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Roast this OKR set for a payments product
Here are the OKRs I am presenting to my VP next week for our payments product (UPI-based, 2M monthly transactions):
Objective: Increase payment success rate and reduce user friction.
KR1: Improve payment success rate from 94.2% to 97% by end of Q3.
KR2: Reduce average checkout time from 38s to under 25s.
KR3: Launch 3 new payment methods (credit card EMI, BNPL, UPI Autopay).
KR4: Achieve NPS of 55+ for payment experience (currently 41).
I think these are solid but something feels off. The "launch 3 new payment methods" KR especially — is that an output or an outcome?
1 response
The objective has two goals joined by "and" — that is the first smell. "Increase success rate" and "reduce friction" sound related but pull engineering in different directions. Success rate is a backend/retry/fallback problem. Friction is a frontend/UX/flow problem. Different teams, different tradeoffs. KR3 is the obvious output-not-outcome problem, but KR4 (NPS 55+) is worse. NPS for a payments flow is almost entirely driven by KR1 (success rate) and KR2 (speed). It is not an independent metric — it is a lagging indicator of the other two. You have four KRs but really two goals and a vanity metric. The rewrite: one objective per engineering surface. Success rate objective for the backend team. Friction objective for the frontend team. NPS is the executive dashboard metric, not a KR.