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[Disclaimer: I work on Gleangen at Google, opinions my own. Also, I wrote part of this in a comment on the blog.] I agree that insider concerns are a problem,

by ddp26 5y ago

[Disclaimer: I work on Gleangen at Google, opinions my own. Also, I wrote part of this in a comment on the blog.] I agree that insider concerns are a problem, but I think there's a very large space for questions that, as Hal Varian says, (a) are of interest to the company but (b) do not reveal financially critical information. Consider OKRs tracking engineering milestones. Estimating your team's progress a quarter or year out is basically forecasting, and participating in those forecasts does not generally make you a financial insider. (Though some OKRs deal directly with finances and would in fact do so.)

quest88 5y ago
Are those _really_ of interest though? How much better are these predictions than a few engineers' predictions during normal OKR planning? Hal's comments hint they don't care about OKR estimates (or things like that) and prefer more interesting questions. Examples: Real names and Google+. People objected and questioned these, and others, without a prediction market and they still got pushed through. There are products that are still alive but barely hanging on that were questioned too. A successful gleangen would eliminate many PM and VP roles and they aren't going to let that happen.
- ddp26 5y ago
  Yeah, fair points. You could imagine trying: (1) Ask "Will Google+ institute a real name policy by X date"? [This may not be useful to know.] (2) Ask "How many users will Google+ have on X date with a real name policy?" and "How many without?" [Potentially powerful, to the extent that they're accurate and decision makers trust them.] (3) Ask "What will the app rating of Google+ be on date X?" [Prices in all factors, so can perhaps reveal the effect of policy changes before they happen.] I don't see prediction markets replacing OKRs or strategy planning, but rather complementing them, kind of like A/B tests and user studies. There's still a lot to figure out!

by ddp26 5y ago

quest88 5y ago

Are those _really_ of interest though? How much better are these predictions than a few engineers' predictions during normal OKR planning? Hal's comments hint they don't care about OKR estimates (or things like that) and prefer more interesting questions. Examples: Real names and Google+. People objected and questioned these, and others, without a prediction market and they still got pushed through. There are products that are still alive but barely hanging on that were questioned too. A successful gleangen would eliminate many PM and VP roles and they aren't going to let that happen.

ddp26 5y ago
Yeah, fair points. You could imagine trying: (1) Ask "Will Google+ institute a real name policy by X date"? [This may not be useful to know.] (2) Ask "How many users will Google+ have on X date with a real name policy?" and "How many without?" [Potentially powerful, to the extent that they're accurate and decision makers trust them.] (3) Ask "What will the app rating of Google+ be on date X?" [Prices in all factors, so can perhaps reveal the effect of policy changes before they happen.] I don't see prediction markets replacing OKRs or strategy planning, but rather complementing them, kind of like A/B tests and user studies. There's still a lot to figure out!