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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

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).
  - LolNoGenerics 8y ago
    > The purpose is to broadcast your view of your priorities, so interested parties can ask that they be adjusted. Concrete team stories are usually quite clear. OKRs force you to encode a bunch of them into objectives and key results. This produces utter nonsense if the duties and opportunities are generic or fragmented. Not every team can write a clear OKR which makes it obvious what's happening, especially if you servicing multiple departments.
  - falsedan 8y ago
    > four to six hours a year thinking about OKRs As a non-IC, I'd spend that much time per week on OKRs: writing the OKRs for a team involved planning out the next quarter's topics, which required aligning the team (with individual meetings & group ones) for the 2-3 weeks at the end of the quarter. Then drafting them, aligning with the department/VP's topics for the quarter, finishing them, getting feedback from other team leads, dry-run presentation for the dev manager meeting, then live run-through for the department all-hands, mid-point scoring updates, end-of-quarter scoring, back to the beginning
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Ah, so are you a higher-up or a drone? I'm confused. Oh, no, you must be the "individual contributor". Right? I'd say I have some pretty smart people working for me but large orgs are large because they have lots of work that needs doing and the big chunks are big enough the people doing the work tend to self-organize. Some work never stops (e.g. healthcare) so you have to establish shift work. Does that mean those people are drones? They might be young, they might enjoy a sense of belonging and camaraderie, even when things suck, and maybe they would benefit from some additional experiential learning of discipline, but does that mean they're drones? Did you consider the fact that my direct reports themselves have advanced degrees? A word of advice ... the worst thing I could have done to you right now is ignore you and let your opinion fester. Maybe step back, have all the disdain for me you want, but I hope you at least read this far.
- Jorge1o1 8y ago
  I implemented OKRs among my small team of 10 devs who are all pretty awesome rockstars and good contributors, but still early in their careers. It turns out that OKRs made the employees happier, because it served as a “more abstract” form of feedback. Before, they were receiving feedback, but it was too specific and narrow. Things like “this class can be refactored to X pattern” or “You missed a few unit tests covering X Y Z cases.” But when we started tracking things like time to ship a new feature, bugs per implemented feature, hard deadlines for certain product releases, etc. it really helped to give some better feedback. You could tell people who were writing code very fast to slow down in general, and write more stable, thought-out code. For example, there was one dev who tended to have substantially more bugs in his code than the others, and slower ship times. It turns out that he was always being assigned to more complicated Tasks and Stories, and the poor guy was overworked to shit and he didn’t even realize it. It’s got nothing to do with being a drone, and everything to do with not being able to improve until you measure. Do you think Usain Bolt doesn’t have a stopwatch when he runs?
  - slow_donkey 8y ago
    I'm curious why this is OKR specific. Shouldn't you be tracking those metrics anyways?
    - Jorge1o1 8y ago
      Recently our sales guys got some hefty clients, and have started to bring in serious money. In order to keep up, we needed to turn development time from just a metric, into an OKR. Moreover, our clients sometimes put pressure on us to ship out X feature immediately, in response to a competitor. This means that sometimes the 10 devs are working on different features for different clients. So, just like the book, “Measure what matters.” Don’t measure useless things like commits per dev or features shipped last quarter, the important thing for our division is development time. Presumably when we get development times down, our OKRs will change to other things, like overall client satisfaction. But for now, the top concern is to meet sales volume, so our OKR is development time
sandGorgon 8y ago
Could you talk about introducing OKR into a large organisation where they didn't exist before - why did they become useful as opposed to things like Slack for example. I'm genuinely struggling to understand the place of a construct like OKR in a world where Slack like tools exist.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  OKR and Slack are completely different things? Ones a chat app the other is a system of setting objectives and measuring against those objectives.
  - sandGorgon 8y ago
    Not really - okr are a communication mechanism to communicate goals to a larger org in a distributed way. Does it still make sense when the org is closer together due to slack
    - russfrank 8y ago
      No, they are completely different things. Real time chat doesn't make people feel like they understand the overall goals of an organization. If someone says in Slack "we really need to get x done because the customers want it" and other people decide to talk about StackOverflow's hilarious April fools day joke for 5 minutes, some are going to miss that "we really need to get x done". Your OKRs put that sort of thing in one place. The process to determine what the OKRs are ensure that everyone's on the same page about the objectives. People in an organization want to feel like they know what they're working towards. When they don't they get stressed out and unproductive.
      - sandGorgon 8y ago
        I don't fully agree on this notion. Because implicitly doing this is also surfacing the gaps in achieving those targets. Most okr are dependent on someone else - the Android app guy will not achieve their okr if the API guy is off doing something else. In that way, the whole aspect of goal setting and achieving that is probably more inefficient using an okr structure than thrashing it out on slack (and most likely in a dedicated channel called "planning")
tokyodude 8y ago
I had an opposite experience. OKRs were a complete waste of time. I was required to waste hours trying to come up with OKRs, none if which had anything to do with what my actual day to day work entailed. The OKRs were then promptly ignored so I could got back to getting shit done. At the end of the ORK term of course they'd been ignored. This had the effect of being demotivating because I was being asked to make up these OKRs "because at this company we have OKRs" but then having zero time and zero motivation to pursue them since there were people waiting for my real work to be finished. I think discussing this requires getting clear on what OKRs are. At the company I was at they were broad personal goals set every 3, 6 or 12 months related generally to your career at the company. They were not related to any specific project or deadline. An example might be "Do more public speaking". Where as generally I'd speak if the opportunity came up but I wouldn't seek out opportunities and AFAIK the OKR didn't make me seek more out. It was just something I wrote to get management to sign off that I had written some OKRs.
- oconnore 8y ago
  Why were you unwilling to lean into the process? You could have said: these OKRs have to describe my actual work... here are my attempts to document what that means, and what to look for if I do a good job at that. If they had pushed back on that, I think you would have a leg to stand on, but as described it sounds like you were just unwilling to engage.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- titanomachy 8y ago
  Sounds like the process was not done well at your company. I have my OKRs set up so that I spend almost all my time working on them. I do usually have one or two "personal OKRs" like the one you described, but most of them represent the team's core work: "put major feature X into production", "address P1 customer issues with 3 days", whatever. It gives you a nice defense when some seemingly urgent but less important work comes along. "We could do that, but it would cost us this OKR which we agreed at all levels was one of the most important things for our team to do."

