> Start by revisiting your organization’s mission (why you exist) and vision (what you want to achieve).
This is the root of where every company I’ve worked for gets OKRs wrong. They always have some flowery statement for mission and vision and build their goals around that. However in the day to day work when decisions are made it becomes apparent that the mission is to make money and the vision is to make more money. And that’s how my OKRs always become divorced from reality, having been derived from the flowery bullshit that rolls downhill.
I've found that there's lots to be gained by splitting the difference and anchoring mission statements in money. Forget team spirit and shared purpose and whatnot; craft a sentence that says exactly how you beat the competition. It gives you a broad target to shoot for.
OKRs as the summary of a strategy conversation (not a “visioning” session) that actually happened, in the words of those who will do the work, fine. In most other scenarios I would proceed with extreme caution.
> 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.
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.
Here's the thing I learned, tying it to revenue gets the company more revenue, tying it to BS gets middle managers promoted faster. Why? Because money may not materialize while BS doesn't require anything except itself to be a success. And since your own promotion and bonus are strongly based on how much middle managers like you...
I'm not sure if you're being serious or ironic given the recent press attention about Google Search being crap to ensure that Google Ads makes more revenue.
So, yes, they definitely can game it by focusing on short term unsustainable wins and ignoring all medium and long term negative impacts. Push the AB testing games to their limits, like running the same text 5 times with minor "improvements", so that the statistical metrics no longer apply. Dark patterns that cause long term user value to drop but drives some short term revenue. And so on. Then you get the more fun ones like stealing work from other departments without giving them credit. They eat the R&D cost and you get the revenue win. A good middle manager will even spin it so it looks like their team did the R&D as well.
That said, it all works fairly well when you've got a monopoly in the area (ie: search and ads for Google) but in those cases most everything works fairly well.
I generally agree with your original comment, and I think a lot about Schmidt's quote when operating in a startup context. You're right that it's ironic in the Google context. Search should absolutely go back to being measured on retention and they should disentangle from the revenue team. And I agree that the real death of Google was in the statistical game: 95% confidence in a microscopic metric improvement still lets through serious quality degradation 5% of the time. This gets to another important point: OKRs should be _big_ or they're not worth doing.
I think revenue or any other KPIs makes sense when it's easier to drive the KPI the "right" way versus the "wrong" way. As a business grows the low hanging fruit are used up and things start to shift to the "wrong" way being significantly easier. Moreover if the culture is about driving a KPI then, like any culture, it's very hard to shift it and no one wants to eat the political cost of trying to do so. I think executives often forget that people are clever and will game any metric if it's possible. I was at a company where there was a silent agreement across the EMs to over-level engineers. The pay was below competitors at the same level and set by HR but the promotion committees were not run by HR. Every new EM that joined was horrified at first at the competencies of their engineers, but then either learned to play the game or eventually got pushed out by their ever growing enemies.
OKRs just means you write down measurable goals in a place where people can see them. The word is popular since it is obviously a good thing to do, it is something everyone should do. In school your OKRs are your classes etc, having such short term measurable goals is really good for personal productivity and alignment.
So OKRs are like unit tests, you can do them badly but it is a thing you almost always want when you do software development, unit tests aren't just a "buzzword", and neither are OKRs.
The alternative to OKR is that your manager writes down your OKRs in a hidden place where you can't see them, the only thing that changes is that now you are less informed. Ignorance is bliss, but reality will smash you anyway.
Personally I thought it was good that I could see what goals my manager had, what goals his manager had, what goals that managers manager had etc. I don't see why people are so angry at that level of transparency.
I my experience, measurable goals is a pipe dream.
It promotes menial tasks like "take a 2 day course in React". "Clean my desk twice a week" "write 10 unit tests" over "spending 100% of my time creating value for customers"
Well, I'm sorry for your experience. Now in a manager chair I have both experiences, setting bad OKRs and good OKRs. The performance and communication improvements when you get it right are astonishing. Unfortunately, I'm not consistent yet.
But when you find a manager/ place where people get it right, you'll love it.
A measurable goal can be "Deliver feature X" etc, how is that not value for customers?
