Reminds me of the time I had an OKR to reduce page load time by some ridiculous amount. The speed wasn’t even bad and there was no theory about how exactly it would help the product. We didn’t sell ads or anything like that.
We ended up achieving our goal by greatly reducing the quality of all images to almost nothing, such that they looked like a rorschach test, and measuring performance on a fast internal network. Management was so happy they bought a white sheet cake and had the graph of improvement drawn on it in icing.
The next quarter, customers started to complain and a new OKR was set to improve image quality by 50%. So we just reverted all the prior changes, and once again victory was declared.
This company operated like this for the entire year I was there. I finally had to quit because I started to question my own sanity. Ever since that experience I have PTSD whenever someone says the word OKR.
I have a comment with my own issues with OKRs but I do want to stick up for OKRs here: this really is a management problem and, let's be honest, they'd have fucked up any framework that was put in place (and a lack of framework would have probably been just as bad!)
Sounds like they were doing it wrong. At a high level, senior management shouldn’t care about tiny optimizations like that, and their OKRs should be higher level. Your team should make OKRs that support those higher level OKRs in the best way it can, which is probably not those meaningless optimizations.
Easy to say, but hard to do. I have also had my OKRs dictated to me by upper/middle management. Sometimes I think I was the only one in the room who read Measure What Matters.
Have to add a different perspective here (the management one), just to try to give a potential explanation. I did pretty much the same thing to my team, though with a lot more background as to why. We were severely rocked by a Google search ranking update, and basically lost 70% of traffic overnight. We had no idea why, none of our metrics over the past years changed, but it all went to shit. In the days after, we set out a plan to try to recover this ranking, even though we had no idea what we need to do. Page speed was one of those metrics we set out to improve, and even though it wasn't bad, but it wasn't exceptional. As with other SEO stuff, there was no guarantee this will help, but we needed to try, along with a few other things. After we fixed it (along with a few other things), there was very small growth initially, and it took another 9 months for our SEO to fully recover, but we did fully recover. Was it Page speed? Who knows, but 30 million website visits were earned back one way or another.
I can easily see from an employee's perspective, they could react like you, "why the hell am I doing page speed shit, we're already fine, this is bullshit". Especially because the entire field of SEO sounds like total random guesswork to a lot of engineers. But I expect the team to have the common sense not to completely fuck up the product in the mean time and/or fake results, even if the metric we're measuring and improving is page speed. I don't think that's an OKR issue, that's just not giving a shit issue that no management approach can solve (on both sides, since the management spent no time explaining why page speed is important to improve).
OKR is another tool for the managers not to feel useless. The problem is when they are also incompetent. OKR is an integral part of company brainwashing of employees. OKRs are good for the management people, but it should be not enforced on those who do the actual work, like engineers. They could set goals like, one coffee per week, report to the higher ups that coffee consumption is good, and thats it. ;)
This is because you're trying to actually achieve your OKRs. Everywhere I have ever worked we understood that OKRs are frequently not achievable, fudged the numbers are OKR grading time and the still frequently had red OKRs. At one point I used to push for actually specific, measurable, achievable OKRs but I quickly learned that nobody cares and it's a waste of effort.
People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process. It's not a problem specifically with OKRs, it's a problem with the whole concept that if HR can just put in this one simple system then doing so will be magically motivational and the whole company will go to ludicrous speed.
There is no replacement for good people. Not in leadership positions, and not in IC positions. Recruit for strengths, hire for culture, train for gaps. No process, least of which OKRs, can make up for recruiting weak people, people who don't fit your culture, or people not interested in personal growth (i.e. filling gaps).
The first time my company decided to implement OKR's I told my manager that I'm already motivated by my own standards, and using OKR's as a carrot on a stick that I know it's deliberately and exclusively out of range is absurd.
He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.
I see this type of backlash against process a lot here. But I don't think 'just good people' is the answer. A lone hero can do a lot, maybe a band of them kick real ass, but it doesn't really scale beyond that nor does it last. Furthermore, even the best make silly mistakes, you need to have a lot of mechanisms to both prevent and mitigate against the consequences of failure if that is important to your business.
Just imagine operating a hospital on the maxim that you 'only' need good people and process is evil. I know this is a bit of a straw man, I just want to make it clear that eradicating all process in favor of 'good people' isn't the answer.
