12 ms·

OKRs Aren't Going to Fix Your Communication Issues

324 points by saisrirampur 8y ago

empath75 8y ago
I have never been involved in an okr system that wasn’t an utterly pointless waste of time that no one but hr and back office people took seriously.
- dpflan 8y ago
  What was a common theme among all the systems that you think contributed to their pointlessness?
  - empath75 8y ago
    They were almost entirely unconnected with the work I was actually doing, and nobody cared them until 3 days before they were due.
    - asark 8y ago
      Similar experience. We (the devs) quickly realized we'd need a ton of time to create useful metrics for our dev teams and that we'd need a shit-load of historical data we didn't have to give them any context—lots of small- to medium-size projects of many different types, hard to reason about one based on another except with a mountain of data from all of them to treat in aggregate. And it might still just be tea-leaf reading. Probably would be, in fact. And of course we didn't have the time to do that. So we found ways to tie social media marketing stuff (views are the easiest thing to measure!) to higher-level OKRs and did that instead, usually rushing to get it done right before the deadline. It was not a good use of software developer salaries. An initiative to at least start collecting the data we needed so it might be useful in 2-3 years could have been, but some OKRized version of "start collecting data to use in OKRs 12 quarters from now" wasn't something anyone would get behind and was pretty much impossible to tie to the higher-level OKRs that were being set. Whole thing was a game to find something easy to measure that could be made to look useful, whether it was or not. It wasn't some huge disaster or anything and I can see how maybe in exactly the right organization it might work, but there's no way it was the right place for that company to spend their money.
  - patejam 8y ago
    We do quarterly OKRs. Quarterly deadlines are completely arbitrary and my actual deadlines aren't tied to the quarters. So I (and everyone around me) don't take them seriously. We take the actual deadlines seriously. The only thing OKRs seem to do is provide direction to the higher ups about what my team is up to.
    - 6nf 8y ago
      Yes so you have no actual incentive to focus on OKRs. You're doing the work required to keep the company running but the quarter's OKR goals only gets attention if you think it will help your actual job. Is that what you mean?
    - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
      I don't think anyone expects OKRs to do more than that. Direction to the higher-ups is a valuable thing, and it's not trivial to reliably get it.
- smudgymcscmudge 8y ago
  My experience is similar. We all know what work needs to be done, but instead of just doing it, we end up having to come up with how it aligns to OKRs or KPIs or whatever they’re calling them that quarter.
- caprese 8y ago
  thank you, I felt like I was in the twilight zone at the last company I worked out that used these I started working from coffee shops until they just dropped the OKR system and every manager wasting the whole company's time on it had "moved on for personal reasons" I had forgotten about this repressed nightmare, I'll remember that next time I am fawning over the hip location and catered meals
- honkycat 8y ago
  There is a lot of toxic cargo cult OKR / Agile / all other forms of management. The point of OKRs is to make sure you are actually working on relevant projects and not burning time on something nobody actually wants or needs. Happens much more than you would think. No amount of process is going to fix brain-dead management.
thinkingkong 8y ago
This is good. Ive found communicating OKRs steadily on a cadence (weekly) as well as show the team the progress towards a goal at an all hands to be effective. Its rare for someone to miss all the all hands meetings. Commms, progress, priorities, from a company down to tactical execution level are easy but require discipline.
xiphias2 8y ago
,,OKRs present a heavy-weight answer to the problem. OKRs tend to require hours and maybe even days to determine what are the right goals and metrics. '' If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is doing. John Doerr wrote the great book about OKRs to explain how important they were in setting the strategy for Intel when it went out of the memory business and focused just on processors: achieving that in 1 quarter is only possible with very clear communication. If it's not rare enough (quaterly or yearly) or not short enough (few items), it doesn't work, it's just a wish list. I have seen them working and not working (when the whole team knew that doing all the strech goals were impossible).
- jldugger 8y ago
  > If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is doing Typically, focusing the team on the strategy for the next 24 hours.
  - count 8y ago
    That sounds like leading by micromanaging...
    - mr-ron 8y ago
      Depends if the leader is in the weeds contributing or not. My experience with quarterly goals at an early startup was that it made an artifact for what was most important at that given moment. Only later we're we able to prioritize a quarter ahead
      - xiphias2 8y ago
        For a startup an example objective would be an MVP launch and a key result would be an MVP being tried out by 10 people in a coffee shop, or getting 100 views from various blog posts. Something like this would set an expectation for the whole team (sales, marketing, engineering...) for the quarter. It shouldn't be complex, but it has to be something well thought out and serious. I would get crazy if I would get a new strategy every 24 hours. The details of the execution can change, but the objective and the key results shouldn't change that often.
maerF0x0 8y ago
One issue I see... People dont actually read their email https://blog.prepp.io/news-stories/youre-not-imagining-it-your-employees-are-not-reading-your-emails https://blog.prepp.io/news-stories/youre-not-imagining-it-yo...
spydum 8y ago
Incase others like me don’t know - OKR is Objectives and Key Results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR I honestly have never seen that acronym but apparently popular from Intel management practices?
- mattnewport 8y ago
  I hate it when people use TLAs without defining them.
  - mifreewil 8y ago
    HTML has an <abbr> tag - please use it.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      That takes effort though, and people use TLAs to reduce effort.
      - tlasAsEffort 8y ago
        No, people use TLAs to increase exclusivity, and seem smarter than they are by creating artificial outsiders.
  - regulation_d 8y ago
    Isn't it great that TLA is a TLA and FLA is a TLA, but FLA is not an FLA?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - rwh86 8y ago
