You Set OKR Goals in Asana and Monday.com. You Still Missed Your Quarterly Goals. Here’s Why.

You set goals as OKRs in Asana. You tracked your key results in Monday.com. You still missed your quarterly goals.

Here’s why.

These Tools Were Never Made to Help You Achieve Goals

You didn’t miss your objectives or key results because you didn’t set them up right. Not because your team didn’t update. Not because you didn’t choose the right pricing plan. Not because there was no good support from Monday.com or Asana.

These tools were never made to help you achieve goals. They are made to help you track your tasks on a daily basis or track your projects, not in a way where you can track your objectives, key results, or long-term goals.

Why Every Quarterly Review Looks Green Until It Doesn’t

Think from a COO’s perspective. During quarterly reviews, Monday.com or Asana will both look great because they are task-oriented. Everything will show green because the team is supposed to finish the tasks assigned to them. Even if they track the numbers or the goals quantitatively, it is going to show green.

But what if one of the metrics is deep red? Will Monday.com or Asana show you who is responsible and what is the reason for that red? The key result is not achieved, what is the reason behind it? Monday.com and Asana will not show you that.

We Hired an OKR Consultant From Upwork and Customized Asana for Three Weeks

I purchased Asana, and we hired an OKR consultant from Upwork.com. We set up a customized Asana instance and spent around three weeks onboarding all of our team members. We even mapped our tasks to our key results.

The Upwork consultant delivered a great job. He charged almost $50 an hour. He showed me a great dashboard. He set up everything for our team. Everything was so great.

But the team couldn’t check in. Even when they did check in, it wasn’t vibing with them. There was no enforcement for the team to check in as a must. There was no escalation if someone missed something.

So we had to quit. After six weeks, a huge graveyard silence happened in Asana.

Why We Moved to Monday.com After Asana Failed Us

We moved to Monday.com because one of our clients was using it. They hired us to build the Earth Summit, which was a huge with more than 40 influencers involved in a nationwide virtual summit. It was a huge success because we used Monday.com to manage the whole project. It was impressive. It was neat, task by task. I really loved it.

So we decided Monday.com was the thing. Customized boards were the thing. Within a single view, I could see everything from a founder’s perspective. Almost all the team members loved it because they were already using Monday.com for the client work, updating every task.

Monday.com Was Perfect for Tasks But Goals Started Dying Again

After we adopted Monday.com for tasks and everything for the internal organization, we started using it for tracking our objectives and KPIs. That’s when we started losing the game. We couldn’t continue using it for goals, though we still use it for task tracking and everything else.

Many things were missing. Same as Asana, we could see who was losing, which team was actually failing, which person was actually doing a great job. But the software was not showing any of that.

That is the moment I decided it was time. Let’s forget other software. Since we are living in the age of AI, I used Figma to create a small MVP, got feedback from my team, and started building what eventually became ShiftFocus OS.

To Be Fair, Asana Goals Is Clean

To be fair and frank, Asana Goals has a clean user interface. Setting objectives and key results takes only a few minutes. It creates an “aha” moment right away, which is good for a product like this. For a team of 20 people, which we were, everyone started using it within three to four weeks. We also customized it based on our needs, and almost everything worked great.

What Happens When 20 People Becomes 50 or More

Problems started when we onboarded other clients and the team expanded to 50 or more people. The typical OKR software problems started kicking in.

The software was not showing who is silent, which team is lagging, where the velocity is, why momentum is dropping in a team, which department is performing, which department is overloaded, or which departments have cross-dependencies with each other.

None of that was shown in Asana Goals or Monday.com Goals. Both are really great software. I respect the founders. They did a great job. The money they raised and the value they provide to users is undeniable. We still use them based on client needs. But from a COO’s standpoint, someone managing a minimum of 500 people thinks from their end.

The COO Who Can’t Be Blind on Monday Morning

A COO needs visibility throughout the company. He needs to know what to do on Monday morning. He cannot be blank. Who is killing his quarterly goals? He cannot be blind. Which team is backstabbing him?