So what is? A good process can really help a lot in working together. I've worked with a mix of medium to good people, who continuously adapted the process to make it work and it helped, a lot. Medium people can do good work. And good people don't have as many obstacles.
It is essential that the people who are responsible for executing also have the mandate of adopting or at least adapting a process to their context. A good process can save a lot of brain cycles and prevent all kinds of organizational waste. Its like automating away a lot of the overhead of working together and achieving goals collectively.
But if the script doesn't work for a use case or with certain parameters, you better change it or just not run it to a fault.
Couldn't agree more. It's a fantasy that there is a magic wand or a system that can make anything and anyone efficient and productive at everything. I agree with the author, some process is needed to have a group of people on the same page, but it's not the driver of good results.
In my experience, these ideas - broadly detailed processes, not just OKRs - are pushed very strongly by ambitious people who don't want to actually work or get good at something. So they push the idea that we should have processes everywhere that solve problems on their own.
I think this is mostly the case except that it’s not about weak people, personal growth or even mostly about culture. If people aren’t willing to go the extra mile for you, that’s on you honestly. If you’re incentivising and looking after your people they’ll feel like they have a stake and be personally invested.
I don’t think anyone would argue that investment banks have great culture from the outside or be motivating their people by the virtues of their higher purpose etc. but the incentives are there, and they work very effectively to get people’s commitment.
> People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process.
As much as anything else, standardization & bureaucratization & Taylorism are most generally forces of stability & predictability & control. A well.managed company does not go extra miles. It goes exactly as many miles as the company said it would. If everything is working well.
In bad times and in desperation, extra miles are what keep things together, what plugs leaks and patches tares.
I believe so strongly in extra miles, in going overboard, and pouring in extra. In making things better than they had to be. But these extra miles are, in my view, owned & done by individuals. Extra miles are what competent happy craftspeople do when they are enjoying their craft; embellishing & exceeding.
The extra mile is almost always a person's own thing. It is almost never something management or the org can pursue. The org can set conditions: create space & permission & happiness. And when these positives align, then we see real extra miles.
> There is no replacement for good people.
And giving them time and space to put in some extra miles.
Same thing with SCRUM or all the other bullshit that people who can not actually bring anything to the table use to justify their payroll, while only making things worse for anyone else involved.
Also, every time some new-manager-on-the-block decides that we have to implement "agile" everything just goes downhill from there.
I don't even know what "agile" means anyway, what about "nimble" or "dextrous" instead, as long as people are not understanding each other, they all mean "let's fuck shit up every 2 weeks"
People can for sure be motivated be simply, standardized processes, such as a % of revenues as commission. However, not everyone gets motivated that way and organizations could use different processes in places or also just say: we only want people motivated by X.
The problem with OKR and every other fad managment system weather it be agile. SaFE, or LEAN is that they are all essentially cargocults once the leave the orgnisation that spawned them.
The problem is that organisations that feels the need to import management dogma's are trying to avoid doing the hard and potentially ego-destroying for upper management task of examining why they arent getting the performance from their mid management they want, by simply copying in the surface aspect of someone more succesfull,
Add to this that there is a surpricingly small number of people both in management and programming that have ever managed a project from cradle to grave at all let alone done so successfully and you get a culture of management consultants that have never been with a project long enough to watch the pretty facade crumble diue to a lack of solid foundations.
Hell yeah! And on top of that management rarely learns or understands that they need to think and design what their organization should be, nor that their power to introduce change is much more limited than they think.
> I think the biggest problem with OKR's laser focus on measurement, though, is that not everything should be measured, even if you can!
That reminds me of a quote on overemphasizing quantitative data:
> But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
> It is a short, fatal step from the statement, "There are many intangibles and imponderables that we can't put on our computers," to the statement, "Let's measure what we can and forget about the intangibles." This step poses an even greater danger to us in the future than in the past.
—Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)
The Tao Te Ching starts with this line, which I adore:
> The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
“The Tao” here means “the rules / way to live your life”. Essentially, the point is that if you try to write down a set of complete rules for how to act - either in life generally or at work, well, that ain’t it.
This is always my problem with OKRs. They’ll always inevitably lead you away from what you actually should / need to do in a given moment if you were in tune with your wisdom. Instead of trying to codify what leaders do, we should practice staying present to what’s actually going on and practice wisdom - for whatever that means in the current context.
