
OKRs from a development team’s perspective - thinksocrates
https://zafulabs.com/2019/05/24/okrs-from-a-development-teams-perspective/
======
superfrank
This put my thoughts on OKRs into words better than I ever could. At my last
two companies, I've been beating the drum that the closer to an individual
level you get the less useful OKRs are. The backward process of, "we know what
we are going to do, how to we make it fit the OKR formula" drives me insane.

Personally, I actually like OKRs at the organization or large sub org level. I
think they are great at getting everyone moving in the same direction and
letting everyone know what matters. My problem is that as you drill down into
an organization you need to switch from the "Why are we doing this?" and "What
are we measuring?" questions and instead as "Exactly how are we going to do
this?" which doesn't really fit into the ORK structure. Personally, I find
that once you get down to a group of about five people or less, creating a
list of tasks is far more affective than OKRs.

~~~
maxxxxx
Exactly. Individuals are far away from the actual organization goals. In my
yearly review I have to categorize my achievements by stuff like "Supporting
growth", "Fueling worldwide expansion", "Increasing customer satisfaction" and
so on. I am very far away from any of these so either I indirectly support all
of them or you could also say I support none of them.

Just filling this out makes it clear that most of the company is about
bullshitting each other.

~~~
0x445442
This sums it up well. If all your achievements, with the exception things like
professional growth, was not directly derived from these high level OKRs then
middle management has failed in the assignment of work.

The hilarious thing where I work is at the end of each week I have to manually
enter the hours I worked and I have N charge numbers to split up those hours.
If you read the line item for each charge number it's basically a synopsis of
one or more OKRs.

All this to say, from an engineer's point of view it seems with just a few
tweaks in JIRA and Gitlab, review input could be created by running a report
on commit history over the date range the review covers.

------
swanson
> Objective – Increase Customer Retention

> Key Result #1 – Lifetime Customer value increase from $N to $N+5

> Key Result #2 – Decrease Customer Churn Rate by 10%

I'm a developer on a team. How am I supposed to know why customers are
churning? I'm three levels removed from talking to customers when they cancel.
I don't have a deep relationship to know how to add value to them.

Someone needs to do the research, analysis, and leg work of finding potential
areas to exploit. And then someone needs to have at least some amount of
vision or inspiration about how to solve that problem. Or do whatever trendy
new "design sprint feedback loop" brainstorming session someone is tweeting
about. This is the kind of stuff I hear designers and "product people" talking
about wanting to do.

If you want to do that work and _then_ loop in the engineering team to talk
about feasibility and planning that seems fine, but the last time I worked in
an environment with OKR no one seemed to have any brilliant ideas about how
to, you know, actually achieve the Key Results.

(Until these questions can be satisfactorily answered to developers, OKRs are
going to be perceived as a buzzword, flavor of the month process air-dropped
in because someone saw a blog post about it)

~~~
hirundo
> How am I supposed to know why customers are churning? I'm three levels
> removed from talking to customers when they cancel. I don't have a deep
> relationship to know how to add value to them.

Most design decisions you make as a developer affect the value users get from
your product, and therefore the churn rate. Sure you can get more useful data
by talking to customers, and you should seek it out. But even lacking that,
it's up to you to put yourself in the place of a user and make the most
practical decisions available for their benefit that your powers of intuition
allow. You don't get to say, I don't have the best possible data for that
choice therefore it's not my problem. It's still your problem.

~~~
swanson
It's the right attitude in spirit. But like how am I supposed to know how to
decrease no-show rates at a clinic? How can I figure out how to increase
harvest yields from autonomous tractors? Convert more enterprise sales
accounts?

