectives. And these frameworks are great when your product team is working internally on prioritizing plans for features, new market segments, or other plans for your products themselves.

OKRs, by contrast, are designed to help you aim for broader business objectives. In fact, the methodology’s earliest users, including Google, often called them “Big Hairy Audacious Goals.” And because achieving these business objectives will require help from other teams and departments, this is an ideal prioritization framework to use when you need to pull together a cross-functional team of contributors from across your company.

Before we review the best practices for creating a successful cross-team alignment around your OKRs, let’s briefly review the basics of the framework and what a real-world example might look like.

 

Understanding OKRs in a Product Management Context

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework is an approach for setting an ambitious big-picture goal (the Objective) and evaluating your success or failure in achieving it within a specific time frame according to a few quantifiable metrics (the Key Results).

A simple template many teams use to build their OKRs looks like this:

“We will _____________ as measured by _________________.”

                                     (Objective)                                 (3 to 5 Key Results)

 (For a more detailed discussion, read our recent blog: How to prioritize your OKRs.)

 

An example of a cross-team OKR

 Let’s say you’re the Product Manager for a B2B software company, and your team is ready to launch a new product. Here’s an OKR you might set.

OBJECTIVE:

“Make a name for this product in our market (within the first four months after launch).”

KEY RESULTS:

Remember, this big hairy audacious goal will require a collaborative effort from key departments across your organization, so we will establish Key Results for each of these teams.

 Marketing Key Results:

• Get 2,000 sales-qualified leads to complete the contact form on our product page.
• Get 1,000 sales-qualified leads to start the free trial

PR Key Results:

• Get coverage in 4 of the 7 major media outlets in our industry.

Sales Key Results:

• Close 100 subscribers
• Develop a pipeline with 200 additional opportunities

 

Note: Some teams create a specific time window for each of the Key Results. You might prefer that in a case such as the one above, because each team might want to set their own internal timeframes for progress. As long as every Key Result fits within the broader deadline for the Objective – in this case, four months post-launch – it’s okay to set different timelines for these different metrics.

 Now let’s discuss the processes and tools you’ll want both to establish your OKRs and to keep your whole cross-functional team aligned and moving toward achieving them.

5 Best Practices for Cross-Functional OKR Success

Achieving true cross-team alignment in OKRs requires more than just sharing a spreadsheet. These five proven strategies for cross-functional alignment in OKRs will help Product Management and every supporting team collaborate effectively, moving beyond silos to guarantee clear goal synchronization and accelerate meaningful product outcomes.

Best Practice 1: Collaborate Early to Ensure Alignment

Start the OKR process collaboratively.

Your product team shouldn’t define OKRs in isolation. By nature, cross-functional OKRs depend on multiple teams, so you need their expertise when shaping both the Objective and the Key Results.

Bring in representatives from every team that will own a Key Result and work with them to define metrics that are ambitious yet achievable. When each group has a real say in setting the OKR, they’re far more likely to feel ownership and act as true partners in delivering the outcome.

Best Practice 2: Vet Key Results for Strategic Relevance

Once teams propose their Key Results, sanity-check them against the strategic goal.

Collaboration doesn’t mean accepting every suggestion. Your product team is ultimately accountable for ensuring each Key Result ladders up to the Objective. If a metric doesn’t reflect meaningful progress, push back and offer a more strategic alternative.

For example, if Marketing proposes:
“Drive 10,000 leads to the contact form.”

That number alone isn’t enough. Not all leads create value. A stronger proposal might be:
“Drive 1,500 sales-qualified leads to the contact form.”

This shifts the focus from volume to value and that is exactly what OKRs are meant to enforce.

Pro tip: Marketing might still choose to track internal KPIs such as 10,000 raw leads to fuel the 1,500 SQL target. Encourage each team to define their own supporting metrics while staying aligned on the shared Key Result.

Best Practice 3: Maintain Alignment with Regular Meetings

Schedule recurring check-ins with the cross-functional team to keep everyone aligned and accountable.

The goal here is to keep your cross-functional team aligned and working toward your shared big-picture objective. One great way to make sure everyone stays on track and steering in the right direction is to communicate regularly as a team.

Setting a regular meeting schedule – say, once a week for an efficient, agenda-driven discussion – is also a valuable strategy for uncovering any issues or insights as soon as possible that could affect the project’s success.

One thing to keep in mind when running these meetings is that they should be collaborative and supportive. If you discover that your Sales team isn’t yet hitting the numbers you had thought they would at this point in the OKR’s time frame, the answer will be to collaborate on how to help those reps – not to criticize. Maybe Product and Marketing can partner to whip up a new case study or demo video for the reps to use in their presentation.

Treat these cross-team meetings as opportunities for helping each other, and you’ll find your team members bringing their A-games.

Best Practice 4: Streamline OKR Metric Updates

Make reporting progress simple and automated.

One common challenge cross-functional teams face when they take on a large collaborative project and then meet regularly to share their progress is that it often takes each team hours to update their presentations or data displays to share in these meetings.

If you’re working hard toward a big, audacious goal, you don’t want members of your cross-functional team wasting their time on these manual data-entry tasks.

The answer is to make sure your various teams can connect the tools they use to track progress, or at least that they have simpler ways of updating the other members on their progress.

For example, if you’re using a product management platform to track your big strategic goals, you’ll want the other teams helping you reach your OKRs – sales, marketing, etc. – to be able to sync their apps with your platform, so you can easily track their progress.

That means, for example, that you’ll want a product management software solution that integrates with Salesforce or Zendesk, so as your sales reps notch new customers, you receive those updates.

Similarly, you’ll want a product management platform that integrates with Slack or MS Teams so that it’s easy to share progress updates with Marketing or the PR team.

Best Practice 5: Conduct an OKR Post-Mortem

At the end of each OKR cycle, run a structured post-mortem with all cross-team contributors.

Finally, at the close of each OKR’s time window, you should bring together all the cross-team members who were part of this effort and discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what they learned.

Ideally, you’ll be establishing and working toward new OKRs all the time, so the more knowledge and insights you can gain from each of these initiatives, the more your team will be able to streamline its efforts on achieving the next big, hairy, audacious goal you set for your business.

Bonus tip: Keep an eye out for the almost-here Craft.io OKR solution. This new environment in our end-to-end software platform will let your product team set OKRs, connect them to your strategic roadmaps, capacity planning, feedback portal, and to the many built-in Craft.io integrations that will make it easier than ever to collaborate on OKRs with your cross-functional teams.

In the meantime…

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