That's the premise of Seeing Like a State, except that the State actively destroys anything that is unintelligible to it, and instead builds what can be measured.
> The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
This is a summary of science and medicine practically since the Enlightenment. Is it a wonder that anti intellectualism is so rampant in North America now?
Intellectuals are assholes. You can really only trust the handful of us who defect, and even that has limits.
When things are growing, any nonsense is thought to be "the way". OKRs, matrixes, oh they must be so smart with all those "systems thinking". Somehow none of those systems work when things are going down. Look at Google and Intel today, none of those OKRs saved them did it?
It's the same thing with CEOs. I don't remember which book it was, but it showed how the CEO changing didn't matter at all but was just natural market cycles.
I really liked this post and it hit on a few problems I've encountered when trying to use OKRs: namely, what I'm going to call the "we know what we want to do, so just fucking do it" problem. I've been guilty of trying to contort things into an "OKR-like" view of the world when really, the answer was to just say "this quarter, we'll work on this task." It makes everything difficult when I'm then asked to turn this into a roadmap of things we'll do.
I do think it's worth remembering that John Doerr's implementation of OKRs at Intel actually did include binary goals. I remember reading the book and seeing "complete design and begin fabrication of chip X by Y date" (I'm paraphrasing because I don't feel like going through the book to find it). Yes, the higher-level objective was "establish Intel as the top chip maker" but that, by necessity, included "actually make the chip."
Nowadays you can write up what you really need to do, then ask ChatGPT to make BS OKRs out of them, with numbers to sound just impressive enough, but really easy to achieve even when you do the correct things unrelated to the OKRs.
The way I've seen OKRs work so far was always the same:
Top management defines a strategy for the company.
Each department (commercial, marketing, product, etc.) create department OKRs from the company OKRs.
The year/term starts.
Each department comes to the implementation teams (product, IT, BI, support, etc.) with a HUGE list of poorly defined objectives or tasks.
The implementation teams only have limited capacity and can only deliver maybe 15-20% of what everyone wants. No one actually thought of checking if the objectives have any reasonable possibility of being delivered at all during the term.
Optional drama to decide what's going to be actually worked on might happen.
When the term ends, and if communication isn't a disaster between the departments, some MVPs are delivered.
A new term starts, and either the previous objectives are continued, or they're simply forgotten in favor of new ones.
Helping teams know what to say "no" to is the real power of OKR.
You do that by having the entire organization's O and KR roll up and cascade down. My Objectives directly roll up to my parent organization's Key Result. My parent org's Objectives rolls up to their parent's KR, and so on to the top. Then, you have the top-level check downwards if the sets of OKRs still make sense in their entirety.
Unfortunately, I have never seen any organization I was with ever do this...
That requires the high level OKRs to not be vague BS, because otherwise the team wanting you to do extra work can justify everything. Like the exec level OKR might be something like "customer first", which literally any feature work could be justified under (or is often used as an excuse to try push out needed technical work)
Years ago I worked at a place where we were meant to set objectives to please HR. Instead, at the end of year we always found what we'd needed to work on had completely changed, so instead, we retrofitted objectives for the work we'd actually done. So, hacked the system / circumvented the spirit of it, but did a very effective end of year annual review i:e what have you actually achieved this year, are you/we happy with that, what do you ideally wanna achieve next year (with caveat that we can't necessarily predict what we'll actually need to do), any training or anything else you need to achieve that. I recommend this approach to anyone encountering OKR nonsense. Change your objectives after the event, to fit what you've done. Just make sure you got a decent list of stuff you've done. Its ridiculous. Think of a plumber for example. Should they specify how many toilets they're gonna fix next year? ;) Depends how many break, in what way they break, how hard they are to fix. I suppose, maybe you could average it out. But software is far more unpredictable.
They certainly are for me. I fill them out with my manager's help and then 100% ignore them because they generally have nothing to do with the things that end up actually needing to be done.
That 70% figure is simply to suggest that you should set stretch goals. One good thing that can come out of setting outlandish goals is that it forces you to take a revolutionary rather than evolutionary approach. I would not say you should do this for everything, but it seems to have worked for Google.
