I think the only time I've seen OKRs work correctly is when they were super specific, singular, and very short term. The team I've seen use them generally picks something that aligns closely with something leadership wants to see progress on, that isn't a multi-year project, and is easy to measure directly.
An example: Q1's goal was around tagging of AWS resources for billing. Our CBO came down with some new practices and automation around tagging and was having trouble getting traction in our BU with getting those tags in place for existing projects.
The work was tedious, but not difficult. Progress is directly measurable (X of Y resources in Z account are tagged correctly) and the measuring is easily automated into a dashboard. It has a massive benefit for automating Change Management and Billing/Budgeting bureaucracy.
I think OKRs have a place but I also think you just can't centralize them the way various big companies do. Even the "bottom-up" version just doesn't work because by the time the OKRs hit the C-Suite they're just mangled and incomprehensible. The OKR in my example never "escaped" past middle management. All the C-Suite knew was the CBO stopped whining about people not tagging their stuff.
I couldn't agree more here -- one of the biggest challenges I've faced (only rolling out OKRs to a ~50 person company, with just two layers, so nothing like Google-scale) was figuring out how to keep the different layers legible. I found the lower layer (team-facing) to be extremely useful, and the CEO-facing layer to be much more difficult.
The dream is that you can imbue each employee with a "chain of objectives" that gives their work more purpose and clarity; I read an article on SpaceX that gave a rocket engineer saying something like "SpaceX's mission is to colonize Mars. In order to do that, one requirement is to build reusable rockets. My job is to build <rocket component X> in such a way as to enable cost-effective reusability." Perhaps that was a PR stunt but you can see how an employee with broader business context will be much more effective at making tactical adjustments within their domain of responsibility.
In theory it should be possible to make some software to manage OKRs better than a spreadsheet; I looked at https://gtmhub.com/ ages ago and didn't find it too useful. Maybe there is a good option now.
An example: Q1's goal was around tagging of AWS resources for billing. Our CBO came down with some new practices and automation around tagging and was having trouble getting traction in our BU with getting those tags in place for existing projects.
The work was tedious, but not difficult. Progress is directly measurable (X of Y resources in Z account are tagged correctly) and the measuring is easily automated into a dashboard. It has a massive benefit for automating Change Management and Billing/Budgeting bureaucracy.
I think OKRs have a place but I also think you just can't centralize them the way various big companies do. Even the "bottom-up" version just doesn't work because by the time the OKRs hit the C-Suite they're just mangled and incomprehensible. The OKR in my example never "escaped" past middle management. All the C-Suite knew was the CBO stopped whining about people not tagging their stuff.