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).
- LolNoGenerics 8y ago
  > The purpose is to broadcast your view of your priorities, so interested parties can ask that they be adjusted. Concrete team stories are usually quite clear. OKRs force you to encode a bunch of them into objectives and key results. This produces utter nonsense if the duties and opportunities are generic or fragmented. Not every team can write a clear OKR which makes it obvious what's happening, especially if you servicing multiple departments.
- falsedan 8y ago
  > four to six hours a year thinking about OKRs As a non-IC, I'd spend that much time per week on OKRs: writing the OKRs for a team involved planning out the next quarter's topics, which required aligning the team (with individual meetings & group ones) for the 2-3 weeks at the end of the quarter. Then drafting them, aligning with the department/VP's topics for the quarter, finishing them, getting feedback from other team leads, dry-run presentation for the dev manager meeting, then live run-through for the department all-hands, mid-point scoring updates, end-of-quarter scoring, back to the beginning
killjoywashere 8y ago
Ah, so are you a higher-up or a drone? I'm confused. Oh, no, you must be the "individual contributor". Right? I'd say I have some pretty smart people working for me but large orgs are large because they have lots of work that needs doing and the big chunks are big enough the people doing the work tend to self-organize. Some work never stops (e.g. healthcare) so you have to establish shift work. Does that mean those people are drones? They might be young, they might enjoy a sense of belonging and camaraderie, even when things suck, and maybe they would benefit from some additional experiential learning of discipline, but does that mean they're drones? Did you consider the fact that my direct reports themselves have advanced degrees? A word of advice ... the worst thing I could have done to you right now is ignore you and let your opinion fester. Maybe step back, have all the disdain for me you want, but I hope you at least read this far.
Jorge1o1 8y ago
I implemented OKRs among my small team of 10 devs who are all pretty awesome rockstars and good contributors, but still early in their careers. It turns out that OKRs made the employees happier, because it served as a “more abstract” form of feedback. Before, they were receiving feedback, but it was too specific and narrow. Things like “this class can be refactored to X pattern” or “You missed a few unit tests covering X Y Z cases.” But when we started tracking things like time to ship a new feature, bugs per implemented feature, hard deadlines for certain product releases, etc. it really helped to give some better feedback. You could tell people who were writing code very fast to slow down in general, and write more stable, thought-out code. For example, there was one dev who tended to have substantially more bugs in his code than the others, and slower ship times. It turns out that he was always being assigned to more complicated Tasks and Stories, and the poor guy was overworked to shit and he didn’t even realize it. It’s got nothing to do with being a drone, and everything to do with not being able to improve until you measure. Do you think Usain Bolt doesn’t have a stopwatch when he runs?
- slow_donkey 8y ago
  I'm curious why this is OKR specific. Shouldn't you be tracking those metrics anyways?
  - Jorge1o1 8y ago
    Recently our sales guys got some hefty clients, and have started to bring in serious money. In order to keep up, we needed to turn development time from just a metric, into an OKR. Moreover, our clients sometimes put pressure on us to ship out X feature immediately, in response to a competitor. This means that sometimes the 10 devs are working on different features for different clients. So, just like the book, “Measure what matters.” Don’t measure useless things like commits per dev or features shipped last quarter, the important thing for our division is development time. Presumably when we get development times down, our OKRs will change to other things, like overall client satisfaction. But for now, the top concern is to meet sales volume, so our OKR is development time

