OKRs were designed to connect organisational ambition to team execution. In most implementations, they do neither. They're set quarterly by leadership, cascaded to teams in a format that doesn't translate to sprint work, reviewed at the end of the quarter with optimism and post-hoc rationalisation, and then replaced with next quarter's OKRs — which look suspiciously similar to this quarter's.
Gartner's 2024 product management survey found that 68% of product leaders say their OKRs are "not well connected" to their team's day-to-day sprint work. This is the most polite way of saying: the OKR process is theatre.
"OKRs at the quarter level are strategy. OKRs at the story level are alignment. Only the second one changes what teams build."Gartner Research · Product Management Excellence
Alignment at the story level
The connection problem exists because OKRs and sprint planning operate at different levels of abstraction without a translation mechanism between them. OKRs say "increase customer activation by 30%". Sprint planning says "implement the new onboarding flow". The connection between these — whether the sprint work actually serves the OKR — is rarely explicit, rarely measured, and rarely questioned. Teams can complete every sprint successfully and move the activation metric not at all.
Performalise's Product Discovery module connects OKRs to stories automatically as part of the scoring pipeline. Product leaders see a real-time view of OKR coverage — which objectives are well-served by the current sprint backlog, which are under-represented, and which are at risk. The gap between strategy and execution becomes visible before the quarter ends, not after.