Ingo, quite the response! Interestingly, the way I see it (and I had to look up OKRs ;), is that you start with OKRs, and those drive KPIs. E.g. strategy down to tactical measures. I think the fuzzy stuff about opinions matters, when you’re evaluating subjective experience: employee experience, customer experience. And there are ways to collect that in valid ways. But to your key question, the data points, in my opinion they are driven by the change you’re trying to achieve. But those should be tied to performance gaps, and the data that should be used are the evidence of the gap and how you’ll know it’s fixed. Too many errors in manufacturing? That’d be the errors per (time, piece, etc). Too long a sales cycle? Then time to close. And so on. If it’s about customer experience, it could just be a satisfaction rating. But you should have a performance you’re trying to improve, then you find the cause, and if it’s a skill gap, then it’s a course. Otherwise it might be a job aid, or a change in incentives, or messaging campaign, or… And then you can measure the impact of those. Hope this helps.

Another layer would be, even fuzzy and hard to measure, behavior, meaning, what people think. Personal thoughts about “do we provide enough trainings” or “do we provide spot on training, even, if not overall many trainings” could be a very personal opinion based on experience and expectations.
This should be tracked separately to be able to deep dive into the data to not miss possible relations between hard and soft values. It’s a bit like a “just in case” data collection. And sometimes patterns appear at places you don’t expect.

I remember a customer we always had to chase to pay the bills. No meeting with the customer fixed it.
Analyzing past data on customer satisfaction, who had been the Sales Reps in the past, which trainings were moved/cancelled in the past, training survey results, lost opportunities and even, where the customer worked before revealed, that something went wrong in his previous company, which had been also our customer. And the same Sales Rep and the same Admin that created this situation in the past (that never had been fully fixed), where now the ones responsible for him again. Situation is now fixed, but without the combination of hard and soft facts we wouldn’t have been able to.

Hope not too much of above is rubbish :D… Just my experience… But I would be very interested in getting to know which data points (hard/soft) you consider as crucial, less important or meaningless and how do you measure those (direct or per relation).

I couldn’t ask them why, as I didn’t conduct the survey. I’m reacting to what I’ve seen elsewhere and what on principle makes sense.

I find it better to walk on boyth sides of the street.

Though I have to confess that I’ve written for them! Hopefully better grounded than those you’ve seen…