OKRs are good for solving the problem of communicating strategic decisions in a meaningful way in large organisations. Without such a device, it is common for people "on the ground" to not have a good understanding of the priorities of people several levels above them, with the result that they can do great work and still not move in the direction the company decided to move in. It is easy to misunderstand that and trash OKRs when you're the "leaf" in an organisational tree. But ask your manager, or their manager, or your VP or CEO, and they'll tell you that they need a device for effectively communicating to everyone in the org what the priorities are.
I think a fundamental problem with all management culture is that fundamentally, managers do not want plans to change. I suspect there's some systematic issue at work here, but in the kinds of people who are selected for these roles, how they're evaluated, and so on.
I guess change requires you to be able to argue for change, and against the status quo, and management culture is the opposite of this.
Whilst the super-structure of management culture exists, all these systems will be corrupted to fit it. They aren't fundamentally engaging with any real-world incentive structure.
In my experience, the vast majority of companies that use OKRs do it incorrectly, misunderstand the point, and cause more harm than good. As a member of the management team, I was able to get my current company to leave them behind, by giving a well sourced presentation on what OKR is for and when/how to use them. After 1 quarter the lights went on and nobody wanted to use them anymore.
Here are the biggest mistakes I commonly see.
1. Use OKRs are for quarterly or year targets. No, OKRs are for managing big changes to things. Never for Business as Usual activities.
2. Require every team to write OKRs for every quarter / interval. See number 1.
3. Focus on the Key Results instead of the Objective. If the Key Results can be achieved without achieving the Objective, that's a broken OKR.
Overall, I think OKRs are a tool that has its uses but its misuse causes far more problems than its absence.
I see only the problem of no ability to change the OKRs, otherwise the core idea of making a plan is right. Changing the goals should introduce a additional change process, because priorities change with new knowledge. I haven't see that done well yet. Maybe just having 6 weeks cycle OKR [1] instead could work better as in Shape Up?
OKR should be something those managers use, not things we programmers(well if you like, call me coder is ok, I don't care) should do. Because it's those managers manage our jobs. If no one can manage my job except me, I'd like to use OKR.
Used to think OKRs were total bullshit, until I started working on a project spanning multiple teams with cross-org dependencies.
OKRs are effectively a quarterly negotiation to get alignment across teams so that large, complex, projects get done on time.
They create accountability and the ability to escalate up the chain when a team you have a dependency on isn't prioritizing what you need to unblock your project.
Generally, if you think OKRs are bullshit, it means they're being applied at a too granular level, or misapplied in an organization that doesn't require strong collaboration across team or org boundaries.
It "seems" easy and obvious when you're a leaf node how a team, org, company should be run and coordinated, but when you actually try and do it, and lead, it's nowhere near as easy as it seems.
OKRs, misapplied, suck. But there has to be some way to get large groups of people to align on specific targets. Effectively something like them have to exist.
Bad org culture will be bad no matter the mechanisms. You can use OKRs to be toxic and you can use Agile to be toxic and you can use your own bespoke bullshit to be toxic. There is no management framework that can fix bad culture because its only a part of it. Incentives structure, existing culture, hiring practices, company life cycle, market conditions, etc all contribute to it and no amount of data can fix those. Managing a company is like parenting, if you think that you can replace attention, care and hard work with a framework you are doing it wrong.
There is a heavy lifting issue hiding behind using OKRs as a tool: you need to build an organization that is able to held teams accountable, and has a working escalation chain.
The prerequisite for OKR is that your organization is driven by objectives which cascade from C-level down to teams, and then all the way back via feedback loops, instead of VPs and directors micromanaging every link of the chain on the go. Drive-by style of objective setting, when things get randomly thrown at random teams, is another problem that needs to be resolved first.
Your OKRs will fail without building this kind of management culture. And you’ll be surprised how many orgs are not working that way, and insane amount of resistance people in the org have when you try to implement these (logically efficient) practices.
I actually think they are quite reasonable compared to a lot of the alternatives.
It gives a good framework for going from business’ overall goal down to what are we going to do with this product the next four months?
I am asked to set my yearly goals in January and in December I have to argue how I met them. With okrs being tertiary you get a bit more manageable time horizon, while maintaining half year and yearly goals.
There are a few silly things about the framework, like how goals should be unobtainably optimistic and that phrasing of goals are not “improve user satisfaction”, but “I want to make the user cry of joy when opening product”. It’s stupid, but user stories also dictates silly phrasing.
