How should you track your growth ambitions? As a KPI, an OKR, or a strategy?

Key Takeaway: A growth ambition isn't one thing, so it doesn't sit in one place on your Strategy Map. Growth as a strategic choice (we're going to grow by category creation, not by expansion into adjacent markets) is a Strategic Pillar. Growth as something you continuously monitor and want to keep healthy (MRR, ARR, signups per week) is a KPI. Growth as a specific, time-bound jump you're driving this cycle (get from $5M to $8M ARR by year-end) is an OKR. Most growth ambitions are actually all 3 at once, just at different levels of resolution. The mistake isn't picking the "wrong" layer. The mistake is picking only one.

I get this question constantly. A founder or CEO will tell me: "Growth is the single most important thing for us this year. I want it everywhere in the goal-setting system.”

But where does it go? Is it a Strategic Pillar? Is it an OKR? Is it a KPI?

For a long time, I had a clean, simple answer ready. I've written articles arguing that growth ambitions like MRR and conversion rate are best represented as KPIs. I've also written that OKRs are the tool for driving change/improvements while KPIs are for maintenance/business as usual. Both of those things are true. But put side by side, they pull in slightly different directions, and that's exactly why the correct answer to this question is not as simple and straightforward.

The more time I spend with companies building their Strategy Maps, the more convinced I am that growth doesn't live in any single layer. It usually lives in all 3. The interesting question isn't which layer. It's what kind of growth ambition you're talking about, because that determines the layer.

Let me walk through what I mean.

Growth as a Strategic Pillar

The most overlooked version of "growth" is the version that's actually a strategic choice.

A strategy, or Strategic Pillar, is a how-to-win choice. It's not time-bound. It explains how you're going to differentiate, how your organization will sustainably outperform competitors in your chosen market. So when growth shows up as a Strategic Pillar, it sounds like this:

• Growth at all costs
• Grow by creating new categories, not by competing in existing ones
• Grow through product-led expansion inside existing accounts
• Grow internationally

Notice what these all have in common. They're not numbers. They're choices about how you're going to grow. They sit at the level of "where do we play and how do we win," not at the level of "what number are we trying to hit."

The first one, “growth at all costs”, is one that I’m sure you’ve seen before in companies, especially the ones that operate in a winner-takes-all market. For example, platform businesses often execute a UFRL strategy (Ubiquity First, Revenue Later) — which prioritizes building a massive user base and market share before introducing aggressive monetization models. 

Deciding to grow as fast as possible (at the expense of profitability) is a strategic choice with massive consequences. It's the right strategy in markets with clear first-mover advantages, but it usually means you have to raise a lot of money. Either way, it's a strategy. It's not an OKR. It's not a KPI. It's a Strategic Pillar that then shapes every other decision below it, including the growth KPIs you'll commit to and the growth OKRs you'll set each cycle.

When it comes to growth, a lot of leadership teams skip the strategy-layer entirely. They say "growth is our strategy" without making any of those underlying choices, and then they wonder why teams interpret "growth" 5 different ways. They have growth ambitions, but without a strategy.

So the first place to look when someone asks "where does growth go" is: is there an underlying strategic choice about how we're going to grow that we haven't named? If yes, that's a Strategic Pillar.

Growth as a KPI

Now we get to the layer where Perdoo has historically been clearest. Most of the growth metrics that companies actually obsess over, look at every week, and want to maintain or improve over time, are KPIs.

A KPI is a maintenance goal. It’s for your business as usual. It measures something you want to maintain (and yes, "maintain at a higher level than today" still counts as maintaining). While the target may change from month to month or year to year, the metrics never expire. They remain the same. 

Classic metrics that you see in growth KPIs are:

• Gross Revenue
• MRR or ARR
• Net Revenue Retention

The trap most companies fall into is treating these as OKRs. They write Objectives like "Grow MRR" with Key Results like "Reach $1M MRR by Q4," and they reset that OKR every single quarter. After 4 cycles, it becomes obvious that "Grow MRR" wasn't really an OKR. It was a KPI in disguise. The team was just renaming the same continuous goal every 90 days. That's not a bug in the OKR system. That's a categorization mistake at the Strategy Map level.

Most ongoing growth ambitions are KPIs. 

Growth as an OKR

So when is growth actually an OKR?