I know that the answer is: spend lots of time talking to customers, doing
research, empathizing, etc. But then who is going to write the code while I'm
doing all of that? It needs to get done, but I'm not sure why that is the job
of the "development team".

~~~
Jtsummers
One thing with OKRs is that the key results are supposed to be in your control
and responsibility. You don't have control over the no-show rate, but someone
has responsibility to improve that as part of their own role. If that has made
it to your team, then something is probably broken. Most likely that no-show
rate is part of an OKR for clinic managers or someone else. They'll come up
with ideas (or consult with you for ideas) and your team is responsible for
implementing the improvement or running experiments to see if it actually
achieves the desired improvement.

That means your OKR will have to do with responsiveness to your customer or
addressing the things your customer believes are associated with the poor no-
show rate. Is your "patient reminder" system broken and failing to contact
patients? Do you lack such a system? That's something you can address and
control, so the OKR will have to do with that (server uptime, quality of
service, features of the service, timeliness of changes to the service).

~~~
malyk
But you can potentially help the no show rate.

\- Send an email to the person 2 days before their appointment

\- Text them the morning of their appointment

\- Build something into the CRM of the front desk that reminds them to call
people the day before an appointment

\- send a pre-generated google directions result to the patient N minutes
before the appointment

I could go on for hours here. The job of a developer, at least in the startup
world, is to understand the objective of their team and _contribute_ to
figuring out ways to reach their objective. It is _not_ just to code up
tickets that are put in front of them.

~~~
robryan
Interesting that this often doesn’t go both ways, in startup culture. I mean
in terms of the non technical team members picking up enough technical skill
to better understand the technical side.

~~~
malyk
I guess?

But I, as an engineer, don't know accounting, or how to setup a healthcare
plan, or the intricacies of VC funding documents, etc. Thinking about how
people use what you are building and how to make it better seems like table
stakes for engineers in the startup world.

Thinking about the product and users is the job of engineers. So is coding a
solution. And so is _not_ coding a solution when there is a better option.

I guess if you get to a later stage startup, where you are working on very
specific technical problems, you _might_ be forgiven if you don't know what it
means to the larger organization, but I can't imagine working in that
environment and being happy. A fancy algorithm is cool I guess, but if I don't
know how it's moving the business forward it's basically meaningless to me.

YMMV

------
madrox
Leadership is hard. Gaining alignment around goals is hard. Even if you state
a goal, getting timely execution is really hard. OKRs are great in that they
are specific and measurable, so you can have a concrete conversation on if
performance is adequate.

The problem with OKRs is goals can be hard to quantify, so it's attractive to
simply make OKRs out of things you CAN measure. This is why we get companies
that optimize for clicks at all costs, and twitter accounts that buy
followers.

If you're thinking about backlog bankruptcy, it's probably because your team
is considered to be struggling. If so, it's attractive to think the process of
delivering on the OKR is the problem. However, in my experience the real
problem is that leadership hasn't done a great job of defining OKRs that
properly align teams on the mission at hand.

But good luck telling that to leadership.

~~~
loteck
Completely agree, this post looks classically to me like a team toiling under
leadership that picked OKRs as the measurement system for employees but not
for leadership.

How many OKR rollouts are plagued by lack of adoption in the C suites? Who
here is shocked to find a system is malfunctioning because employees are
trying their best to engage with it, but leadership can't or won't do their
part? OKRs in particular are hugely reliant on leadership defining goals for
others to align with.

Measurements and progress are cultural. It either starts and continues from
the top, or it's defective.

------
staticassertion
OKRs just feel like waterfall with "metrics" slapped on to make it sound
legitimate. The idea that I can predict what I should be working on for a full
quarter, and know how to measure it in advance, is inane.

Been working under this system for 1.5 years and I think it's nothing but a
detriment. I did research into doing OKRs "right", watched videos, _really_
tried to give it a fair shake, too.

~~~
dvirsky
I look at them as a useful way to plan and estimate. It's okay if priorities
shift or if you realise something will take longer, or that you actually need
to work on something else right now and some KR will be pushed to next Q, etc.
And it's perfectly fine not to meet some of your OKRs. I think of them as a
compass rather than a paved road.

~~~
staticassertion
If it's ok to shift priorities 3 weeks into OKRs and push them to the next
quarter why was it important to have them at all? Do you now need to measure
the new work that's prioritized?

It's totally fine (and encouraged, in fact) to not pass every OKR, but I don't
see any point to them. All of the failures of waterfall that everyone has
always been aware of, but with the additional work of stating how you'll
measure it, so that finance knows who to pay more.

