Monday.com urges cross-functional OKRs to align product, engineering and marketing

Why OKRs matter when the roadmap starts to fragment

The real value of OKRs at monday.com is not paperwork, it is alignment. When product, engineering, marketing and leadership all chase different local wins, teams can ship plenty of work without moving the business in the same direction. monday.com’s own guide pushes the opposite habit: define outcomes, not feature lists, and use shared objectives to force the organization to decide what matters.

That matters at a company that now describes itself as an AI work platform serving more than 250,000 customers worldwide. As monday.com grows, the risk is not only slower execution, it is scattered execution, with each function optimizing its own version of progress. OKRs become the mechanism that keeps the roadmap from turning into a pile of disconnected bets.

Keep the quarter small enough to be real

The guide’s most practical advice is also the hardest for fast-moving teams to follow: limit quarterly objectives to three to five. That constraint does more than keep a planning deck tidy. It forces leaders to admit that not every request, launch or internal priority deserves equal weight, which is exactly where roadmap chaos starts.

The second discipline is the 70% rule. monday.com argues that about 70% completion is a healthy stretch target, not a failure signal. That matters because perfect execution can produce cautious goals, sandbagged timelines and teams that stop experimenting. A 70% target says the point is progress with ambition, not theatre with a green dashboard.

Google’s OKR guidance reinforces that logic by treating ambitious goals as a way to improve focus and performance, not as a scorecard for perfection. The broader OKR tradition, traced by What Matters back to Andy Grove and Intel, was built around the same idea: strategy only matters when it can be translated into execution.

Cross-functional OKRs are where the real leverage shows up

monday.com’s strongest argument is not that teams should write better OKRs in isolation. It is that product, engineering and marketing should share them. Cross-functional OKRs prevent the common failure mode where one team optimizes for shipping, another for technical elegance and another for launch volume, while the customer sees a fragmented experience.

That is where OKRs become more than a planning ritual. Shared objectives give teams a common language for tradeoffs, so product can decide whether a feature serves a measurable user outcome, engineering can judge whether a technical investment will move a key result, and marketing can anchor the story in the same business goal. The company’s support materials describe OKRs as a collaborative tool for measurable results, transparency and alignment, which is exactly the point: visibility is useful only when it changes how teams choose.

For sales, the handoff gets cleaner too. When the company knows which outcomes it is trying to drive, sales can shape discovery around real customer pain, not a loose list of releases. That makes the customer conversation more credible, because the value story is tied to the same objectives that product and engineering are working against.

What this means for engineers, product managers and marketers

For engineers, the guide is a reminder that output is not the same as impact. A shipped service, an internal refactor or a completed sprint only matters if it helps a customer do something better, faster or more reliably. That mindset reduces the temptation to treat engineering as a separate track with separate success metrics.

For product managers, the benefit is control. A quarter built around three to five objectives gives you a way to say no without turning every no into a political fight. It also keeps the team from overcommitting, which is especially important in a platform business where every extra request can look important until it gets compared with the user outcome it is supposed to serve.

For marketing, shared OKRs prevent launch plans from drifting away from what the product is actually trying to accomplish. The team can still own messaging, adoption and demand generation, but those efforts work best when they support the same measurable result as the roadmap. If the goal is adoption, for example, marketing should be helping the company explain why the change matters, not simply amplifying the fact that something new exists.

A practical way to use the framework is simple:

• Start with one user outcome that matters to the business.
• Cap the quarter at three to five objectives so the team can focus.
• Write key results that can be measured, not just observed.
• Share the same objective across product, engineering and marketing.
• Treat 70% completion as a sign that the target was ambitious enough to matter.

Why the message is especially relevant inside monday.com

The company’s own growth makes this guidance feel less like theory and more like operating discipline. In fourth-quarter 2025, monday.com reported revenue of $333.9 million, up 25% year over year. For the full year, revenue grew 27% and non-GAAP operating margin reached 14%. It also said monday vibe became the fastest product in company history to surpass $1 million in ARR.

Those numbers point to a business that is scaling across more customers, more product surface area and more internal dependencies. The company recently filed its 2025 Annual Report on Form 20-F with the SEC, another reminder that public-company scale brings its own demand for clarity and discipline. As the platform expands, planning cannot stay modular by function; it has to stay coherent across the business.

That is the underlying value of monday.com’s OKR message. It is not about collecting prettier goals or filling a dashboard with activity. It is about forcing a company to agree, quarter by quarter, on which customer outcome deserves collective effort, and then making every team work toward the same result. In a workplace where roadmap sprawl is easy and alignment is hard, that is the difference between motion and progress.