No OKR Software Is Brave Enough to Show You Who's Failing. Here's Why.

No OKR software on the market is brave enough to show you who's falling behind. 

Which team is failing. Which department is dragging the company off track. I've been looking for this software for years and it doesn't exist.

I'm not saying OKR software should only expose failure. It should show the full picture who's crushing it, which teams are delivering, and which ones are sinking.

But from my experience using more than 20 OKR tools, paying anywhere from free accounts to $1,000 a month for a single seat with dedicated support, none of them showed me the truth.

The CEO Needs to See Where the BoatIs Leaking

A CEO managing 50 to 500 people needs to know one thing: where is the boat sinking?

Is the leak small enough to fix?

Is it fake someone reporting a problem that isn't real? Or

Is it so big that the whole department is going under?

None of the software shows that.

They show you averages.

Green, yellow, red.

But they never show you: this specific team, this specific key result, that's where your quarter is going to fall apart.

The Manager Who Updates  for  the  Entire Team

Here's something that actually happens and nobody talks about.

A team lead logs in 15 minutes before the weekly meeting and fills in their entire team's OKR updates. Not based on real data. Based on what they think is happening.

They do this because chasing 8 people for updates is harder than just guessing. The tool shows green. The data is fiction. And leadership makes decisions based on numbers that one person estimated on a Monday morning.

This isn't rare. This is the norm at most companies I've worked with.

The Software Just Wants Your Check-In. Not Your Results.

OKR software is built on habit-forming product design. The entire philosophy is: get someone to log in, enter their goals, and come back weekly to update a number. That's the product.

Log in Friday. Enter progress. Close the tab. Weekend. Repeat. But did anyone actually achieve anything? Or did they just update a number in a tool? 

The software doesn't care. It measures engagement, not outcomes.

Dependencies Are Invisible and That's Where the Real Problems Hide

This drives me crazy and no software handles it.

If a content writer can't publish a blog post because they're waiting on the design team, whose fault is that? The writer shows "0% progress" on their key result.

Dashboard shows red. But the bottleneck is somewhere else entirely.

Dependencies between teams, between departments, and between individuals are not shown in any of the software that shows this. So when leadership sees someone underperforming, they're making judgments without context. That's not management. That's guessing.

And it works the other way too. When someone is consistently delivering crushing every key result, the software doesn't highlight that either.

Top performers and underperformers look the same unless you dig through five levels of filters.

No Escalation. No Alert. Nothing.

Real example from my own company.

We track website traffic for our digital marketing clients. If our SEO team isn't hitting the traffic targets we promised, I need to know immediately, not at the end of the month.

But our OKR software never showed me that. I was completely blind. If it had flagged that the SEO team was falling behind on content production, I could have escalated to the team head and course-corrected in days, not weeks.

But none of the software escalates. No alert from the team member to the manager. No flag from the manager to the department head. No escalation from the department to executives.

The information just sits there, buried in a dashboard nobody checks until the damage is done.

Someone Has to Be Brave Enough

Here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody in this industry wants to admit: enforcement doesn't just expose underperforming teams.

It exposes the VP who set unclear goals. The director who never followed up. The COO who approved 47 OKRs when the company could realistically execute 12.

Enforcement creates a trail that goes up, not just down. That's why nobody builds it.

That's why we built ShiftFocus OS.

Not to point fingers. Not to create fear. To make the invisible visible before it's too late to fix. If a team is falling behind, show it. If someone is blocked by a dependency, show that.

If a department doesn't have the bandwidth, show the workload metrics so leadership can make a real decision: hire, reprioritise, or cut the goal instead of blaming people at the end of the quarter.

Because if your software can't show you the difference between "they didn't try" and "they didn't have enough people," then your software is useless.

Someone has to be brave enough to show the truth. We decided that someone would be us.