      TLA is actually an initialism. :/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature
ryanmarsh 8y ago
They also won’t fix leadership’s lack of vision, ability to focus, and courage.
Rapzid 8y ago
I worked at a startup for a bit that started OKRs and I found experience super enjoyable; to the point where working in a more relaxed environment(for lack of a better description) is kinda hard these days. The two things people and teams struggled the most with though, IMHO, is: A.) Coming up with a good OKR that met longer term, higher level company priorities that intersected your work. B.) Coming up with a good ORK in terms of measurable key results. It can be tough and time consuming to get the measurements in place necessary to gauge the results, or even make a case for the OKR in the first place(incidentally this is the dirty secret of SRE IMHO). We would pro-actively get data collection in place on occasion for reasons that included helping to launch and score future OKRs.
- deleted 8y ago
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- tadasv 8y ago
  True. I've worked at several companies where OKRs were implemented and I find it valuable. Everyone does them differently. People still have trouble understanding and implementing them. To address some of the pain points with OKRs I started building my own saas about a year ago https://simpleokr.com https://simpleokr.com
- honkycat 8y ago
  Agreed. There is a peace that comes with knowing what you are working on is aligned with the company, and that management has good visibility into how you are doing. And if you take your job seriously, it is really not that hard to keep up with.
- full_plate 8y ago
  > (incidentally this is the dirty secret of SRE IMHO) I think I have a hunch, but what exactly do you mean by this?
eismcc 8y ago
Despite the name and intention, in my experience, OKRs is a prime candidate for cargo culting culture into an org and using process as a proxy for actual focus on outcomes.
- deleted 8y ago
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- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I agree. That’s the only type of use of OKRs I’ve ever seen or heard of, across several jobs and big, small, young and old companies. People who get shit done do so in spite of OKRs or other formalisms like Agile. OKRs do not help orient work towards what matters, maintain accountability, alert management to schedule slippage, or unify team efforts. OKRs are cargo cult metrics for middle management to bend the ear of higher management to argue and gladhand for bonuses & promotions.
  - Jtsummers 8y ago
    When you say Agile is a formalism, you mean Agile with a big-A? Like the very formal approaches to Scrum or SAFe? Because outside of those, agile is actually the anti-formalism. It's a whole slew of tools, techniques, methods, and philosophies to choose from for your team and organization. Offices that formalize it are the same ones that'd formalize Waterfall or Vee model or Rational Unified Process or any other approach. And they'll suffer the same consequences regardless of which one they use. Offices that understand it as a toolkit can actually get value from it (AKA, those who read and internalized the initial manifesto and mostly avoided the consultancies that came out after).
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      In theory I’d agree, but in practice agile is _always_ just a source of metrics so that middle managers can create Dutch Books out of project outcomes. I read a good way of putting it once, “when everyone misuses a tool, beyond a certain point, it’s the tool’s fault.” I think this fits the realities of agile well. Separately a lot of people will look at this or that pathological issue in agile and say that’s not “real” agile, ignoring that this is just a No True Scotsman fallacy by which you’d vacuously define agile as “all good things” or something. The main pathology I’ve seen in agile (across half a dozen companies, large & small, with or without formal agile training, etc.) is that it is paradoxically highly inflexible. If certain research tasks need to be a 4-week deep dive that cannot be chopped up into separate tickets on a sprint cadence and cannot be time-boxed, there’s no way to handle it (this happens all the time on research teams). If one team needs to work on a 3-week cycle all summer instead of the company-wide 2-week cycle, it can’t be done. If there is no way to estimate some points for a certain task, you still are forced to go through the motions and fabricate misleading numbers anyway. Even the core agile manifesto has to be ignored sometimes. Sometimes sticking to the plan actually is more important than responding to change, and you have to turn down business or tell customers no even if it costs you. Agile can be used well. It’s just exceedingly rare that it is, to such a degree that we need to admit something’s wrong with agile itself given how easy it is to subvert agile into a bad system. At this point a lot of people reply by saying, well what alternative is there? I don’t like this because it presumes there has to exist some named alternative that doesn’t suffer agile’s limitations, but no such official method has to exist and that doesn’t mean agile should be used. Instead, just use some mixture of common sense and planning based on the specific personnel working on the project, their preferences and styles, and randomly stealing things from agile or waterfall or whatever else on an as-needed bases. Don’t give it a name.
vmware513 8y ago
What is OKR?
- 6nf 8y ago
  Example of a more traditional KPI (Key Performance Indicator): System downtime must be below 0.01% every quarter. Example of an OKR (Objectives and Key Results): By the end of the quarter, implement a new fast-response process to reduce issue resolution time by 25%
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Almost like KPIs are a measurement of state, and OKRs are a measure of change.
  - dilyevsky 8y ago
    At least the way google did it your first example could totally be an okr. Not every okr is some deliverable.
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    That isn’t an effective OKR. Try this: Objective: system downtime must be below .01% every quarter. KR: implement new fast-response process (binary measurement.) KR: reduce mean issue resolution time from 60 to 45 minutes (linear measurement of progress with .75 set to 15 minutes and 1.0 set to 20 minutes of reduction) In this case, your objective is likely a key result of our boss, so it makes sense that it’s the same measurement. You’re being measured on something that matters. One of your key results is purely based on effort. The other might have a bit in it that’s out of your control, but also lets you benefit from other ways you and your team find to achieve the resolution time reduction.
- deleted 8y ago
