Stretch Goal
Definition
A stretch goal is a target set deliberately beyond what a team is confident it can hit, so that planning starts from ambition rather than from a comfortable extrapolation. In OKR practice, stretch goals are expected to land short — a score around 0.7 is treated as success.
Stretch goals only function when the organization separates them from commitments. If a missed stretch target is treated the same as a missed delivery date, teams learn to set targets they know they will beat, which is the exact behavior the mechanism exists to prevent. Most mature OKR programs label each Key Result as committed or aspirational at the moment it is set, not after the result is known.
The visible failure mode is sandbagging, and it is harder to spot than a miss because everything looks green. A Key Result running far ahead of pace early in a cycle usually says more about how the target was chosen than about how the team is performing.
Example
Committed: 'Ship SOC 2 Type II by 30 September' — a 1.0 is expected. Aspirational: 'Grow self-serve revenue from $80k to $250k MRR' — landing at $190k scores about 0.65 and counts as a good quarter.
See also: OKR software