But yeah OKR are usually done at higher level than individuals, I didn't write any OKRs just the people above me. In general it is something managers should do, the lowest level employees shouldn't have to.
I can agree that individuals being forced to write OKRs is a bad thing, but managers being forced to write OKRs is a good thing.
At higher level OKRs looks like "attract X more customers" or "reduce customer churn by Y%" etc, to achieve those they instruct people like you to create customer value, at your individual level such goals aren't as easy to write since they are the result of contributions from many parts.
Edit: But if you can come up with good measurable goals for you as an individual since you have enough individual freedom to do so, then yeah writing that down is good. But if you don't have any long term project and don't have control to plan what you work on then writing down an OKR is just hazing, you need to be responsible for the things your OKR measures, if you lack long term responsibilities then you shouldn't write down any OKRs.
One way to create a "measurable goal" is to focus on what you can control. In our case this meant improving the platform, far away from chaotic customers. Lo and behold, the result was down-prioritizing customer delivery.
You don't have higher level management? Those are there to organize collaboration between your teams and them giving you OKRs and setting shared OKRs is an excellent way to do that, teams setting their own OKRs to be very greedy goals to suit the teams themselves just means the higher level managers aren't doing their job.
Yeah, probably company politics. But this is also real.
What happened here was
1) that the techy guys convinced higher management that this is essential for success. (Replacing a fully functional CI/CD tool with another CI/CD tool)
2) The OKR deadline suddely got very close so instead of investigating how to do this step by step, it was decided they do it all at once without any detailed investigation how it affects all services. And without planning.
3) The customer feature teams of course did all the heavy lifting since it was their services that were affected.
4) 1.5 years later customer feature teams are still not done replacing the 150k lines of legacy CI/CD code with code for the new tool.
I agree in that case the dysfunctions stems from the other company, that is much harder to work with since you don't share the same organization so don't have a joint manager.
In that case your manager has to decide, and seems they decided to ignore the customer in this case which is probably reasonable.
Anyway, not sure why that was due to OKR. Maybe the decision was rushed due to OKR deadlines as you say, maybe it would have been rushed anyway, but at least OKR makes these problems more visible and makes it easier to work with them.
OKR in general makes it much easier for managers to do their job, and you really want your managers to do their job properly.
I agree with the sibling comment: this is just broadly dysfunctional and the presence of a something formally labeled an "OKR" is not the cause. At worst, the OKR enabled or exacerbated it.
Both in terms of taking a shortcut in the priority queue because it was easily measurable, lived on it's own right without complex dependencies and "the platform guys also need an OKR"
But also in terms of how it was handled with regards to the OKR deadline, and possibly bonuses/performance reviews connected to how well it was achieved.
Yes, it was dysfunctional, but the OKRs enabled it IMO.
A huge company like google can swallow this because this fancy CI/CD tool was what they wanted all along, and there will always be another customer/project. But for a smaller company, this kind of shift in priorities can be lethal.
> "Deliver product X" most of the time depends on so much more than my or the teams performance. Maybe it is not even a priority anymore?
Don't you have an OKR tree? If it isn't just your teams responsibility then just put it at a higher level in the org, and then the individual teams will have OKRs saying they should contribute to such efforts.
If you have too rapid pace of individual features, then an OKR can be to reduce latency when other functions need help from you to increase collaboration among teams etc, if that is a bottleneck to delivering features.
If a team you depend on often respond "we don't have time helping you, wait a week!", then that team should get an OKR to reduce that time since those delays are costing you a lot. Such delays are easily measurable so becomes excellent OKRs.
Other good OKRs could be to reduce time to review code etc, to help speed up coding iterations and make job more fun, waiting for a response isn't fun. We typically got code reviews in much less than an hour, for smaller things often within minutes, that is much better than waiting a day on it.
Edit: If your managers isn't doing these things then they are just incompetent, such an org will be dysfunctional regardless what you do, the OKR just makes that dysfunction more visible but they would work like shit regardless. OKRs really do help managers fix such organizations, as you can see from my examples above, those would really help you deliver features to customers in time.
