Scaling OKRs across an enterprise is the moment most companies discover the framework is harder than it looked. The pilot department writes strong OKRs. The next twenty teams write to-do lists. The first few teams write strong OKRs. The next twenty teams write to-do lists.
Zalando, the European fashion platform founded in Berlin in 2008, faced this exact challenge. Here is how they solved it, and what their approach reveals about why most OKR rollouts stall after the first quarter.
Scaling OKRs Challenge: From Pilot to Enterprise
Zalando began using OKRs within a single department, Brand Solutions, which had roughly 80 employees. Like many fast-growing organizations, they wanted greater alignment across teams, increased transparency, clearer articulation of strategy, and a system that encouraged stretch and collaboration.
They adopted a version of the Google model that was popular when they first got started. Key results were scored on a 0 to 1.0 scale, with 0.7 as the target, public grading, and no linkage to bonuses or compensation.
That last decision was critical. By keeping OKRs separate from compensation, they protected stretch thinking and avoided sandbagging from the start. They didn’t want to just make incremental progress, they wanted to achieve amazing results.
The pilot phase taught teams what a great objective looks like, how to write measurable key results, why scoring KRs matters, and how transparency enables alignment. But after the pilot succeeded, a major challenge emerged: while it is easy for most teams to draft objectives, coaching people to develop measurable and impactful key results and scaling OKRs can be difficult. By taking a crawl-walk-run approach, Zalando was already incorporating one of the 5 best practices for gettng started with OKRs.
The Turning Point: Build Internal OKR Experts
As OKRs expanded beyond the initial department, Zalando recognized that central oversight would not scale. Reviewing every OKR from the top would create bottlenecks and slow execution. Instead, they invested in building in-house OKR expertise.
They invited Ben Lamorte to develop a program that would create internal OKR coaches embedded throughout the organization. We co-developed a workshop to train OKR coaches at Zalando.
Managers and selected team members, often agile coaches and HR business partners, were trained to facilitate OKR drafting sessions, identify key results that look like a task on a to-do list, guide alignment conversations across teams, run structured quarterly check-ins, and support peers in refining their OKRs.
This approach laid the foundation for what later became the OKR Expert Workshop, and ultimately evolved into our formal Train-the-Trainer (TTT) model.
The lesson from our work with Zalando is clear: scaling OKRs requires internal capacity to support and sustain the program. A small group of trained OKR facilitators can sustain quality across hundreds or thousands of employees. Without that layer, OKRs degrade into restated roadmaps that look like to-do lists, compliance exercises, or “set it and forget it” documents that fail to deliver value.
Alignment Week: Designing Alignment Into the Process
One of the most powerful scaling OKRs mechanisms Zalando implemented was an “alignment week” at the beginning of each quarter.
Instead of hoping cross-functional conversations would happen organically, they designed time for them. During alignment week, calendars were intentionally lighter. OKR owners met with dependent teams. Cross-functional buy-in was secured before finalization.
This simple structural choice prevented downstream conflict and strengthened shared ownership across the organization. Alignment is not accidental. It must be designed into every element of your OKR program.
Transparency as an Alignment Multiplier
Zalando reinforced transparency through quarterly company-level OKR presentations, department all-hands meetings, public grading of key results, broad visibility into team OKRs, and ongoing training and education.
The result was clear direction, shared accountability, faster resolution of dependencies, and stronger cross-team convergence. When OKRs are visible across the organization, alignment improves naturally because teams see how their work connects to everyone else’s. This visibility is essential when scaling OKRs.
Listen to the Full Scaling OKRs Conversation
This article is based on episode 2 of our Real OKR Implementation series. In the full episode, I walk through additional details from the Zalando engagement that did not fit in this article, including specific stories about how the alignment week conversations actually played out.
A Critical Insight: Tools Alone Do Not Create Maturity
Interestingly, Zalando operated successfully for an extended period using Google Docs and Sheets before implementing a dedicated OKR platform. This reinforces a fundamental principle about OKR implementations.
Tools can make a process more efficient and amplify the effects of a system, but they cannot create that system. The early priorities in any OKR program must be the quality of objectives and key results, coaching capability, alignment behavior, check-in discipline, and leadership sponsorship. Software becomes powerful only after those foundations are strong.
Results: From Framework to Operating System
As OKRs matured at Zalando, the organization experienced greater cross-team alignment, clearer company direction each quarter, stronger strategic conversations, a self-sustaining OKR expert community, and reduced dependency on centralized oversight.
Most importantly, OKRs became embedded in how the organization operated. They were no longer a “program.” They were part of the culture.
Five Lessons for Organizations Scaling OKRs
If you are implementing or scaling OKRs in your own organization, here are the takeaways from Zalando’s journey.
1. Pilot before you scale. Start in one department, learn quickly, and refine the approach before broad rollout. Resist the pressure to deploy everywhere in the first quarter.
2. Build internal OKR experts. Train a cohort of leaders to facilitate drafting, alignment, and check-ins. This is the single highest-leverage investment in any scaling initiative.
3. Protect alignment time. Create structured windows like alignment week for cross-functional coordination. Do not assume the conversations will happen on their own.
4. Separate OKRs from compensation. Preserve stretch, learning, and honest scoring. The moment OKRs influence bonuses, sandbagging begins.
5. Focus on behavior before software. Strengthen capability and cadence before investing heavily in tooling. Software amplifies what you already have. If you have nothing, it amplifies nothing. Doing so is one of the top 40 OKR mistakes.
Scaling OKRs: Why the Train-the-Trainer Model Works
Many OKR rollouts fail because organizations underestimate the human component. OKRs change how teams prioritize, how leaders communicate, and how tradeoffs are resolved. That requires facilitation skill, not just documentation.
The OKR Expert Workshop, now offered as a formal Train-the-Trainer (TTT) program at OKRs.com, exists to build that internal capability. Some of our clients who already have an OKR program in place but feel it is not scaling well benefit from our TTT program. It can add exponential value in just one month.
Scaling OKRs successfully can happen in your organization. But only if you build the internal capability to make the framework your own.
Ready to Build Internal OKR Capability?
If your OKR program is stalling after the pilot phase, our Train-the-Trainer workshop builds the facilitation capability your organization needs to succeed at scaling OKRs across teams and sustain momentum quarter after quarter.
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