~~~
groby_b
If you have no idea where you're going, and no metrics at all, how do you
reasonably pick _any_ tasks?

So, clearly, you have some goal. It's likely also measurable. If you pick it
so specific that you can't stick to it, yeah, OKRs are nonsensical. But "make
money" or "increase conversion rate" or "find market fit" are clearly
meaningful goals, no?

The difference from waterfall is that OKRs don't prescribe a "how". They
describe a desired outcome. Guardrails within which you can be as agile as you
want, just get some results.

------
jofer
So far, all companies I've seen that use OKRs operate something like this:

Start of quarter - Management: We need to increase X. Dev: Okay, here's how
I'll break that down... (key results)

One month later - Management: Everything's changed... Y is the top priority
now! Dev: Okay, that means we should focus on fozbuzzles.

One month later - Management: Oh, man, what we really need to focus on is Z!
Dev: Alright, we can do that if we de-emphasize X and Y. Let's get Z done!

End of quarter - Management: You didn't meet any any of your OKRs other than
Z! Dev: ...but you told me to drop X and Y...

Honestly, I've never seen an OKR that was relevant by the end of a quarter...
We finish them or not, but the objectives are always wildly different every
few months and priorities change.

Frankly, the start-of-quarter OKR system is incredibly disheartening... None
of my major accomplishments or the primary focus of my work ever winds up
being recorded, as only the items set at the first of the quarter are
evaluated.

I've worked at other places (outside of tech) where the emphasis was on
recording what you worked on and why at the _end_ of the quarter. In my
experience, it's smoother for everyone. I'm a bit surprised at the focus on
quarterly, pre-set OKRs in tech... It seems like a more adaptive process would
be better for everyone.

~~~
superfrank
> Honestly, I've never seen an OKR that was relevant by the end of a
> quarter... We finish them or not, but the objectives are always wildly
> different every few months and priorities change.

I think there are two types of priorities, "fires" and "nice to haves".

Fires are high priority, unpredictable, and often need to be solved quickly.
This is things like "our databases crash every morning" or "our AWS bill is
too high and going to put us out of business".

Nice to haves can still be needed, but they tend to take a back seat when a
fire happens. Additionally, their priority tends to be much more subjective.
This is things like "Our build process takes too long" or "our deploy process
has too many manual step which leads to human error".

OKRs tend not to last a full quarter because any tasks/priorities that you can
schedule and make fit nicely into a 3 month period are "nice to have"s. I'm
not saying they don't matter, but the timeline to get them done doesn't really
matter so things get delayed or moved around.

On the flip side, you can't schedule fires and you usually can't delay them
either. The things that actually important enough that they can't get delayed
tend not to fit the OKR framework.

------
Justsignedup
As an engineer OKRs are a bit of a conflicting thing, and here's the
reasons...

\- I don't decide what projects come my way. Product or management decides
that.

\- My concerns are: "Is the company going to be around for > 6 months?"
because if the answer is yes than my concerns are "In 6 months, make sure we
don't hit a wall that will be a stop all development situation". I've seen it.

\- OKRs are always going to be goals of the company. My question will always
be: What can eng do to actually affect these OKRs? Are customers leaving due
to bugs? Eng will prioritize bugs. Are customers leaving due to lack of
features? Eng will build features. Is the company about to run out of money?
Eng needs to build as much and as fast as possible and ignore any long-term
problems because we need to get customers.

Basically either department heads need to take the current OKRs and transform
them into department specific OKRs or they become meaningless. There needs to
be engineering OKRs around things that engineering can affect. Not product
OKRs which product will affect. Not sales OKRs which sales affects.

Example of a product OKR:

\- increase customer conversion rates by 0.5% every 2 weeks for the next 2
months.

Example of an engineering OKR:

\- enable product to A/B test

\- enable product to measure more data points to make decisions to reach their
OKRs

------
codingdave
I've only seen this in large companies, not startups or software shops, but it
was never a single layer of OKRs. It was a set at each management level.

The CEO would define the top-level OKRs. Their direct reports would ask
themselves, "How can I contribute?", and build a more detail set of their
organizations OKRs, that rolled up to support the CEOs. Every layer of
management down the chain did the same. And the individual contributors set
personal goals that supported their direct manager's OKRs.

No system is perfect, and this one had its annoyances. But it did tie
everything from personal goals all the way up to the top-level corporate
goals, which resolves many of the concerns from the article.