But as the article and comment section shows, it’s no cure for stupidity or bad managers.
Too many organizations are making OKRs much more complex than they need to be.
The fundamental idea of OKRs is actually useful: define a few high-level goals the organization wants to achieve, and for each goal define a few key outcomes that will materialize if the goal is achieved.
Good OKRs help with focus and alignement, particularly in large teams.
We can keep our OKRs simple:
- Key Results don’t necessarily have to be measurements, as long as it’s possible to evaluate them in an objective way.
- OKRs don’t have to be cascaded deep down to the individual level.
- No spreadsheet is needed either. You can just have your OKRs in Notion, Confluence, or similar.
- And OKRs don't have to be stretched if it's not part of the company's culture.
[+] [-] iamleppert|2 years ago|reply
We ended up achieving our goal by greatly reducing the quality of all images to almost nothing, such that they looked like a rorschach test, and measuring performance on a fast internal network. Management was so happy they bought a white sheet cake and had the graph of improvement drawn on it in icing.
The next quarter, customers started to complain and a new OKR was set to improve image quality by 50%. So we just reverted all the prior changes, and once again victory was declared.
This company operated like this for the entire year I was there. I finally had to quit because I started to question my own sanity. Ever since that experience I have PTSD whenever someone says the word OKR.
[+] [-] pjc50|2 years ago|reply
More people should learn from Deming instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
[+] [-] scott_w|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] al_borland|2 years ago|reply
Easy to say, but hard to do. I have also had my OKRs dictated to me by upper/middle management. Sometimes I think I was the only one in the room who read Measure What Matters.
[+] [-] szundi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkt|2 years ago|reply
It goes to show how utterly insane management types can be, and how they need to be hemmed in with empiricism and held to account for wasting time.
[+] [-] napoleoncomplex|2 years ago|reply
I can easily see from an employee's perspective, they could react like you, "why the hell am I doing page speed shit, we're already fine, this is bullshit". Especially because the entire field of SEO sounds like total random guesswork to a lot of engineers. But I expect the team to have the common sense not to completely fuck up the product in the mean time and/or fake results, even if the metric we're measuring and improving is page speed. I don't think that's an OKR issue, that's just not giving a shit issue that no management approach can solve (on both sides, since the management spent no time explaining why page speed is important to improve).
[+] [-] lofaszvanitt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lutger|2 years ago|reply
I mean, you are lucky they were not into SAFe or you might have quit the field altogether.
[+] [-] tdeck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solatic|2 years ago|reply
There is no replacement for good people. Not in leadership positions, and not in IC positions. Recruit for strengths, hire for culture, train for gaps. No process, least of which OKRs, can make up for recruiting weak people, people who don't fit your culture, or people not interested in personal growth (i.e. filling gaps).
[+] [-] Arisaka1|2 years ago|reply
He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.
[+] [-] Lutger|2 years ago|reply
Just imagine operating a hospital on the maxim that you 'only' need good people and process is evil. I know this is a bit of a straw man, I just want to make it clear that eradicating all process in favor of 'good people' isn't the answer.
So what is? A good process can really help a lot in working together. I've worked with a mix of medium to good people, who continuously adapted the process to make it work and it helped, a lot. Medium people can do good work. And good people don't have as many obstacles.
It is essential that the people who are responsible for executing also have the mandate of adopting or at least adapting a process to their context. A good process can save a lot of brain cycles and prevent all kinds of organizational waste. Its like automating away a lot of the overhead of working together and achieving goals collectively.
But if the script doesn't work for a use case or with certain parameters, you better change it or just not run it to a fault.
[+] [-] locallost|2 years ago|reply
In my experience, these ideas - broadly detailed processes, not just OKRs - are pushed very strongly by ambitious people who don't want to actually work or get good at something. So they push the idea that we should have processes everywhere that solve problems on their own.
[+] [-] highwaylights|2 years ago|reply
I don’t think anyone would argue that investment banks have great culture from the outside or be motivating their people by the virtues of their higher purpose etc. but the incentives are there, and they work very effectively to get people’s commitment.
[+] [-] jauntywundrkind|2 years ago|reply
As much as anything else, standardization & bureaucratization & Taylorism are most generally forces of stability & predictability & control. A well.managed company does not go extra miles. It goes exactly as many miles as the company said it would. If everything is working well.