A CEO cannot be blind after raising $20 million for new development features while the development team hasn’t even started building them yet. The CEO may be thinking everything is going great and smooth: “I got you the money you needed, I instructed the CTO, I spoke with the VP of Engineering.” He adds all of it in Monday.com, sends a task: “Build me my features.”

The $20 Million Feature That Never Got Built

But what if the team delays two or three weeks? And what if those two or three weeks pass and the investor comes to the CEO or COO asking, “Can I take a look at what’s happened in the last four weeks? Show me the progress you promised.”

At that moment, you go to the VP of Engineering, and he says, “The marketing team asked us to implement some features they really needed. New clients wanted integrations, so we worked on those. We were fixing some APIs.”

These surprises are a common pattern when you use Asana or Monday.com for tracking goals. It doesn’t mean these tools should be solving this problem. No. Their software focuses entirely on getting things done. That’s it. Monday.com and Asana don’t have a goal of getting your goals achieved. It’s not their thing. Both tools lack escalation, enforcement, or a system to hold the team accountable without micromanaging them.

The Silence Problem Nobody Asks About Before Buying OKR Software

This is the question nobody asks before buying OKR software. Every buyer, every CEO, COO, HR team, or department wanting to set up OKRs searches Google, Capterra, or G2 Crowd. They don’t make decisions based on what software will actually help them achieve their goals.

What they actually need to find before buying is a solution for the silence problem.

If a team is not checking in for two weeks straight, who is going to monitor that? Who is going to hold them accountable? If the owner of a key result is not updating it, or if he’s a blocker or dependency for another team’s key result, does the OKR software notify that person’s manager?

If not, that silence will kill the entire key result. And it kills the entire objective aligned to that key result. If this dying key result is not escalated to the manager, VP of Engineering, or VP of Marketing, what happens next?

When Marketing’s Delay Kills Sales by 50% And Nobody Knows

Here’s an example. The VP of Sales has a goal of bringing in $3 million per quarter wired to the account and another $3 million in soft commits or verbal commits. The VP of Sales needs 100 qualified appointments from the inbound marketing team.

If the marketing team sends only 50 appointments and thinks they’ll send 150 more by running Google Ads next week, but they don’t update the key results this week, then the VP of Sales doesn’t know there’s a problem.

Sales is going to drop by at least 50% this month. If it’s not fixed right away, sales will drop by at least 50% for the entire quarter. And this doesn’t only reflect on the VP of Marketing’s dashboard, it should show as 50% less goals achieved by the sales department too.

Does the CTO or CEO know about this? Definitely not, if you are using Asana or Monday.com for goals tracking.

Cross-Dependencies Should Be Escalated, Not Discovered After the Quarter Ends

These cross-dependencies should be acknowledged right away and escalated to the VP of Marketing, VP of Engineering, and maybe even the CMO. All of them should be pulled into a Google Meet to fix the problem immediately, adjusting team members, hiring more people, doing whatever it takes to get things back on track.

This is how you need to choose OKR software: based on real situations that will happen in your company. Not because someone provides a click button to set an objective, publish it, and add team members to update. That is not the OKR software you need.

The software you need should help you achieve your objectives and key results this quarter, not next quarter. It should not just let you know a team failed after the quarter already ended.

What I Actually Recommend And What I Built Instead

I recommend Monday.com and Asana for task management and project management. For small development teams, I recommend Jira. For creative teams, video teams, and flexible workflows where a CEO wants a quick, beautiful view of task progress, who’s assigned to what, and what’s getting done, I highly recommend Monday.com, even more than Asana.

But if you want software that actually helps you achieve your quarterly objectives and key results, where your managers and VPs don’t have to become micromanagers, where everyone can focus on their work and let the software handle what people don’t want to do, that’s a different problem.

Nobody wants to ask their team member an uncomfortable question and then sit down with them at lunch the next day. Most people avoid being the bad guy by not pointing fingers.

This is where ShiftFocus comes in. Nobody needs to be the bad guy. ShiftFocus handles the standard operating procedure for OKR execution across your entire organization.