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Thoughts on OKRs

• cyberlurker 4y ago
  Am I the only one that saw “jibe” at the end of the article, thought it was incorrect, looked it up, and discovered I have been using “jive” incorrectly instead for years?
• est 4y ago
  I work at a anti-fraud department, settings up OKR is always difficult because fraud happens in every unexpected way. IDK how others are doing it, but I'd really like to see a detailed OKR for a game like Tetris.
• crakhamster01 4y ago
  > If it takes 3 weeks into the quarter to define your OKRs for the quarter, well, congratulations, you spent those 3 weeks choosing what you’ll actually do this quarter. You’ll make the case that the things you’re working on are really important and already in progress, even if they’re not lined up exactly with the department OKRs. And they may be really important, and the OKRs may be wrong because we didn’t spend enough time working on them and took too long to deliver them, and we didn’t leave room for bottom-up objective setting. So we do the important things we’re already doing, and we’ll fudge the KRs a bit at the end of the quarter. LOL this paragraph really spoke to me. I've been in FAANG for 6 years, and every time roadmapping/OKRs come around this always happens. As an IC, those weeks spent planning are precious time that could be spent landing ~impact~ for your performance review, so you might do a mini-planning session to figure out how to use your time. That project that you picked up ends up getting traction, but due to disconnects with the team's planning process, the overall OKRs no longer align with your work! Guess we'll have to fudge the numbers...
• ryan-duve 4y ago
  The scenarios described here are familiar even though I've only spent a small part of my career doing formal OKRs. If your next blog post continues to mirror my experience, it will paint a picture of a quarterly OKR debrief meeting where half the people didn't work on their objectives and it just doesn't matter because they got good work done anyway. People who really like process and checklists will nail their OKRs, but they probably would have gotten the same work done in the quarter regardless so, again, it doesn't matter. Upon reflection, it makes me wonder if OKRs are better used as a corrective tool for a team than as a formal process for already high performing teams.
• Kalanos 4y ago
  I agree. What could be more important? It is leadership's job to set the goals. If the goals fail, leadership has failed. Here is an expanded summary for those who want to learn more: https://medium.com/@rocketsyntax/okr-framework-strategic-planning-to-complement-agile-execution-1d03a49d3e1a https://medium.com/@rocketsyntax/okr-framework-strategic-pla...
• jph 4y ago
  I've seen OKRs significantly improve teams when there's full staff bottom-up commitment; I've seen OKRs totally fail when they're drive-by top-down directives. I maintain a repo of OKR guidance here: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/objectives-and-key-results https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/objectives-and-key-re...
• SaltyBackendGuy 4y ago
  The biggest issue I've seen with OKRs is that it just turns into a game, and then proceeds to get "gamed". Separately, there has been more than one occasion where we chose to work on something OKR related but ended up providing less value to our end user as requirements changed mid quarter. Therefore making our initial OKR irrelevant, and preventing management from wanting to pivot to solve a real customer need.
  • Jensson 4y ago
    OKR shouldn't look like a set of sprint tasks, they are supposed to mirror what results matters to your team. If your team is supposed to solve the needs of a specific customer then your OKR should be something akin to "implement features to solve customer X needs and keep them happy" and not list those features explicitly since what you build doesn't matter, all that matters is whether the customer is happy so that is the key result. Alternatively the team can be focused on developing new generic features or products to be sold to many, in those cases you can list the products explicitly since then the key result your team is delivering is that product to sell instead of keeping a specific user happy.
    • dchftcs 4y ago
      In a sufficiently complex system with a big enough hierarchy, personal OKRs become quite far from the end product due to necessity. If the product objective is to grow an app to 100m users, the objective of a backend distributed systems team would be to scale the system to handle the load. If front end requirements change, for example the app needs to serve videos instead of images, entire OKRs of the backend team might need to be rewritten. If requirements change often enough the backend team OKRs just become meaningless. If they follow your model, the backend team objective would be to just "help the product scale", and the personal OKRs would be just to "help the team scale the backend and make my EM happy" because there's no way to really plan for what the product team wants next. That may well be the only thing that can be done, but it's a degeneration to a system that offers no clear accountability, and just points to the futility of sticking to the OKR model in a large organization that needs to move fast.
• athenot 4y ago
  My biggest issue with OKRs comes from those who practice what could be called "Aimless Key Results". Instead of thinking about an intuitive objective and then try to come up with some form of measurable Key Result that can help assess whether the org is getting closer to—or further from—the objective, some skip the whole Objective part altogether. They become so stressed with having something measurable that they end up with KRs based on how easy they are to measure, regardless if they actually correlate to a supposed objective. This is Goodhart's Law[1] on steroids. Healthy OKRs do exist but they have a few preconditions: - the individuals devising them must fully internalize which are the objectives that do matter for the org, among an ocean of "priorities". - the KRs must be carefully thought out and evaluated against their vulnerability to the law of unintended consequences. - the team(s) implementing the KRs must understand why theses KRs exist, their relationship to the Objective they serve, and how well (or not) they measure the objective. - the leaders must be quick to change the KRs if there's any doubt as to whether they are actually helping, or causing more damage. The "why" should remain relatively constant over time, the "how" can change. - KRs that have thresholds should always be ambitious and very hard to actually meet, as they stretch the organization's goals. - Tying perforance bonuses to them is dangerous because it immediately results in gamification: Damn the Objective, I want my bonus! OKRs can be incredibly tricky for middle management because the top leadership may have a decent objective to be pursued, and the line managers may have a good grasp on what success looks like. But the middle part is caught in between the 2, and this can create all sorts of fun artifacts of measurement, aka. dysfunctions. Especially if that middle management layer doesn't have a rock solid understanding of the actual objectives and are only obsessed with the measuring part. [1] When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law#cite_note-Strathern1997-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law#cite_note-Str...