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jSully24 8y ago
Good people make any process look good. No matter how amazing the process is, without good people, you’ll fail. I like OKRs, but I benefit from being with smart people.
deleted 8y ago
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alex_young 8y ago
OKRs can be great, or they can result in releasing software that isn't ready yet (see Google's Buzz for context). My suggestion: let your team members craft goals, and help shape those goals into deliverables that help them and the company.
killjoywashere 8y ago
When I took over at my new lab, 40 FTEs, I implemented OKRs, just between my direct reports and I. It quickly became apparent who gets shit done and who doesn't. It also became apparent how overloaded some folks were. How little some understand their jobs. It helped me see what I needed to focus on and what I needed the lab to focus on. I am also in a massive, MASSIVE, organization with literally acres of people dedicated to formal communication processes. I submit that OKRs were handy because they forced formal communication that revealed problems outside the official formal methods. It's a hack. And in the realm of formal comms, it's a particularly low-friction, low-cost-of-adoption hack. 10/10 will use again.
- pishpash 8y ago
  As suspected it's useful only to the higher-ups and specifically to manage drones who need military discipline, same as scrum. If it has an acronym it's useless to functioning contributors. The original purpose has disappeared with the name.
  - xiphias2 8y ago
    Not at all. If you achieve your OKRs regularly, you can expect to get promoted. If not, you can expect not to get promoted. Being clear with it helps everybody. If you don't get promoted although you achieved most of your OKRs, you should run from that team / company.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    Everybody's acting like OKRs are this enormous heavyweight process. Why? You just write down what you're planning on doing this quarter in a prioritized list. The purpose is to broadcast your view of your priorities, so interested parties can ask that they be adjusted. At the end of the quarter you look back and review what you actually accomplished. It's really not that big of a deal. The process gets heavier at the level where OKRs are getting aggregated across multiple teams, or teams of teams, but that's a cost paid by managers, not by "drones," so I don't see why line employees should be concerned with it. FWIW I spend about four to six hours a year thinking about OKRs, and that's assuming I'm paying attention for the entire OKR team meeting (fat chance).
james305 8y ago
John Doerr's book references Intel and Google heavily to gain credibility for the OKR methodology. Can someone from either of those organizations chime in with their experience?
kochikame 8y ago
OKRs can be really great but only if they are used properly and are fully integrated into the process from top to bottom. Just relabelling old KPIs as OKRs is pointless (just, why would you do this?) Just having OKRs at a division or company level is pointless (no buy-in or engagement from regular employees)
etse 8y ago
I feel like the article misses a powerful aspect of OKRs–the ability for people to be creative, but in a cohesive manner that results in focus. I noticed that my team hardly did any of the work we planned for last quarter, but we were still able to achieve many of our key results through (different) work. In an organization where you don't have the power to influence your own work, OKRs provide more context than what will be used, so people may feel like it's a waste of time.
msluyter 8y ago
I've only experienced OKRs at one company, and I felt a sort of a weird disconnect between OKRs and actual work/performance. On the one hand, OKRs were presumably critically important, but on the other, they weren't directly tied to individual performance. I still have trouble wrapping my head around that. And I found those ratings (0, .4, .7, 1.0 for hitting a stretch goal) just a sort of weird self delusion, like setting your watch 15 minutes early to ensure you'll be on time. You can fool yourself a little, but eventually it stops working, and so, for example, .7 become the de facto "real" target. Secondarily, I found that as a team lead, to the extent that OKRs were stressed, any non-OKR related work became highly disincentivized. Refactor? Write more integration tests? Hell no, not if it doesn't directly impact OKRs. We had stories in the backlog that really should have been done because they would have helped other teams and yielded a positive return, but anything non-OKR was just dropped on the floor. Third, they didn't really provide any value to the team that I could discern. We didn't have to look at our objectives every day to know what to do. We had typical releases/epics, etc... to do, and on a day to day basis, the OKRs just receded into the background. In theory, I assume that the OKRs are there to guide which releases/epics/stories, etc... you do, but in our case, we had a pretty clearly defined product already prior to introduction of OKRs. So the OKRs were all just sorta "OK, finish this thing we're already working on." That said, the company was new to them and in the process of learning. Perhaps we did them wrong, or perhaps I missed the point.
- jpm_sd 8y ago
  In my experience, OKRs should be set, in part, by negotiation with the other teams who are interdependent with your own.
  - hrktb 8y ago
    It still can become tricky as each team's OKR doesn't have the same weight. It's not unusual that a team holds a requirement for several other teams, but that requirement is not as valued for them as their team mission. Negotiations are done assuming they accomplish everything planned, but of course in practice it doesn't go that way.
- sockgrant 8y ago
jpm_sd 8y ago
One way in which I've seen OKRs used effectively is as a defense against the type of middle or upper manager who is constantly coming up with new ideas or tasks. But what if we did $shiny_thing!? Sorry, that's not in our OKRs this quarter, let's have a meeting to plan for next quarter.
- 1123581321 8y ago
  It acts as a defense in both directions, too, since the manager’s boss will want the manager to stick to objectives that fit with the manager’s boss’ OKRs.
bitL 8y ago
OKR and other management frameworks work well in environments that would perform well even without them (self-organizing, enthusiastic, competent, non-threating and driven employees). Having just the structure in place wouldn't guarantee much. Google's success using OKRs was a side effect of their past employee composition and the fact it got least in the way of them to do great things.
omeid2 8y ago
What is an OKR? Whatever it is, clearly didn't help the author to communicate clearly. ;)
honkycat 8y ago