~~~
loteck
The trick here is: what happens if the CEO is unwilling to pin herself down to
specific goals, for any reason, but especially because she has no goals or is
afraid to be seen failing those goals?

Either leadership doesnt engage with OKRs, tasks are deliberately
misinterpreted as goals, or unmeasurable goals are set. The rest of the
company's OKRs then follow this example, and everyone suffers.

~~~
codingdave
In such a case, you have bigger problems than OKRs.

------
kradroy
We started using OKRs this past year. I can't tell you what our current OKRs
are. We even create "sub-OKRs" that align with the higher level OKRs. It feels
like a pointless exercise, because we do what the author describes: slap
labels on items in our backlog that sorta-kinda relate to an OKR.

The author's suggestions aren't terribly complete or practical. I don't know
many teams who could just dump their backlog every quarter. You're going to
have work that can't be related to OKRs. We do use the OKRs to drive our
weekly meetings and sprint planning.

One suggestion I have is just to accept all work isn't OKR related and reserve
capacity for that work. If some PM or manager complains, push back.

~~~
baxtr
This is exactly what we do. We reserve about 25% of every team's capacity for
"other" stuff, e.g. maintenance. The PMs/leaders have to acknowledge for that
when they compile their OKRs.

~~~
Terretta
This just means someone somewhere has an unstated objective that things be
maintained. Make them write it down, and then your 25% capacity supports that.

~~~
baxtr
The O is clear. What’s the KR for you? (Driving a KPI from one number of
another)

------
dpcx
We've been doing OKRs at my employer for a while. It's always really difficult
for the development team to come up with ideas because we know that there's a
higher than average chance that we'll get pulled to work on something that's
unrelated to the OKRs we've come up with; and while everyone says we're not
being judged on our OKRs, _someone_ is keeping track, otherwise they're not
really useful.

I'll be reading and re-reading this article for a while.

~~~
cdeonier
I work at at company that does OKRs as well. I think I've viewed both the
symptoms you described and the common pattern described in the article of
fitting an existing backlog to OKRs.

I think one observation that I have is that OKRs are really a framework to
help teams understand what direction/goal to head to and understand progress
toward that goal. And really, this mindset needs to be adopted not just by the
development teams-- it needs rigor and consistency from leadership as well.

For example, the leaders are accountable for setting direction and describing
what they think is important. If they then start asking you for things that
aren't tied with an OKR, it's a perfectly fair question to ask leadership "Why
are you asking me to work on this when you indicated it's not important to our
company strategy?" If the team feels like they're going to be working on
something unrelated to their OKRs, that's symptomatic of leadership not
sending a consistent message on strategy or prioritization.

I've also seen it from the other side as described in the article. I've seen
development teams really struggle to initially understand OKRs and the value.
As mentioned earlier, it's really designed to help clarify direction and
progress-- if a team is ignoring the OKR and fitting their backlog, that's
symptomatic that they're really not trying to understand the direction
leadership wants to head.

What I like about the author's suggestion is that it really forces the team to
understand the problem the organization is trying to solve and think up
solutions how to achieve it. Backlog bankruptcy is one way to do it, though
there are likely some items that can still solve the problems outlined in the
OKR. Those items just shouldn't automatically be transferred over without
verifying they solve a problem that needs to be solved.

Teams shouldn't be fitting problems to work-- teams should be fitting work to
problems.

------
Apreche
I write software that is used entirely internally by the company. We are
building something completely new from scratch that is not yet live. OKRs were
recently introduced at our company. The only OKR I can even think of is "get
this thing functioning and in production". Just a boolean. I wanted to come up
with something measurable, but what is there to measure?

I don't understand how OKRs are appropriate for employees without the power to
make business decisions. My only goals are to come into work, do what is
expected of me, get paid, not get fired, and go home. I do not have power to
decide anything with quantifiable results. If I did, writing OKRs and working
towards them would be extremely easy.

If I did have any power to make business decisions one of the first things I
would do is make any employee without any power exempt from having to even
think about stupid OKRs.