Yes, ensuring all parts do their job effectively so that nobody gets bottlenecked is the core to organizational efficiency. And those bottlenecks and organizational dysfunctions are extremely frustrating when you try to do your job, so it is good for employee happiness as well.
Depends on the team. If your team has multiple roles then your OKR should match how much you should spend on each, ignoring an important aspect of your role in the OKRs doesn't help anyone.
I worked at a core library team at a big company, we had both OKR to improve the library and OKR to help people with issues in a reasonable amount of time. Both are important.
Anyway, in the end that isn't your decision to made, you were hired for a reason so a level or two above you should decide what is the most important here. So you disagreeing doesn't change that.
It is common for teams such as yours to prioritize the wrongs things, OKRs helps show such dysfunctions and makes it easy to fix. If you really are causing problems by deprioritizing customer requests then a higher level manager would go in and tell you to put that back on.
The challenge is how to get lots of people of varying aptitude and ambition to do things you consider useful. All the tools for that are pretty rubbish.
Say you're running an organisation if a few thousand people structured as a rough hierarchy. The goal is to move the stock price over a period of a few quarters. How should one do that?
The people who do know do it via OKR and similar, so you are basically saying that we shouldn't try other things since we don't know if those will work.
Do you have an alternative? Genuine question. We‘re also using OKRs and I’m dreading it, but it’s better than nothing. Hoping for everybody to magically on their own align with company goals doesn’t work either.
Yes. OKRs for us (a mid-size? company, 150ish people) have been a disaster. They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else. It's been a lot of "this isn't in my OKRs, why should I work on it?", making it both hard to adjust course ("why would I work on this important thing when it's not an OKR?"), and to get the teams to help each other ("why would I work on their target when I have mine?")
Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.
> They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else.
Don't you have higher level umbrella targets that everyone can contribute to? OKRs are a tree, working on targets that aren't your teams but helps the bigger picture above you is also a feature of OKRs, you aren't meant to just look at your local OKRs.
If the company need those team to help other teams, then those teams should have OKRs to help other teams. A good OKR is that they need to respond and/or fix things in X hours etc, depending on what kind of support they are expected to give.
OKR shows you the state of the current organization, if the OKR are dysfunctional the organization is dysfunctional, it would be even if you didn't see the OKRs. The fix isn't to remove the OKRs, it is to align the OKRs with what each team is really expected to do as I said above.
If the team you need help from had an OKR to help you quickly, so they focused on that, do you really believe that would be a bad thing? That is the only way to do it, such teams are slow to respond and provide help everywhere that doesn't give them OKRs to reduce latency on responses, they always have their own things to work in regardless if they are visible or not.
Such OKR also makes life easier for that team, now they get rewarded for what they are supposed to do: provide support. And, if they don't have enough people to provide that support, now they have a good case to get more resources to enable them to provide that support.
You're saying that OKRs should be SLAs, instead of hitting specific objectives? Our OKRs tend to be "release these features/fixes", not things like "hit team metrics".
Depends on the team, but yeah often time that is the most important you can work on, improving SLA metrics are excellent OKRs since they are easily measurable and are grease to the orgs cogs.
If your small company (150 is small!) has groups that need to work together but have OKRs so orthogonal that they don’t, something is seriously wrong with the OKR implementation or the culture.
That kind of “not my OKR” nonsense shouldn’t happen in a 15,000 person company, let alone a company where everyone’s OKR’s are, what, two steps from the corporate ones?
Some feedback: Telling people "that's wrong" and leaving it at that isn't very useful. These days I try to either say something constructive, or nothing at all.
While I appreciate the feedback, I also subscribe to not trying to diagnose without enough information.
I believe it is accurate and constructive to say a 150 person company with OKRs producing counter-productive outcomes is doing it wrong, at least when replying to someone who seems to believe the problem is with the OKR model.
> Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.
Aha. That’s an interesting take I never would’ve thought of. Thx…
We currently use JIRA for tracking practically everything, including objectives.
Whilst I don't really like JIRA, I think this kind of tracking of objectives, initiatives and delivered results is a good way to capture OKRs based on reality rather than mission statements.
