[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

> the mission is to make money and the vision is to make more money.

This is just fine, but it's not enough.

The purpose of writing a proper mission and vision is to say something about how. There should be some coherent strategic guidance, some notion of where the company is and/or wants to be in the marketplace or in customers' minds, and so on and so forth.

If you have that (and it's actually backed up by reality), then the OKRs emerge organically across the portfolio of investments the company is pursuing. Land N more deals with this existing customer segment, experiment with new features in pursuit of that other customer segment, staff a team to ensure customers aren't lost for reason X or Y, etc.

The real magic, of course, is that every person in the company can then make a clear statement about how they're contributing to the broader mission and vision of the corporation. When it all lines up, it really is a beautiful symphony of capitalism.

[nkrisc]

I don’t doubt it can work and be used correctly, I’ve just never experienced that.

In my experience I’m left scratching my head when it cures time to write my OKRs since as an IC, who doesn’t get to choose what I work on or what gets released, everything comes down to essentially “do my job more gooder”.

Maybe I’m just bad it or my managers were bad at guiding me, but every OKR I’ve written was essentially bullshit and at performance review time my manager sat down with me and we bullshitted how they were achieved so I could keep my job. It’s what everyone did. No one ever did not achieve a goal. How could I write a measurable goal that contributed to revenue if I had no control over anything but my own work? I can’t say “release N features” because I can’t control if I’ll work on N features that actually get released. And so on.

I’m just happy OKRs are firmly in my rear view mirror now.