~~~
alexhutcheson
Break it down into milestones. What's the minimum piece you could complete
that would be usable by someone (even just a beta user to gather feedback)?
What's the next incremental piece that would be useful after that?

You can measure milestones completed, and you can also apply some type of
scoring to the feedback you collect from your beta users. If your beta user
feedback is "This is terrible, it doesn't do the key thing we need to do for
our jobs!", that's actually a great outcome, because you can course-correct
early, rather than having to revisit 1+ years of eng work to address the
feedback.

> My only goals are to come into work, do what is expected of me, get paid,
> not get fired, and go home.

OKRs should just be the process of you writing down "what is expected of me"
in a somewhat structured and measurable way. Team OKRs of "Hit milestones #1,
#2, and #3 in development roadmap of system X" are fine, and are pretty common
for greenfield projects. The main key is to have a "definition of done" for
each milestone - does the milestone include documentation? Monitoring? Who
decides that work is complete?

------
ltc5505
Would it kill people to expand the acronym on first use?

For example: "Most of the companies I’ve worked for in the last 5 years have
used the objectives and keys results (OKR) system."

I'm not sure why this common practice in text is seemingly disappearing on the
web.

~~~
asark
There's even a tag for it. Not that anyone cares about what HTML can do
anymore.

------
kenhwang
My company has been using OKRs for several years now and the author perfectly
describes what the engineering team does. We scan through our backlog, slap
some nice OKR tags on items that are vaguely relevant, and then ignore the
OKRs until the next quarter. The more politically savvy members of the team
then spin some BS to make everyone buy that the work engineering is doing
actually supports the OKRs.

My personal opinions of OKRs are that it's possibly the most cumbersome form
of waterfall without many of the few benefits of waterfall. It's really a tool
for making leadership feel good about being bad at their job.

~~~
astral303
I agree. OKRs are renamed MBOs. This is extrinsic motivation and a giant waste
of time. At best, it’s a process-heavy priorities setting/strategizing
mechanism. At worst, it causes unnecessary employee anxiety and distraction
away from current business needs.

Any measurement that is a metric (goals in OKRs) will cease being a metric. It
will be gamed.

~~~
Terretta
MBO and OKRs are not (supposed to be) the same methodology. Their proponents
decades back were of opposing views on how to manage.

------
residentfoam
OKRs _could_ drive some value BUT in my experience they are hard to maintain
and update. Most companies keep their OKRs in huge spreadsheets, some even
have dedicated people to maintain that insanity.

Teams then work with different tools, e.g: Marketing use Trello, Eng use Jira,
you name it and now you have to trace back tasks from different tools to some
OKRs defined somewhere in the cloud ... good luck with that.

It's nearly impossible to measure and reconcile progress made on team/sprint
basis with OKRs therefore you just shovel random numbers in the spreadsheet
and management is happy.

When an OKRs is updated good luck cascading the changes bottom <=> up .

I have yet to find a company that has implemented OKRs in an effective way.

Most of the time managers themselves tell you : "just write something .. it
does not really matter" hahahah and there you go ... At the end of the day
people have to do OKRs but they keep asking themselves ... why ?