Ah yes… the mythical MBA boogey man. I knew he’d make an appearance in the comments. :) Apologies in advance for the rant…
The irony is that OKR’s are nothing but a rehashing of Peter Drucker’s Management By Objectives (MBO)- invented in 1954 and already ignored by MBA programs by the 1970s. Management By Objective is useless until one is talking about the business unit level where folks have direct impact on profit and loss. If its not already immediately obvious what numbers are relevant to your job, there’s rarely anything to be gained by groping for them in the dark corners of a middle manager’s quarterly performance ritual.
Apologies in advance to who(m)ever posted this article or may have found it useful since I’m not trying to be a dick here… but… at least to this idiot… the article is a list of maudlin management cliches actually far more tired than even OKR’s or MBO.
As far as OKR’s, personally I find them a management charade at best, and destructive prob more often than not. Having wonderfully aligned goals and objectives is a good thing. But goals and objectives that aren’t wonderfully aligned? Not so much. Especially around self-driven folks- who most likely do the right thing in the absence of goals. And they’re especially bad if at all tied to compensation or promotion.
The fact that many in the tech world have both trotted out this old, tired, and often destructive technique; and then pinned the blame on the mythical MBA; is so rich with irony that I prob shouldn’t have bothered to even open my mouth on the topic.
p.s. Are MBA’s throwing around Scrum buzzwords these days? Man, we need to police our own… lol.
> Apologies in advance to who(m)ever posted this article
FYI, and this is just a tangentially related grammar remark, but "whomever" wouldn't be correct here, because the phrase "whoever posted this article" has the person in subject position here, even though the whole phrase is used in an object position (i.e "apologies to [whoever posted this article]"). You can think of it like "whoever" replaces something like "the person who," and "the person whom posted this article" sounds more obviously incorrect.
You could use "whomever" if it were something like "whomever your friend met," as the subject is "your friend" in that case, and "whomever" refers to an object. The equivalent noun phrase would be "the person whom your friend met."
Of course, most people just don't say "whom" ever, so it barely matters anyway.
I think it’s for the desire to have measurable outcomes that are non-binary. So they can be put into a dial, etc on an executives dashboard. And be managed so that decisions can be made and tested to see how they affect the metric, etc.
The Objective part of OKR is the goal I guess you could say. The KR part are the measurable tactics used to achieve the goal.
Last year, I had a personal OKR to take a course on OKRs (yes a little bit meta). I was surprised to learn that the instructor suggested less emphasis on measurability. The reason being, that if one only focuses on measurable things a lot can be missed.
Did the instructor recommend having mutually exclusive or at least opposing KRs? I wonder if a mandate to define some of them like that would help with Goodheart’s law.
In most places OKR, SMART, etc, just pops up around performance-review time. During other times the ACTUAL goals and priorities drift and rearrange like deck chairs on the titanic. As long as one can finagle the rhetoric to make it seem like there was a coherent narrative where one has done the things they wrote down they were going to do last year-- nobody cares.
But really, now there's "pre-work" for setting OKR's? Like it's not enough busy work already to just devise them.
All metrics like this either immediately or eventually become targets to be gamed [0].
If you’re part of the execution apparatus you’re just caught in the crossfire in trying to make some old fart’s powerpoint presentation green when showing it to other directors.
Only if you reward people based on completion. IF you just use them to communicate goals I don't see why they would be bad. When I worked we did OKR but nobody talked about them and it wasn't a big deal whether they succeeded or not, it was just a place to put goals, just like a bug tracker.
If you have a place where you write down goals you are basically doing OKRs, it is good to do in general.
> Only if you reward people based on completion. IF you just use them to communicate goals I don't see why they would be bad.
I concur. But I personally have never seen that happen. Not to mention, instituting it organizationally means you don’t have much idea how it’s being applied elsewhere in the org.
That’s like saying communism works because all you have to do is distribute the wealth equally right?
It may look good on paper but in practice it always becomes a target and it’s considered a failure if you miss one. If it doesn’t work in practice the theory is wrong.