People moan on and on about OKRs, but I am a developer and I honestly like them. Personally: I do not resent that management wants to know what I am up to. And it is helpful for me to be working on projects in such a way that I understand their greater context.
greatlakes 8y ago
We just got done with trying OKRs for a quarter at my company. It was overall a really positive experience. We had a small team of people working to push out a new product. At the beginning of the quarter, we defined what success looked like for that new product and came up with the key indicators for it. As a developer, it was really fulfilling to take time to really think through what it would take to build out a truly quality product. I spent a lot more time thinking through the things I normally wouldn't put much effort into. We built tools to help our support team understand the new product. We put together documentation. We took time to think about how to train the company on the new product. We wrote automated tests to make sure that we could sell the new product as a stable solution. Everything was focused on our overall objective to deliver a quality product. Our team had people from development, marketing, sales, product, and quality assurance. It was great to see a cross-department team unified to get something amazing done. Just adding a data point that there are ways to make it work well.
dboreham 8y ago
One way to think about this stuff is to ask : "Do lawyers and accountants and doctors and playwrights and mathematicians have these kind of schemes?". Answer: probably not. They're handy for some jobs but not others. FWIW this kind of oddness has been going on since I entered the workforce in 1986. BS5750, ISO9001, TQM, KPI, and on. Part of the landscape and not really worth getting too excited about.
- eismcc 8y ago
  Good point. Thinking about this more, I’m wondering if OKRs are just s byproduct of abstraction. Management needs to feel like they have a way to have “traction” on things they don’t actually have any real understanding of - eg the code. Similar to how devs think java is what the processor actually does.
Simple_Guy 8y ago
Here's a step to fix your communication issue. Don't assume people know what OKR is, and explain it briefly at the start of your article about OKRs.
pst 8y ago
OKRs aren't supposed to fix communication. They are supposed to guide your team to make day to day decisions that support the agreed goal.
erikstarck 8y ago
"OKRs tend to require hours and maybe even days to determine what are the right goals and metrics." The author implies that this is wasted time. It is not. Figuring out why you do what you do and how you measure the success of that in a way that leads you to the right result IS hard but extremely valuable work. It forces you to deeply understand the problem you're solving and the challenges you face.
jondubois 8y ago
It's strange because the company I work for just started implementing OKRs last week. It actually happens creepily often when I do something and then some related article pops up on HN a some weeks later. I do read HN everyday though but still. I guess it shows that we severely lack creativity and are all being manipulated. Personally I don't think OKRs add any value because they force us to focus on measurable results at the expense of unmeasurable results which might actually be more important.
- layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
  >It actually happens creepily often when I do something and then some related article pops up on HN a some weeks later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effect
2betafactor 8y ago
True that!
2betafactor 8y ago
true that!
idcrosby 8y ago
The point he makes is that OKRs (alone) aren't going to save you. The same way any technology or trend (Scrum, Docker, latest JS library...) isn't going to fix your problems. You must change your process/culture along with it. We took on OKRs a while back, and have created a process around it - https://info.container-solutions.com/hermes-container-solutions-strategic-execution-toolkit https://info.container-solutions.com/hermes-container-soluti... (Apologies for the gated content)
minipci1321 8y ago
Using email efficiently requires training and discipline, being able to: -- at a quick glance, quickly "triage" big lists of unread messages, not be put off by several hundreds messages and grab the phone -- reply shortly and to the point (being native to the culture and language helps but is not a given anymore) -- master art of attracting attention of very busy people of various kinds, to get them open at least the email and read some -- not to turn email into slack in disguise, check if the question already has answer available somewhere else, and not become nervous if the other side doesn't reply in a second -- master email client sufficiently to configure pre-sorting messages, and trust it's action I'd say environment where email works as a reliable channel for top-importance communication (such as goals and prios), probably already doesn't need OKRs.
bigbadgoose 8y ago
I like having a static quarterly document, in a super easy to access place. It must be one page max and lay out the "theme" of the quarter and supporting initiatives. Every team weekly summary email has a link to this document in the footer. Tracker — or whatever you use — has epics et al aligned with this document.
xena 8y ago
OKRs were always waved around as some magic secret sauce that's going to revolutionize the free puppy distribution market. In practice they ended up just being another reason why directors would bother us about the "error burn rate" of services that only have errors when the upstream services they rely on are having issues; with no way to programmatically remove that from the "error burn rate". I hope this helped management discover how much the systems of that job all rely on eachother.
jordanpg 8y ago
Goals are great, sure. And yes these are just goals with lots of wrapping. But I am tired of having the latest management book wisdom foisted upon me by product and management. Why do engineers always need to be dragged into this stuff? Why can't they be content to have their endless meetings and share their "decks" alone? As Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying about religion: "just leave me out of it." /rant
acdha 8y ago
Jacob Kaplan-Moss had some practical advice in response to this post which I found interesting: https://jacobian.org/2019/apr/1/talk-about-performance/ https://jacobian.org/2019/apr/1/talk-about-performance/
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
THE FIRST MENTION OF AN ACRONYM SHOULD DEFINE WHAT THE FUCK THE ACRONYM STANDS FOR.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xtat 8y ago
In my experience OKRs are the latest fashion of BigCo MBA bullshit -- same thing with a new name and with equally bullshit results.