~~~
tadasv
Shameless plug, but check out my tool for managing OKRs outside of
spreadsheets if this is something you're looking for
[https://simpleokr.com](https://simpleokr.com)

~~~
fivre
Do you have a companion tool whose purpose is to convince Excel devotees that
modern, domain-specific tooling exists, and that they should stop pushing
Excel because it's terrible for many tasks?

My problem is less that no tools exist to manage things outside of
spreadsheets, but more that older management tends to take the position of
"Jira (or whatever) is complicated and I already know Excel, and I'm in charge
so we're using whatever doesn't require me to learn something new".

~~~
marcinzm
The problem with domain specific tools for project management is that everyone
has slightly different goal, priorities and requirements. So you end up with a
mess of a tool that barely works (Jira) or one that's missing necessary
features. Then someone decides they could do it faster and better in Excel.

------
jph
OKRs are excellent-- I manage a repo about OKRs where you can see examples and
contribute ides. The article author is exactly right: use OKRs to drive your
weekly team meetings.

[https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/objectives_and_key_re...](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/objectives_and_key_results)

~~~
hrktb
From the Google examples:

> a team is encouraged to set as goals about 50% more tasks than they are
> likely to actually accomplish.

> If a team scores significantly higher than that, they are encouraged to set
> more ambitious OKRs for the next quarter.

I lived through this in Scrum sprints. There is a baked in incentive to
sacrifice some iterations every once in a while to ajust the average
expectation, while keeping an overall positive look.

Otherwise without having used it seems to me that OKRs are another rather
plain tool that works for clever organisations but fails when applied dumbly.
Is there anything specific to it that makes worst case scenarii better ?

------
maxxxxx
Seems this tends to go exactly the way Scrum and Agile did. If done correctly
by the whole company it works well. But in most cases it will probably be a
mandate by top management and the rest has to come up with some nonsense
metrics and objectives and just play a game.

I think more and more any methodology will work if followed honestly and
adapted to real world problems. In the end it's always the disconnect between
what an organization claims to do vs what it really does. If that disconnect
is small things are good, but in a lot of cases the disconnect is big.

------
msoad
Metric-obsessed management systems often miss on quality.

~~~
maxxxxx
Or they invent a lot of bullshit metrics because in reality a lot of work is
very hard to quantify.

~~~
asark
The one place I worked that tried to do this, the developers mostly ended up
doing things easy to measure. Turns out it's super-easy to measure views and
shares so content marketing it is! Not exactly a good use of our particular
abilities but it seemed to make everyone (who was pushing the OKRs) happy. Our
real work could rarely be connected to any kind of OKR. Too hard to measure
and, "this OKR thing seems cool, we should gather data for at least 2 years on
X, Y, and Z for a baseline averaged across projects so we can create OKRs to
improve them" didn't fly, obviously. So. Youtube videos and blog posts it was.

------
vinay_ys
OKRs do force you to put down your company's priorities and metrics to measure
their success. Unable to do that usually is a symptom of being too tactical
and reactive and not having a strong strategy/vision.

Company-level OKRs are only as good as your leadership team's clarity on
strategy and long-term direction and conviction to largely stay the course for
at least 3 month chunks.

If you feel your company OKRs are bad or you are unable to connect with it, it
is because your leadership team has not done the necessary homework to define
and socialize it well.

If you agree your company OKRs make sense but you are unable to connect it to
your work, think of it this way:

For a functional feature engineer, the team OKRs should clearly and directly
connect the features they are working on to the company OKRs. If not, then you
need to engage with your product managers to achieve that clarity.

For a senior platform engineer responsible for evolution of tech platforms, it
is critical to have a good sense of the direction in which business will
evolve and expand. (Annual OKRs and strategy articulations are crucial for
this). From this, you should be able to draw out a mind map of the kinds of
features and capabilities needed by your platform. Then you can articulate
this to your team to build those required enhancements to the platform while
also ensuring immediate feature building activity is moving as productively as
possible.

If you are unable to connect the dots between the business OKRs and tech
platform OKRs, it is usually a sign that there isn't a good functional model
for your business domain and your tech platform isn't really a platform that
supports that functional model. For architects, this should be the most
important deep work – to keep the functional model of the business and that of
tech platforms in sync. Without this common model, teams cannot collaborate
effectively.

------
jrochkind1
> I think it gives leadership the justification they need to declare that
> everyone is working towards the same goals, but I don’t think it leads to
> dev teams actually feeling like that’s true.

The more important thing is whether it's _actually_ true, not whether dev
teams (or leadership) _feels_ it's true, no?

But the OP indeed seems to describe an environment where it is not actually
true either.

Clearly, thought and planning is needed on how people work, in a way that will
be directed to actually addressing OKR's. The OP offers suggestions about
abandoning backlogs, and focusing weekly meetings on OKR's, which seem
possibly beneficial, but probably not sufficient. I think it probably requires
more fundamental shifts in how the whole organization works, which are a lot
harder than just publisizing OKR's.

------
vikramkr
If the items in the backlog aren't related to the OKRs, then it's possible
that they should be thrown our with the new cycle like the author says, but I
wonder if it could mean that the OKRs need to be changed in certain situations
as well. If there are things the teams value in the backlog that aren't part
of any OKRs, and the dev teams are in some sense closer to the product than
upper management, then that input should be filtered back up to be considered
by upper management since the teams "on the ground" might be seeing
information that the management doesn't have.