OKRs are done right in tons of places, just that when they are done right people don't notice them much because they aren't meant to be a thing you notice much. Its first and foremost a thing managers should be engaged with since it helps them organize with each other, individual employees should barely be aware OKRs are even a thing at the company.
Having not worked in a large corporate environment in a couple of years now, and thus having not seen every type of meeting and organizational process under the sun prefixed with "pre" in quite a while, this title gave me a bit of a flashback to that time.
I'd forgotten how emblematic "pre"-prefixed meetings are of larger organizations that have meetings to plan for other meetings, e.g. "Pre-planning", "Pre-OKR brainstorm".
Seeing pre-meetings always reminds me of a scene in Office Space where "The Bobs" are seen [1.] in front of a whiteboard that clearly reads "Planning to Plan". It's a subtle visual of the movie's central theme of poking fun at corporate culture.
It's been a real treat being in an environment where we don't plan to plan, or have such a vague concept of our meetings that they're best described as a "syncs".
Being the guy who starts using OKRs even if you claim it's not for reducing head count is not a way to become popular.
Measure these things quietly. Keep a positive attitude with employees, but imo making sure employees feel value and aren't under surveillance is a better path to ironically actually improving OKRs.
I think this is only hard for poorly informed KRs. If something has risen to your top hypothesis for what's holding your Objective back, just look at the signal that made you honestly believe this. Customers keep telling you the product is painful to use? You can rely on the same communication channel to discover when it's fun and guardrail that it hasn't also lost utility. If teams deliver their KRs but don't move the Objective then the problem isn't with the KR delivery.
What about this scenario: two teams, rnd and delivery team. Rnd has an okr to make the projects easier to deliver. How do you objectively measure that, as one team does not completely control the result.
Start by answering why projects need to be easier to deliver. Of course they should be, but the nuance of the answer is the thing you measure. You see something that indicates that they're "too slow." What impact would you see on the R&D team if the delivery team did better? Go back to why you have a delivery team at all.
Or you can ask in the reverse: when would you stop wanting to invest in delivery beyond maintenance? What does "good enough" look like?
OKRs are a management fad and a performance review bludgeon. They don't improve performance or alignment. The best pre-work you can do on OKRs is to not do them.
Startups dont need OKRs for either performance or alignment and later stage companies that implement OKRs are in the beginning phase of stagnation and descent.
How do you propose companies approach goals setting?
Surely there has to be some way for a company to communicate to employees “Our goal is to grow 30%” and we will do this focusing marketing on a rebranding, focusing sales team on shifting to outbound sales model, product will build features x, y, z, etc…
Very simplistic example but companies need some way to flow goals down to smaller groups of people down the chain, don’t they?
In the same way that you can take a simple idea like iterative and responsive planning and turn it into a management monstrosity like agile, so too can simple goal setting and alignment be turned into the management and performance review monstrosity that is OKR.
My charitable view is, they can serve as an error correction function in a product led org. I.e., product and sales people don't care about the internals, just feature, feature feature. Over time this increases entropy. OKRs can be used to make time to address entropy.
AKA: “Answer the question, is it good FOR THE COMPANY”. /s If you have clear vision you don’t need “OKRs” - all you need is a bug queue and weekly sync-up. Trouble is, most organizations don’t have vision.
I'm so tired of meta-work. Work that adds to the workload of already overloaded and stressed employees of a company. It feels like nonsense that everyone goes along with simply because they are all too terrified to say "no, this doesn't help me get my job done".
I find it's (the devils) idle work added by BAs and "Agile Specialists" who have no real skin in the game, but used to make them look productive, at the expense of adding meta work to everybody else's pile.
They get a nice back pat at the faux results everybody using them then has to create to pretend they're not failing them (lest they be sacked).
This is the root of where every company I’ve worked for gets OKRs wrong. They always have some flowery statement for mission and vision and build their goals around that. However in the day to day work when decisions are made it becomes apparent that the mission is to make money and the vision is to make more money. And that’s how my OKRs always become divorced from reality, having been derived from the flowery bullshit that rolls downhill.