324 points by saisrirampur 8y ago

I have never been involved in an okr system that wasn’t an utterly pointless waste of time that no one but hr and back office people took seriously.

dpflan 8y ago
What was a common theme among all the systems that you think contributed to their pointlessness?
- empath75 8y ago
  They were almost entirely unconnected with the work I was actually doing, and nobody cared them until 3 days before they were due.
  - asark 8y ago
    Similar experience. We (the devs) quickly realized we'd need a ton of time to create useful metrics for our dev teams and that we'd need a shit-load of historical data we didn't have to give them any context—lots of small- to medium-size projects of many different types, hard to reason about one based on another except with a mountain of data from all of them to treat in aggregate. And it might still just be tea-leaf reading. Probably would be, in fact. And of course we didn't have the time to do that. So we found ways to tie social media marketing stuff (views are the easiest thing to measure!) to higher-level OKRs and did that instead, usually rushing to get it done right before the deadline. It was not a good use of software developer salaries. An initiative to at least start collecting the data we needed so it might be useful in 2-3 years could have been, but some OKRized version of "start collecting data to use in OKRs 12 quarters from now" wasn't something anyone would get behind and was pretty much impossible to tie to the higher-level OKRs that were being set. Whole thing was a game to find something easy to measure that could be made to look useful, whether it was or not. It wasn't some huge disaster or anything and I can see how maybe in exactly the right organization it might work, but there's no way it was the right place for that company to spend their money.
- patejam 8y ago
  We do quarterly OKRs. Quarterly deadlines are completely arbitrary and my actual deadlines aren't tied to the quarters. So I (and everyone around me) don't take them seriously. We take the actual deadlines seriously. The only thing OKRs seem to do is provide direction to the higher ups about what my team is up to.
  - 6nf 8y ago
    Yes so you have no actual incentive to focus on OKRs. You're doing the work required to keep the company running but the quarter's OKR goals only gets attention if you think it will help your actual job. Is that what you mean?
  - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
    I don't think anyone expects OKRs to do more than that. Direction to the higher-ups is a valuable thing, and it's not trivial to reliably get it.
smudgymcscmudge 8y ago
My experience is similar. We all know what work needs to be done, but instead of just doing it, we end up having to come up with how it aligns to OKRs or KPIs or whatever they’re calling them that quarter.
caprese 8y ago
thank you, I felt like I was in the twilight zone at the last company I worked out that used these I started working from coffee shops until they just dropped the OKR system and every manager wasting the whole company's time on it had "moved on for personal reasons" I had forgotten about this repressed nightmare, I'll remember that next time I am fawning over the hip location and catered meals
honkycat 8y ago
There is a lot of toxic cargo cult OKR / Agile / all other forms of management. The point of OKRs is to make sure you are actually working on relevant projects and not burning time on something nobody actually wants or needs. Happens much more than you would think. No amount of process is going to fix brain-dead management.

thinkingkong 8y ago

This is good. Ive found communicating OKRs steadily on a cadence (weekly) as well as show the team the progress towards a goal at an all hands to be effective. Its rare for someone to miss all the all hands meetings. Commms, progress, priorities, from a company down to tactical execution level are easy but require discipline.

xiphias2 8y ago

,,OKRs present a heavy-weight answer to the problem. OKRs tend to require hours and maybe even days to determine what are the right goals and metrics. '' If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is doing. John Doerr wrote the great book about OKRs to explain how important they were in setting the strategy for Intel when it went out of the memory business and focused just on processors: achieving that in 1 quarter is only possible with very clear communication. If it's not rare enough (quaterly or yearly) or not short enough (few items), it doesn't work, it's just a wish list. I have seen them working and not working (when the whole team knew that doing all the strech goals were impossible).

jldugger 8y ago
> If a team leader doesn't have a few days to decide on the strategy for the team for the next quarter, I have no idea what more important thing she is doing Typically, focusing the team on the strategy for the next 24 hours.
- count 8y ago
  That sounds like leading by micromanaging...
  - mr-ron 8y ago
    Depends if the leader is in the weeds contributing or not. My experience with quarterly goals at an early startup was that it made an artifact for what was most important at that given moment. Only later we're we able to prioritize a quarter ahead
    - xiphias2 8y ago
      For a startup an example objective would be an MVP launch and a key result would be an MVP being tried out by 10 people in a coffee shop, or getting 100 views from various blog posts. Something like this would set an expectation for the whole team (sales, marketing, engineering...) for the quarter. It shouldn't be complex, but it has to be something well thought out and serious. I would get crazy if I would get a new strategy every 24 hours. The details of the execution can change, but the objective and the key results shouldn't change that often.

maerF0x0 8y ago

One issue I see... People dont actually read their email https://blog.prepp.io/news-stories/youre-not-imagining-it-your-employees-are-not-reading-your-emails https://blog.prepp.io/news-stories/youre-not-imagining-it-yo...

spydum 8y ago

Incase others like me don’t know - OKR is Objectives and Key Results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR I honestly have never seen that acronym but apparently popular from Intel management practices?

mattnewport 8y ago
I hate it when people use TLAs without defining them.
- mifreewil 8y ago
  HTML has an <abbr> tag - please use it.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    That takes effort though, and people use TLAs to reduce effort.
    - tlasAsEffort 8y ago
      No, people use TLAs to increase exclusivity, and seem smarter than they are by creating artificial outsiders.
- regulation_d 8y ago
  Isn't it great that TLA is a TLA and FLA is a TLA, but FLA is not an FLA?
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - rwh86 8y ago
    TLA is actually an initialism. :/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature

ryanmarsh 8y ago

They also won’t fix leadership’s lack of vision, ability to focus, and courage.