sandGorgon 8y ago

Could you talk about introducing OKR into a large organisation where they didn't exist before - why did they become useful as opposed to things like Slack for example. I'm genuinely struggling to understand the place of a construct like OKR in a world where Slack like tools exist.

james_s_tayler 8y ago
OKR and Slack are completely different things? Ones a chat app the other is a system of setting objectives and measuring against those objectives.
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  Not really - okr are a communication mechanism to communicate goals to a larger org in a distributed way. Does it still make sense when the org is closer together due to slack
  - russfrank 8y ago
    No, they are completely different things. Real time chat doesn't make people feel like they understand the overall goals of an organization. If someone says in Slack "we really need to get x done because the customers want it" and other people decide to talk about StackOverflow's hilarious April fools day joke for 5 minutes, some are going to miss that "we really need to get x done". Your OKRs put that sort of thing in one place. The process to determine what the OKRs are ensure that everyone's on the same page about the objectives. People in an organization want to feel like they know what they're working towards. When they don't they get stressed out and unproductive.
    - sandGorgon 8y ago
      I don't fully agree on this notion. Because implicitly doing this is also surfacing the gaps in achieving those targets. Most okr are dependent on someone else - the Android app guy will not achieve their okr if the API guy is off doing something else. In that way, the whole aspect of goal setting and achieving that is probably more inefficient using an okr structure than thrashing it out on slack (and most likely in a dedicated channel called "planning")

tokyodude 8y ago

I had an opposite experience. OKRs were a complete waste of time. I was required to waste hours trying to come up with OKRs, none if which had anything to do with what my actual day to day work entailed. The OKRs were then promptly ignored so I could got back to getting shit done. At the end of the ORK term of course they'd been ignored. This had the effect of being demotivating because I was being asked to make up these OKRs "because at this company we have OKRs" but then having zero time and zero motivation to pursue them since there were people waiting for my real work to be finished. I think discussing this requires getting clear on what OKRs are. At the company I was at they were broad personal goals set every 3, 6 or 12 months related generally to your career at the company. They were not related to any specific project or deadline. An example might be "Do more public speaking". Where as generally I'd speak if the opportunity came up but I wouldn't seek out opportunities and AFAIK the OKR didn't make me seek more out. It was just something I wrote to get management to sign off that I had written some OKRs.

oconnore 8y ago
Why were you unwilling to lean into the process? You could have said: these OKRs have to describe my actual work... here are my attempts to document what that means, and what to look for if I do a good job at that. If they had pushed back on that, I think you would have a leg to stand on, but as described it sounds like you were just unwilling to engage.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
titanomachy 8y ago
Sounds like the process was not done well at your company. I have my OKRs set up so that I spend almost all my time working on them. I do usually have one or two "personal OKRs" like the one you described, but most of them represent the team's core work: "put major feature X into production", "address P1 customer issues with 3 days", whatever. It gives you a nice defense when some seemingly urgent but less important work comes along. "We could do that, but it would cost us this OKR which we agreed at all levels was one of the most important things for our team to do."