I Asked My Own Team Why They Stopped Using Our OKR Software.

I did something most founders won't do. I got on a call with my marketing team and asked them straight up why did you stop using our software?

Not a survey. Not a feedback form. A live call where I shut up and let them talk.

These are people who work for me.

They had every reason to just say, "yeah, it's great, bro, we'll use it more." But they didn't.

They told me the truth. And the truth was brutal.

"It Looked Like a To-Do List"

The first person to speak said something that still sits with me. He said when he logged in, all he saw was a place to put tasks and mark them done.

That's it.

He couldn't tell it was an OKR tool. Couldn't figure out what an objective was versus a key result.

The percentages on the dashboard meant nothing to him. The progress charts? Decoration.

And this guy had been onboarded. Our operations manager personally walked the whole team through the software.

Showed them where to set goals, how to add key results, and what everything means. After all that, his exact words were "still I don't know how that works."

That broke something in me. If someone can sit through a guided demo and still not understand what they're looking at, the software failed. Not the person. The software.

Every OKR tool assumes users know what OKRs are. Most employees don't. They know tasks. They know deadlines.

They don't know what "a measurable key result tied to a strategic objective" means.

And honestly, why should they?

They just want to know what to do today and whether they're doing enough.

"We Reported Bugs, and They Argued With Us"

Another team member actually liked the concept. Said it's good software, it can help us reach our goals. But then he said, "We reported bugs, and sometimes the dev team argued with us instead of fixing them."

His point was simple. We're the users. We're telling you something feels broken. Don't explain to us why it's not broken.

Just fix it.

This happens at every software company. The developer sees the code working as intended. User sees the experience as broken.

Both are technically right. But only one of them stops using the product.

When your response to user feedback is "actually that's by design," you've lost that user. They won't report the next issue. They'll just stop logging in. Which is exactly what happened.

The Goals Were Wrong, and the Software Didn't Care

Here's where things got interesting. I asked the team what objectives they had set for LinkedIn marketing.

Their key results were things like send 10 connection requests a day, post content three times a week, and sending five DMs.

Those are activities. Not outcomes. Sending connection requests doesn't book appointments. Posting content doesn't close deals.

The key result that actually drives results for LinkedIn outreach?

Engaging with 50 comments per day on target prospects' posts. Building conversations. Then DMing people you've already built rapport with. That's what actually books meetings.

One team member knew this already. He described the whole funnel: engage in comments, build the relationship, DM with context, and book the call.

He already understood what works. But the OKR software let him set "send 10 connection requests" as a key result and showed him a green progress bar when he hit 10.

The software rewarded the wrong behaviour. It celebrated activity instead of outcome. And no OKR tool on the market will tell you that your goal is wrong.

They all accept whatever you type. You could set "breathe 20 times today" as a key result, and the software would track it and show you 100% completion with a green bar.

Garbage in. Green bar out. That's every OKR tool.

"Just Tell Me How Many I've Done and How Many I Need"

This was the moment that changed everything.

One of my junior team members said, "It would be better if we had a reminder every day. Like, hey, you need to do 50 comments today. You've done 10. You need 40 more."

Then he paused and said, "I know this is goal software, but I'm looking for something like that."

He apologised for asking. He thought what he was describing was outside what an OKR tool is supposed to do.

But what he described without ever hearing the word is execution enforcement.

He wanted the software to watch his progress in real time and push him when he was falling behind. Not at the end of the week in some check-in meeting. Not in a progress bar, he has to manually update. Right now. While he's working.

No OKR tool does this. They all send you a weekly email, "Time to update your OKRs!"

But none of them messages you at 2pm on a Tuesday saying, "you're at 10 out of 50 today, you have 4 hours left."

That's tracking versus enforcement. Tracking tells you what happened last week. Enforcement tells you what needs to happen right now.

A member of my team described the core thesis of ShiftFocus without ever reading a single page of our website. When your user independently invents your product idea, you know you're building the right thing.

"Whether We Use the Software or Not, the Work Stays the Same"

The most devastating line from the whole call. One team member said, "We know the goal on our side.

We need to get appointments. Whether we set that in the OKR software or not, we still need to do the work in real time."

Translation: the software is irrelevant.

His team already knows what needs to happen. Book appointments. Follow up. Close. Typing that into an OKR dashboard doesn't change what they do on Monday morning. The dashboard exists in a parallel universe that has nothing to do with their actual workflow.

He's right. At most companies using OKR tools, you do your real work in Slack, in email, in Jira.

Then, once a week, you open the OKR tool and type a summary of what you already did.

The software doesn't influence the work. It documents it after the fact. That's not a goal-setting tool. That's a reporting tool with better branding.

What Changed After That Call

Twenty minutes with my own team taught me more than six months of competitor research.

The onboarding problem is that if my team can't figure out the difference between a task and a key result after a walkthrough, we need to stop assuming users understand OKRs.

The software needs to guide people with role-specific templates. Are you in marketing?

Here are the five metrics that matter. Not a blank field.

The enforcement gap, my team member asked for real-time activity tracking without knowing that's what ShiftFocus is supposed to be. That's the product validated by accident.

The workflow problem the software has is to live inside the tools people already use. Not as a separate login. Not as another tab. Inside Slack. Inside the actual conversation.

Every OKR tool has these exact problems.

The difference is that Lattice and Betterworks will never publish a call recording of their own team saying, "I don't know how this works."

That's embarrassing. But I'd rather be embarrassed and build something real than pretend the problems don't exist.

If your OKR tool can't pass the simplest test, will the people who built it actually use it every day?

Then it doesn't matter how clean the dashboard looks or how many G2 badges it has. It's a to-do list with a progress bar. And your team already has plenty of those.