In bad times and in desperation, extra miles are what keep things together, what plugs leaks and patches tares.
I believe so strongly in extra miles, in going overboard, and pouring in extra. In making things better than they had to be. But these extra miles are, in my view, owned & done by individuals. Extra miles are what competent happy craftspeople do when they are enjoying their craft; embellishing & exceeding.
The extra mile is almost always a person's own thing. It is almost never something management or the org can pursue. The org can set conditions: create space & permission & happiness. And when these positives align, then we see real extra miles.
> There is no replacement for good people.
And giving them time and space to put in some extra miles.
[+] [-] Lionga|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|2 years ago|reply
Also, every time some new-manager-on-the-block decides that we have to implement "agile" everything just goes downhill from there.
I don't even know what "agile" means anyway, what about "nimble" or "dextrous" instead, as long as people are not understanding each other, they all mean "let's fuck shit up every 2 weeks"
[+] [-] ozim|2 years ago|reply
You cannot hire only best people because that is not possible. There are too many companies competing.
Only thing manager can really do is to fire toxic and highly underperforming employees asap - this is basically only thing I expect from a manager.
[+] [-] RandomLensman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stranger43|2 years ago|reply
The problem is that organisations that feels the need to import management dogma's are trying to avoid doing the hard and potentially ego-destroying for upper management task of examining why they arent getting the performance from their mid management they want, by simply copying in the surface aspect of someone more succesfull,
Add to this that there is a surpricingly small number of people both in management and programming that have ever managed a project from cradle to grave at all let alone done so successfully and you get a culture of management consultants that have never been with a project long enough to watch the pretty facade crumble diue to a lack of solid foundations.
[+] [-] pvdoom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] des429|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willsmith72|2 years ago|reply
btw, agile is not a management system, and a tech worker who thinks that it is raises a huge red flag to me
[+] [-] Terr_|2 years ago|reply
That reminds me of a quote on overemphasizing quantitative data:
> But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
> It is a short, fatal step from the statement, "There are many intangibles and imponderables that we can't put on our computers," to the statement, "Let's measure what we can and forget about the intangibles." This step poses an even greater danger to us in the future than in the past.
—Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)
[+] [-] josephg|2 years ago|reply
> The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
“The Tao” here means “the rules / way to live your life”. Essentially, the point is that if you try to write down a set of complete rules for how to act - either in life generally or at work, well, that ain’t it.
This is always my problem with OKRs. They’ll always inevitably lead you away from what you actually should / need to do in a given moment if you were in tune with your wisdom. Instead of trying to codify what leaders do, we should practice staying present to what’s actually going on and practice wisdom - for whatever that means in the current context.
[+] [-] tpm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
This is a summary of science and medicine practically since the Enlightenment. Is it a wonder that anti intellectualism is so rampant in North America now?
Intellectuals are assholes. You can really only trust the handful of us who defect, and even that has limits.
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|2 years ago|reply
It's the same thing with CEOs. I don't remember which book it was, but it showed how the CEO changing didn't matter at all but was just natural market cycles.
[+] [-] scott_w|2 years ago|reply
I do think it's worth remembering that John Doerr's implementation of OKRs at Intel actually did include binary goals. I remember reading the book and seeing "complete design and begin fabrication of chip X by Y date" (I'm paraphrasing because I don't feel like going through the book to find it). Yes, the higher-level objective was "establish Intel as the top chip maker" but that, by necessity, included "actually make the chip."
[+] [-] mewpmewp2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeWaren|2 years ago|reply
Top management defines a strategy for the company.
Each department (commercial, marketing, product, etc.) create department OKRs from the company OKRs.
The year/term starts.
Each department comes to the implementation teams (product, IT, BI, support, etc.) with a HUGE list of poorly defined objectives or tasks.
The implementation teams only have limited capacity and can only deliver maybe 15-20% of what everyone wants. No one actually thought of checking if the objectives have any reasonable possibility of being delivered at all during the term.
Optional drama to decide what's going to be actually worked on might happen.
When the term ends, and if communication isn't a disaster between the departments, some MVPs are delivered.
A new term starts, and either the previous objectives are continued, or they're simply forgotten in favor of new ones.
Rinse and repeat.
edit: formatting and typo.