~~~
henrikschroder
In many companies, engineering puts out fires, prevents disasters, gets rid of
tech debt, etc. In short, engineering does a lot of maintenance that is needed
to keep the entire company afloat. If that work stops, the company will go
bust.

It's such an obvious key objective, it should be in every top-level OKR, yet
it almost never is, which means that there's nowhere the engineering
department can slot in that work. And how do you measure it?

------
m0zg
OKRs are merely a mechanism for generating public commitment to goals. You get
to have a bit of a say what those goals are, but fundamentally they're about
holding your feet to the fire after you spent a quarter bullshitting on Reddit
because nobody in the organization has a foggiest clue about what needs to be
done.

Understand OKRs for what they are, and you'll be a much happier developer.
Don't treat them too seriously, use them as a productivity mechanism _for
yourself_. Now, even if nobody knows what needs to be done, you can refer to
your (approved) OKRs and do _that_, whether it makes sense a month after the
quarter started or not.

I don't know how it is now, but at e.g. Microsoft in the 00's you'd set your
goals once a year. A month later those goals were completely irrelevant to
what actually needs to be done. And Microsoft is objectively one of the most
successful software companies in the world. Waterfall, agile, OKRs or yearly
goals, it doesn't matter. The reality is always dictated by circumstances.
What matters is that every single thing I worked on while there makes money
now, and a couple make billions a year.

------
jedberg
Man I wish I had read this seven years ago! We tried doing OKRs on my team and
it never seemed to work. We ended up just throwing it all away at the end of
the quarter and listing what we actually accomplished.

And I think it was because we were doing what the author says and shoehorning
in our backlog into the OKRs!

I was really soured on OKRs because of it. Now I want to try again doing it
“the right way”.

~~~
thinksocrates
Would love to hear if you're able to make it work by adjusting the details of
how it's carried out.

------
rocky1138
This is interesting. I wonder how much of a depressing effect throwing away
the backlog every time will have on contributions from people on the team who
have good ideas but are not super vocal, e.g. "what's the point of saying my
ideas when they'll just be thrown out next time we do planning?"

~~~
jedberg
I think the hope is that management looks at the backlog and uses that to
guide their OKR creation so that there is a meeting in the middle of the upper
level OKRs and the backlog.

------
apinstein
In our use of OKR, we was concerned about this as well. Having to use mental
gymnastics to make things work is a bad sign.

The way we thought about it was that OKR should not dictate 100% of effort.
OKR is about prioritizing the changes that leadership wants to make at the
productivity frontier of the organization. OKRs alone are not enough to direct
company efforts. Leadership also needs to specify what % of energy should be
spent on OKR vs other responsibilities. The OKR effort goal could be between
0-100 for different teams, or the company as a whole.