When it's a specific, time-bound, ambitious jump that requires real change to happen within a specific time period.

An OKR is a change goal. It measures something you want to change, by a deadline. The deadline matters. The ambition matters. The fact that it requires the team to do things they wouldn't be doing under business as usual is what makes it an OKR rather than a KPI.

Growth as an OKR looks like:

• Objective: "Establish a repeatable inbound growth engine before our Series B."
• Objective: "Make U.S. expansion a meaningful revenue contributor."
• Objective: "Move from a sales-led to a product-led acquisition motion."

Each of these has a clear deadline, a clear end state, and points at change, not maintenance. You're not going to keep "establishing a repeatable inbound growth engine" every quarter for the next 5 years. You're either going to succeed at it by your deadline, or not.

Here's the connection most companies miss: the growth OKR often hangs underneath a growth KPI. The KPI is what you're trying to dramatically move. The OKR is the change you're driving to move it. The Key Results inside that OKR describe what success looks like at the deadline.

If your KPI is "MRR" and it usually grows 5% quarter over quarter under business as usual, then you’ll have to start doing things differently if suddenly the quarterly growth target for your MRR KPI jumps to 25%. “Make U.S. expansion a meaningful revenue contributor” is then a credible OKR. The OKR is aligned to the KPI, drives a step-change in it, and then expires. The KPI keeps running (though its target may change).

"We want to grow. Where does it go?"

Almost every real growth ambition has all 3 layers. If a company says "growth is our top priority," and they're being serious, the honest answer is that they need:

1. A strategic choice about how they're going to grow (Strategic Pillar).
2. The KPIs that measure whether the growth strategy is working (MRR, ARR, NRR, win rate, whatever the right scoreboard is).
3. One or more OKRs that drive specific, time-bound improvements in those KPIs during specific time periods.

When the question "where does growth go on our Strategy Map" feels confusing, it's usually because the team has skipped one of these 3 layers without realizing it. They have a Pillar and KPIs, but no OKR driving the specific change this quarter. Or they have a target ("hit $10M ARR") with no underlying strategy and no OKRs contributing.

The mistake to avoid

The mistake isn't putting growth in the "wrong" layer. The mistake is putting it in only one layer.

I've seen 3 versions of this:

Growth is only a KPI. The company has a beautiful KPI dashboard, watches MRR every Monday morning, but there's no Strategic Pillar explaining how they're choosing to grow, and no OKR driving a specific change. The number drifts up or down based on whatever the market is doing. Nobody is really steering.

Growth is only an OKR. Every quarter, leadership sets an aggressive growth OKR. Every quarter, teams scramble. Nothing about the underlying strategy ever gets explicit. Nothing gets tracked as a KPI between quarters. The growth OKR keeps getting "reset" and the team is exhausted.

Growth is only a Strategic Pillar. The strategy deck has a beautiful pillar called "Aggressive Growth." Nothing underneath. No KPIs that measure whether the strategy is working. No OKRs driving any specific change this cycle. The pillar is decoration.

All 3 of these failure modes feel different on the surface, but they're really the same mistake. They treat growth as if it lives in one layer, when in fact a real growth ambition has to live in all 3.

What to do this week

If growth matters to your company, do this at your next strategy offsite or planning session:

1. Name the strategic choice. Finish the sentence "We're going to grow by ______, not by ______." If you can't, you don't have a growth strategy. You have a growth wish.
2. Name the KPIs. List the 3 to 5 numbers that, if they're healthy, mean your growth strategy is working. These are KPIs. Put them on a KPI Board in Perdoo and call this your Growth Board.
3. Name this cycle's change. Pick the 1 or 2 OKRs that will drive a specific, time-bound jump in one of those KPIs this quarter or this year. Make them ambitious. 

When you've done all 3, growth is no longer a single floating ambition that confuses everyone. It's a Strategic Pillar at the top, KPIs measuring whether it's working, and OKRs driving the specific changes you're committing to right now. That's what a real growth ambition looks like on a Strategy Map.

And if you want a tool that gives each of those layers a proper home, so your Strategic Pillars, KPIs, and OKRs are all native objects connected by explicit parent-child links rather than living in 3 different decks, that's exactly what Perdoo is built for. Start for free, or request a demo.