[+] [-] maytc|2 years ago|reply
You do that by having the entire organization's O and KR roll up and cascade down. My Objectives directly roll up to my parent organization's Key Result. My parent org's Objectives rolls up to their parent's KR, and so on to the top. Then, you have the top-level check downwards if the sets of OKRs still make sense in their entirety.
Unfortunately, I have never seen any organization I was with ever do this...
[+] [-] Macha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickd2001|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nox101|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_username|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esafak|2 years ago|reply
That 70% figure is simply to suggest that you should set stretch goals. One good thing that can come out of setting outlandish goals is that it forces you to take a revolutionary rather than evolutionary approach. I would not say you should do this for everything, but it seems to have worked for Google.
[+] [-] intellectronica|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjburgess|2 years ago|reply
I guess change requires you to be able to argue for change, and against the status quo, and management culture is the opposite of this.
Whilst the super-structure of management culture exists, all these systems will be corrupted to fit it. They aren't fundamentally engaging with any real-world incentive structure.
[+] [-] getoffmyyawn|2 years ago|reply
Here are the biggest mistakes I commonly see.
1. Use OKRs are for quarterly or year targets. No, OKRs are for managing big changes to things. Never for Business as Usual activities.
2. Require every team to write OKRs for every quarter / interval. See number 1.
3. Focus on the Key Results instead of the Objective. If the Key Results can be achieved without achieving the Objective, that's a broken OKR.
Overall, I think OKRs are a tool that has its uses but its misuse causes far more problems than its absence.
Update: typos
[+] [-] vackosar|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.2-chapter-08
[+] [-] jdlyga|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xialvjun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brotchie|2 years ago|reply
OKRs are effectively a quarterly negotiation to get alignment across teams so that large, complex, projects get done on time.
They create accountability and the ability to escalate up the chain when a team you have a dependency on isn't prioritizing what you need to unblock your project.
Generally, if you think OKRs are bullshit, it means they're being applied at a too granular level, or misapplied in an organization that doesn't require strong collaboration across team or org boundaries.
It "seems" easy and obvious when you're a leaf node how a team, org, company should be run and coordinated, but when you actually try and do it, and lead, it's nowhere near as easy as it seems.
OKRs, misapplied, suck. But there has to be some way to get large groups of people to align on specific targets. Effectively something like them have to exist.
[+] [-] drdrek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smugglerFlynn|2 years ago|reply
There is a heavy lifting issue hiding behind using OKRs as a tool: you need to build an organization that is able to held teams accountable, and has a working escalation chain.
The prerequisite for OKR is that your organization is driven by objectives which cascade from C-level down to teams, and then all the way back via feedback loops, instead of VPs and directors micromanaging every link of the chain on the go. Drive-by style of objective setting, when things get randomly thrown at random teams, is another problem that needs to be resolved first.
Your OKRs will fail without building this kind of management culture. And you’ll be surprised how many orgs are not working that way, and insane amount of resistance people in the org have when you try to implement these (logically efficient) practices.
[+] [-] bhawks|2 years ago|reply
If you don't need to improve comms or prioritization then OKRs are of limited value.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|2 years ago|reply
It gives a good framework for going from business’ overall goal down to what are we going to do with this product the next four months?
I am asked to set my yearly goals in January and in December I have to argue how I met them. With okrs being tertiary you get a bit more manageable time horizon, while maintaining half year and yearly goals.
There are a few silly things about the framework, like how goals should be unobtainably optimistic and that phrasing of goals are not “improve user satisfaction”, but “I want to make the user cry of joy when opening product”. It’s stupid, but user stories also dictates silly phrasing.
But as the article and comment section shows, it’s no cure for stupidity or bad managers.
[+] [-] ngrilly|2 years ago|reply
The fundamental idea of OKRs is actually useful: define a few high-level goals the organization wants to achieve, and for each goal define a few key outcomes that will materialize if the goal is achieved.
Good OKRs help with focus and alignement, particularly in large teams.
We can keep our OKRs simple:
- Key Results don’t necessarily have to be measurements, as long as it’s possible to evaluate them in an objective way.
- OKRs don’t have to be cascaded deep down to the individual level.
- No spreadsheet is needed either. You can just have your OKRs in Notion, Confluence, or similar.
- And OKRs don't have to be stretched if it's not part of the company's culture.