[xcrjm]

My experience of them was that upper management set "Objectives" like "1% YoY Online Sales Growth" for your group or team or whatever and then each team in that group (again, or whatever) would come up with their own "Key Results" that they thought, if the result was achieved, would translate to that objective.

So for example, if you worked in online retail like I did, maybe you'd get an objective like that and then hypothesize a few things along the lines of "if we increase product image interactions by X% then sales should go up by Y%." as key results that you then report back out to management to show progress towards your objective.