Rapzid 8y ago

I worked at a startup for a bit that started OKRs and I found experience super enjoyable; to the point where working in a more relaxed environment(for lack of a better description) is kinda hard these days. The two things people and teams struggled the most with though, IMHO, is: A.) Coming up with a good OKR that met longer term, higher level company priorities that intersected your work. B.) Coming up with a good ORK in terms of measurable key results. It can be tough and time consuming to get the measurements in place necessary to gauge the results, or even make a case for the OKR in the first place(incidentally this is the dirty secret of SRE IMHO). We would pro-actively get data collection in place on occasion for reasons that included helping to launch and score future OKRs.

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tadasv 8y ago
True. I've worked at several companies where OKRs were implemented and I find it valuable. Everyone does them differently. People still have trouble understanding and implementing them. To address some of the pain points with OKRs I started building my own saas about a year ago https://simpleokr.com https://simpleokr.com
honkycat 8y ago
Agreed. There is a peace that comes with knowing what you are working on is aligned with the company, and that management has good visibility into how you are doing. And if you take your job seriously, it is really not that hard to keep up with.
full_plate 8y ago
> (incidentally this is the dirty secret of SRE IMHO) I think I have a hunch, but what exactly do you mean by this?

eismcc 8y ago

Despite the name and intention, in my experience, OKRs is a prime candidate for cargo culting culture into an org and using process as a proxy for actual focus on outcomes.

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mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I agree. That’s the only type of use of OKRs I’ve ever seen or heard of, across several jobs and big, small, young and old companies. People who get shit done do so in spite of OKRs or other formalisms like Agile. OKRs do not help orient work towards what matters, maintain accountability, alert management to schedule slippage, or unify team efforts. OKRs are cargo cult metrics for middle management to bend the ear of higher management to argue and gladhand for bonuses & promotions.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  When you say Agile is a formalism, you mean Agile with a big-A? Like the very formal approaches to Scrum or SAFe? Because outside of those, agile is actually the anti-formalism. It's a whole slew of tools, techniques, methods, and philosophies to choose from for your team and organization. Offices that formalize it are the same ones that'd formalize Waterfall or Vee model or Rational Unified Process or any other approach. And they'll suffer the same consequences regardless of which one they use. Offices that understand it as a toolkit can actually get value from it (AKA, those who read and internalized the initial manifesto and mostly avoided the consultancies that came out after).
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    In theory I’d agree, but in practice agile is _always_ just a source of metrics so that middle managers can create Dutch Books out of project outcomes. I read a good way of putting it once, “when everyone misuses a tool, beyond a certain point, it’s the tool’s fault.” I think this fits the realities of agile well. Separately a lot of people will look at this or that pathological issue in agile and say that’s not “real” agile, ignoring that this is just a No True Scotsman fallacy by which you’d vacuously define agile as “all good things” or something. The main pathology I’ve seen in agile (across half a dozen companies, large & small, with or without formal agile training, etc.) is that it is paradoxically highly inflexible. If certain research tasks need to be a 4-week deep dive that cannot be chopped up into separate tickets on a sprint cadence and cannot be time-boxed, there’s no way to handle it (this happens all the time on research teams). If one team needs to work on a 3-week cycle all summer instead of the company-wide 2-week cycle, it can’t be done. If there is no way to estimate some points for a certain task, you still are forced to go through the motions and fabricate misleading numbers anyway. Even the core agile manifesto has to be ignored sometimes. Sometimes sticking to the plan actually is more important than responding to change, and you have to turn down business or tell customers no even if it costs you. Agile can be used well. It’s just exceedingly rare that it is, to such a degree that we need to admit something’s wrong with agile itself given how easy it is to subvert agile into a bad system. At this point a lot of people reply by saying, well what alternative is there? I don’t like this because it presumes there has to exist some named alternative that doesn’t suffer agile’s limitations, but no such official method has to exist and that doesn’t mean agile should be used. Instead, just use some mixture of common sense and planning based on the specific personnel working on the project, their preferences and styles, and randomly stealing things from agile or waterfall or whatever else on an as-needed bases. Don’t give it a name.

vmware513 8y ago

What is OKR?

6nf 8y ago
Example of a more traditional KPI (Key Performance Indicator): System downtime must be below 0.01% every quarter. Example of an OKR (Objectives and Key Results): By the end of the quarter, implement a new fast-response process to reduce issue resolution time by 25%
- rhizome 8y ago
  Almost like KPIs are a measurement of state, and OKRs are a measure of change.
- dilyevsky 8y ago
  At least the way google did it your first example could totally be an okr. Not every okr is some deliverable.
- 1123581321 8y ago
  That isn’t an effective OKR. Try this: Objective: system downtime must be below .01% every quarter. KR: implement new fast-response process (binary measurement.) KR: reduce mean issue resolution time from 60 to 45 minutes (linear measurement of progress with .75 set to 15 minutes and 1.0 set to 20 minutes of reduction) In this case, your objective is likely a key result of our boss, so it makes sense that it’s the same measurement. You’re being measured on something that matters. One of your key results is purely based on effort. The other might have a bit in it that’s out of your control, but also lets you benefit from other ways you and your team find to achieve the resolution time reduction.
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jSully24 8y ago

Good people make any process look good. No matter how amazing the process is, without good people, you’ll fail. I like OKRs, but I benefit from being with smart people.

