How Lucid Software’s engineering team transformed its OKR culture – with airfocus

"There's a lot of time and talk dedicated to writing OKRs in the last two weeks of the quarter, but my cynical but accurate observation is that they then get put in Confluence, and rarely talked about again." Zack Rowley, Technical Project Manager at Lucid Software, says a shift in product management software wasn't just about saving time; it was about finally making OKRs worth caring about.

Every quarter, it played out the same way. Engineers and product managers would spend the final two weeks in a flurry of activity, writing objectives, filling in Confluence pages, ticking the right boxes. Then those carefully assembled OKRs would quietly fade into the background, rarely mentioned again until it was time for the next quarter’s OKR alignment. 

Zack Rowley had seen this pattern repeat across multiple engineering teams. As a technical project manager embedded within R&D, responsible for facilitating the conditions in which work can get done, Zack sits at the intersection of ambition and execution. He knows, perhaps more acutely than most, when OKRs are working.

The problem, as Zack sees it, is often structural. If annual roadmapping happens before OKRs are written, it means teams are working backwards from a pre-determined delivery plan rather than forwards from a desired outcome.

"A lot of OKRs just end up being work plans," he explains. "You work from the item that you're planning on delivering, instead of working from, ‘We want to move this metric, what could we come up with to do that?’"

The consequences show up at scoring time. Because each key result was worth an equal fraction of the overall OKR score, teams that genuinely excelled in one area can’t show it. A breakout success is worth the same 0.25 as everything else.

"You could come back and say, we knocked this out of the park, we got a 1 on this. But because of the way you write the scores, you only got a .25. That's all the credit that you get for it – which sucks."

For Zack, the cumulative effect of this system isn’t just administrative frustration. It is motivational damage. "This model is failure-focused. It doesn't feel good, so teams aren’t motivated with it."

How Lucid created positive OKR planning

The change came mid-quarter, when an engineering manager reached out to a handful of teams with an invitation to trial airfocus for OKR management. There was no hard deadline, no mandate, just a skeleton framework and a prompt to see what the teams thought.

Zack sat down with the engineering manager for the process group, three teams under one product area, and they opened airfocus together.

The verdict was unanimous across Lucid’s product managers. Teams stopped using Confluence and ported everything across. By the following quarter, the plan was to originate all OKRs directly in airfocus from day one.

Scoring that actually means something 

Ask Zack what made the biggest difference, and he doesn't hesitate: the scoring.

In airfocus, key results can be scored against real targets – numerical values, percentages, specific milestones – and those scores aggregate upwards through the objective hierarchy. A team-level KR rolls into a group-level objective. Group scores roll into department metrics. The picture that emerges isn't an approximation; it's a living record of actual progress.

For example, a KR tracking the percentage of customers performing setups and imports, with a target to move from 20% to 30% by end of quarter. In airfocus, the product manager simply logs a check-in – "we're at 25%" – and the system updates the score accordingly.

"It’s way easier to give the real result," says Zack. "The way that the teams are using airfocus as well, it's easier to do this on a monthly basis with check-ins."

And because granular scores roll up into aggregates, leadership can get a genuine read on group performance without needing to chase down context from every team.

"In stead of giving scores like .75, which doesn’t mean much, you can get so much more granular."

Two clicks to company strategy

One of the more quietly powerful features of airfocus, in Zack’s view, is the ability to answer the question every engineer silently holds: How does what I'm doing actually matter?

In their setup, company-level objectives sit at the top of a nested hierarchy. Team OKRs link upward into group objectives, which connect to department goals, which trace directly back to business outcomes – in this case, an ARR target for the process accelerator product area.

"There's three process teams that are working on it. Just being able to show them [airfocus], and answer how what they’re working on contributes to what the business is doing… it takes me two clicks to get here."

That clarity, he argues, changes the conversation around OKR writing too. Rather than starting with a delivery plan and retrofitting a metric, teams can begin with the outcome and reason backwards – asking which epics are most likely to move the needle, and whether the quarter's scope is realistic.

Not a time save. Something better.

"It is not a time save. But the time we spent doing anything else before was wasted,” says Zack. “We had not spent enough time talking about or using our OKRs in positive ways beforehand, and thus far, any time investment in doing this has paid off in dividends."

What has changed is visibility – and with it, the nature of conversations around performance. Stakeholders who once needed a meeting to get a status update can now scroll through airfocus for twenty minutes and walk away with the full picture. A quick look at the department objective shows progress towards the ARR target: currently at 90%. "That took us two minutes. It took longer to say the acronym than it did to find the information."

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