For instance, a company that needs to pivot or will die is probably close to
100% OKR effort on all teams.

This approach gets around the need to assign OKR to every activity and allows
OKR to be more salient and less diluted as a tool for alignment and goal
setting.

------
the-pigeon
Making decisions based off an any metric is very dangerous and the downfall of
many products.

You MUST have a deep understanding of exactly what that metric is measuring
and all of the things it doesn't take into a account.

For a concrete simple example. An A/B test may sure that forcing users to
create an account before seeing shipping charges increases order completion by
10%. But then it turns out you've reduced return visits to the site by 30% and
decreased overall conversion rates due to damaging that funnel.

Reality is very complex. Trying to boil everything down to a few numbers to
make decisions based on seems like it simplifies things but often times you
are just ignoring the complexities and flying blind by chasing metrics.

------
tmaly
I saw the creator of OKRs, Andy Grove, speak years ago out at Intel in Oregon
when I was doing an internship.

I don't recall the product development group I was in using them. Maybe they
were implemented at a much higher level in the company.

------
simplecomplex
I’m so sick of the software industry expecting developers to do the work of
the entrepreneurs for them without any of the upside.

Why the fuck should I help the owner get rich by identifying how to grow their
business by increasing conversion, retention, etc.? I don’t benefit at all.

At my current company we have weekly meetings where the owners tell us all the
business metrics we should be driving and ask for ideas on how to increase
them. I’ve learned to say “I don’t have any specific ideas right now.” because
it’s insulting they expect me to do their work and get nothing for it.

------
blazespin
OKR at an individual level work fine, but they need to be positioned as an
individual OKR.

For example, reduce bug count report by 10%. Or, increase LOC by 10% without
reducing quality (defined as bugs, DRY, PR comments), increase documentation
written by 10%, increase Slack karma by 10%, etc

Obviously other metrics other than the OKR need to be maintained.

PRoduct owner is responsible for OKRs that scope across stories implemented,
not ICs. Or at least not junior ICs. Architect level IC for example should be
able to complete more broad scope.

------
ibeckermayer
Is there no limit to the bullshit dopey “management consultants” will come up
with an acronym for? “OKR’s”? Oh, do you mean creating some objective and then
working towards it as a team? Measuring progress through some empirical
metric? You know, the same process humans have engaged in since the dawn of
our species? What a load of garbage.

------
alain94040
If you're into OKRs, a friend of mine built a tool open to all:
[https://general-internet.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/36001...](https://general-internet.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360013429514-Why-how-what-is-GI-OKR-)

Interested in feedback.

------
dijksterhuis
OKRs seem like a fancy new version of KPIs.

My single biggest issue with KPIs is that, for the most part, in a large
company, one (or even several) metric(s) cannot cover the whole story.

They are useful for _very_ specific targets.

I’ve ended up working towards KPIs which I’ve known have zero relevance to
improving service because they are (a) poorly defined (b) irrelevant to the
actual problem (c ) force a metric to exist where no sensible metric can.

Unfortunately this tended to happen more often than not.

OKRs have their place. But they don’t sound like something new (KPI rehash)
and are wide open to misuse, just like KPIs.

~~~
hj7n
Hi Dijksterhuis,

Some organizations do indeed move from KPIs to OKRs. I personally think they
are different tools for different purposes, and they could work well together.

I believe KPIs are a great tool to define and monitor your business as usual,
whereas OKRs is more about realizing your ambitions and pushing the company
further ahead.

If it helps, more info here: [https://www.perdoo.com/blog/kpis-okrs-the-goals-
that-drive-b...](https://www.perdoo.com/blog/kpis-okrs-the-goals-that-drive-
business-success/)

Best, HJ

------
LittlePeter
> Where OKRs become less useful is within the decision making process for an
> individual team.

> Joe Cannatti

Anyone else put off by the author quoting himself?

------
tzakrajs
No mention of Key Performance Indicators? Why?

~~~
Terretta
MBO and KPIs are different systems stemming from different philosophies about
how to frame objectives and how to measure what matters.