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alex_young 8y ago

OKRs can be great, or they can result in releasing software that isn't ready yet (see Google's Buzz for context). My suggestion: let your team members craft goals, and help shape those goals into deliverables that help them and the company.

killjoywashere 8y ago

When I took over at my new lab, 40 FTEs, I implemented OKRs, just between my direct reports and I. It quickly became apparent who gets shit done and who doesn't. It also became apparent how overloaded some folks were. How little some understand their jobs. It helped me see what I needed to focus on and what I needed the lab to focus on. I am also in a massive, MASSIVE, organization with literally acres of people dedicated to formal communication processes. I submit that OKRs were handy because they forced formal communication that revealed problems outside the official formal methods. It's a hack. And in the realm of formal comms, it's a particularly low-friction, low-cost-of-adoption hack. 10/10 will use again.

pishpash 8y ago
As suspected it's useful only to the higher-ups and specifically to manage drones who need military discipline, same as scrum. If it has an acronym it's useless to functioning contributors. The original purpose has disappeared with the name.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  Not at all. If you achieve your OKRs regularly, you can expect to get promoted. If not, you can expect not to get promoted. Being clear with it helps everybody. If you don't get promoted although you achieved most of your OKRs, you should run from that team / company.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  Everybody's acting like OKRs are this enormous heavyweight process. Why? You just write down what you're planning on doing this quarter in a prioritized list. The purpose is to broadcast your view of your priorities, so interested parties can ask that they be adjusted. At the end of the quarter you look back and review what you actually accomplished. It's really not that big of a deal. The process gets heavier at the level where OKRs are getting aggregated across multiple teams, or teams of teams, but that's a cost paid by managers, not by "drones," so I don't see why line employees should be concerned with it. FWIW I spend about four to six hours a year thinking about OKRs, and that's assuming I'm paying attention for the entire OKR team meeting (fat chance).

james305 8y ago

John Doerr's book references Intel and Google heavily to gain credibility for the OKR methodology. Can someone from either of those organizations chime in with their experience?

kochikame 8y ago

OKRs can be really great but only if they are used properly and are fully integrated into the process from top to bottom. Just relabelling old KPIs as OKRs is pointless (just, why would you do this?) Just having OKRs at a division or company level is pointless (no buy-in or engagement from regular employees)

etse 8y ago

I feel like the article misses a powerful aspect of OKRs–the ability for people to be creative, but in a cohesive manner that results in focus. I noticed that my team hardly did any of the work we planned for last quarter, but we were still able to achieve many of our key results through (different) work. In an organization where you don't have the power to influence your own work, OKRs provide more context than what will be used, so people may feel like it's a waste of time.

msluyter 8y ago

I've only experienced OKRs at one company, and I felt a sort of a weird disconnect between OKRs and actual work/performance. On the one hand, OKRs were presumably critically important, but on the other, they weren't directly tied to individual performance. I still have trouble wrapping my head around that. And I found those ratings (0, .4, .7, 1.0 for hitting a stretch goal) just a sort of weird self delusion, like setting your watch 15 minutes early to ensure you'll be on time. You can fool yourself a little, but eventually it stops working, and so, for example, .7 become the de facto "real" target. Secondarily, I found that as a team lead, to the extent that OKRs were stressed, any non-OKR related work became highly disincentivized. Refactor? Write more integration tests? Hell no, not if it doesn't directly impact OKRs. We had stories in the backlog that really should have been done because they would have helped other teams and yielded a positive return, but anything non-OKR was just dropped on the floor. Third, they didn't really provide any value to the team that I could discern. We didn't have to look at our objectives every day to know what to do. We had typical releases/epics, etc... to do, and on a day to day basis, the OKRs just receded into the background. In theory, I assume that the OKRs are there to guide which releases/epics/stories, etc... you do, but in our case, we had a pretty clearly defined product already prior to introduction of OKRs. So the OKRs were all just sorta "OK, finish this thing we're already working on." That said, the company was new to them and in the process of learning. Perhaps we did them wrong, or perhaps I missed the point.

jpm_sd 8y ago
In my experience, OKRs should be set, in part, by negotiation with the other teams who are interdependent with your own.
- hrktb 8y ago
  It still can become tricky as each team's OKR doesn't have the same weight. It's not unusual that a team holds a requirement for several other teams, but that requirement is not as valued for them as their team mission. Negotiations are done assuming they accomplish everything planned, but of course in practice it doesn't go that way.
sockgrant 8y ago

jpm_sd 8y ago

One way in which I've seen OKRs used effectively is as a defense against the type of middle or upper manager who is constantly coming up with new ideas or tasks. But what if we did $shiny_thing!? Sorry, that's not in our OKRs this quarter, let's have a meeting to plan for next quarter.

1123581321 8y ago
It acts as a defense in both directions, too, since the manager’s boss will want the manager to stick to objectives that fit with the manager’s boss’ OKRs.

bitL 8y ago

OKR and other management frameworks work well in environments that would perform well even without them (self-organizing, enthusiastic, competent, non-threating and driven employees). Having just the structure in place wouldn't guarantee much. Google's success using OKRs was a side effect of their past employee composition and the fact it got least in the way of them to do great things.

omeid2 8y ago

What is an OKR? Whatever it is, clearly didn't help the author to communicate clearly. ;)

honkycat 8y ago

People moan on and on about OKRs, but I am a developer and I honestly like them. Personally: I do not resent that management wants to know what I am up to. And it is helpful for me to be working on projects in such a way that I understand their greater context.

greatlakes 8y ago

We just got done with trying OKRs for a quarter at my company. It was overall a really positive experience. We had a small team of people working to push out a new product. At the beginning of the quarter, we defined what success looked like for that new product and came up with the key indicators for it. As a developer, it was really fulfilling to take time to really think through what it would take to build out a truly quality product. I spent a lot more time thinking through the things I normally wouldn't put much effort into. We built tools to help our support team understand the new product. We put together documentation. We took time to think about how to train the company on the new product. We wrote automated tests to make sure that we could sell the new product as a stable solution. Everything was focused on our overall objective to deliver a quality product. Our team had people from development, marketing, sales, product, and quality assurance. It was great to see a cross-department team unified to get something amazing done. Just adding a data point that there are ways to make it work well.

dboreham 8y ago

One way to think about this stuff is to ask : "Do lawyers and accountants and doctors and playwrights and mathematicians have these kind of schemes?". Answer: probably not. They're handy for some jobs but not others. FWIW this kind of oddness has been going on since I entered the workforce in 1986. BS5750, ISO9001, TQM, KPI, and on. Part of the landscape and not really worth getting too excited about.

eismcc 8y ago
Good point. Thinking about this more, I’m wondering if OKRs are just s byproduct of abstraction. Management needs to feel like they have a way to have “traction” on things they don’t actually have any real understanding of - eg the code. Similar to how devs think java is what the processor actually does.

Simple_Guy 8y ago

Here's a step to fix your communication issue. Don't assume people know what OKR is, and explain it briefly at the start of your article about OKRs.

pst 8y ago

OKRs aren't supposed to fix communication. They are supposed to guide your team to make day to day decisions that support the agreed goal.

erikstarck 8y ago

"OKRs tend to require hours and maybe even days to determine what are the right goals and metrics." The author implies that this is wasted time. It is not. Figuring out why you do what you do and how you measure the success of that in a way that leads you to the right result IS hard but extremely valuable work. It forces you to deeply understand the problem you're solving and the challenges you face.

jondubois 8y ago

It's strange because the company I work for just started implementing OKRs last week. It actually happens creepily often when I do something and then some related article pops up on HN a some weeks later. I do read HN everyday though but still. I guess it shows that we severely lack creativity and are all being manipulated. Personally I don't think OKRs add any value because they force us to focus on measurable results at the expense of unmeasurable results which might actually be more important.

layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
>It actually happens creepily often when I do something and then some related article pops up on HN a some weeks later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effect

2betafactor 8y ago

True that!

2betafactor 8y ago

true that!

idcrosby 8y ago

The point he makes is that OKRs (alone) aren't going to save you. The same way any technology or trend (Scrum, Docker, latest JS library...) isn't going to fix your problems. You must change your process/culture along with it. We took on OKRs a while back, and have created a process around it - https://info.container-solutions.com/hermes-container-solutions-strategic-execution-toolkit https://info.container-solutions.com/hermes-container-soluti... (Apologies for the gated content)

minipci1321 8y ago

Using email efficiently requires training and discipline, being able to: -- at a quick glance, quickly "triage" big lists of unread messages, not be put off by several hundreds messages and grab the phone -- reply shortly and to the point (being native to the culture and language helps but is not a given anymore) -- master art of attracting attention of very busy people of various kinds, to get them open at least the email and read some -- not to turn email into slack in disguise, check if the question already has answer available somewhere else, and not become nervous if the other side doesn't reply in a second -- master email client sufficiently to configure pre-sorting messages, and trust it's action I'd say environment where email works as a reliable channel for top-importance communication (such as goals and prios), probably already doesn't need OKRs.

bigbadgoose 8y ago

I like having a static quarterly document, in a super easy to access place. It must be one page max and lay out the "theme" of the quarter and supporting initiatives. Every team weekly summary email has a link to this document in the footer. Tracker — or whatever you use — has epics et al aligned with this document.

xena 8y ago

OKRs were always waved around as some magic secret sauce that's going to revolutionize the free puppy distribution market. In practice they ended up just being another reason why directors would bother us about the "error burn rate" of services that only have errors when the upstream services they rely on are having issues; with no way to programmatically remove that from the "error burn rate". I hope this helped management discover how much the systems of that job all rely on eachother.

jordanpg 8y ago

Goals are great, sure. And yes these are just goals with lots of wrapping. But I am tired of having the latest management book wisdom foisted upon me by product and management. Why do engineers always need to be dragged into this stuff? Why can't they be content to have their endless meetings and share their "decks" alone? As Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying about religion: "just leave me out of it." /rant

acdha 8y ago

Jacob Kaplan-Moss had some practical advice in response to this post which I found interesting: https://jacobian.org/2019/apr/1/talk-about-performance/ https://jacobian.org/2019/apr/1/talk-about-performance/

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

THE FIRST MENTION OF AN ACRONYM SHOULD DEFINE WHAT THE FUCK THE ACRONYM STANDS FOR.

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xtat 8y ago

In my experience OKRs are the latest fashion of BigCo MBA bullshit -- same thing with a new name and with equally bullshit results.