  • andrewingram 4y ago
    I have a slightly different take. I think there's a tendency to attach too much importance to the key results; though I very much agree with your point about the law of unintended consequences, this is why the concept of anchoring metrics/KRs comes up a lot. To me, the Objective is what you want, whilst the KRs are just a set of heuristics that tell you if the work you're doing is taking you in that direction. But I see it as a classic "the map is not the territory" thing. Too much emphasis on the KRs (like, as you say, tying bonuses to them) can lead to gaming the system and other failure states.
• andrewingram 4y ago
  The most common failure states I keep seeing are: * Reverse-engineering the todo list to produce OKRs * OKRs being the wrong fit for the team and/or the company's lifecycle. The second one is more damaging, because it's subtle, whereas the first is obvious to everyone involved. Fundamentally, OKRs are a tool that should allow teams to make decisions about what to focus on, with the knowledge that they're aligned with the business objectives. If a team already has an immutable quarter+ roadmap, they're not making any decisions, they're just working; OKRs aren't a good fit for this kind of team. OKRs done well _should_ result in teams feeling empowered, because they can see the link between their actions/decisions and overall success. OKRs done poorly have the exact opposite effective; not just benign, but harmful.
  • Tomte 4y ago
    > Reverse-engineering the todo list to produce OKRs I recently saw that. In a training. By a professional, paid, external trainer. We are supposed to take our backlog, comb it for stuff that always falls between the cracks, collect that, these are our key results. [1] Then we are supposed to invent a headline for all that assorted stuff. That's our objective. The whole procedure is supposed to be called "bottom-up OKR". [2] You don't have to tell me, I have actually read Doerr's book and know better, but everyone in that training went from knowing nothing about OKRs to knowing falsehoods about OKRs. [1] yes, he really confused tasks with measurable outcomes. And yes, that procedure ensures that the not-so-important stuff gets highest priority :-) [2] in reality, "bottom-up" refers to the company hierarchy. Bottom-up OKRs are set by lower-tier employees.
    • timr 4y ago
      It's not totally insane to want bottom-up OKRs. One of the common failure modes of OKRs is that the top-down view of the management doesn't connect well to the reality of day-to-day operations. So you often end up with people engaged in Kabuki theater (making up a nice story about how the things they were going to do anyway really are the KRs for any particular stated objective). Of course, having teams produce bottom-up OKRs has failure modes too -- it's not really strategic planning if the leaves of the org tree are setting the goals. So you need both. A cycle of planning seems to work best -- a high-level goal is transmitted down, then each team engages in a local goal-setting process, then these goals go up, then there is coordination and refinement. But this takes forever and requires incredible discipline, so it's hard to do well.
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• Apreche 4y ago
  My issue with OKRs is trying to apply them to employees who have no power to make business decisions.
  • b3morales 4y ago
    Or worse, doing a little farce where they supposedly "choose their own".
  • cgearhart 4y ago
    I’ve said for years that OKRs can make some sense at higher levels of the org because it’s an easy way to communicate strategy but it makes no sense for individual engineers to use them. I think your comment explains why. At some point the people writing the OKRs no longer have the authority or autonomy to actually achieve them. So what’s the point?
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    100%! I have to set goals at the beginning of the year but so far every time priorities changed and the goals became deprioritized or obsolete quickly. And at the end of the year I have to map my achievements into categories like "increase market share" or "fuel international growth". My work is so far away from these things that it makes no sense at all. I can see this working for VP and higher who have a multi year perspective and can changes things as needed, but for lower ranks it makes no sense. The only realistic goal for my work is "Keep the f...ing system running and enhance as needed"
  • spookthesunset 4y ago
    OKRs are supposed to be liberating. In theory the management owns the prioritization of problems to be worked on. The team owns the actual way the problem is solved. Done right, OKRs help drive team level innovation. Of course there are plenty of ways to fuck up OKRs…
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  • eddieroger 4y ago
• st3v3ndungan 4y ago
  OKR's without strategy or context (or OKR's substituting for a strategy or context) is a killer I've seen. Especially if I'm "laddering up" my product's OKRs. This is where the bi-directional approach does work better than strictly top-down or bottom-up; my leadership probably doesn't see the opportunities or constraints for my product, but for my opportunities to be attainable, I need to be swimming the same direction as my organization. Strategy gives me context for where I should be playing.
• commandlinefan 4y ago
  Every time I've seen it tried (over and over again in the span of a 30-year career), the "goals" are based on whatever the priority/flavor-of-the month happens to be when goal-setting is announced. I've never seen those priorities last an entire year, but I have been called to account for why I didn't personally meet the goals that I was pressured into setting "for myself" even though the priorities shifted over the course of the year.
  • enos_feedler 4y ago
    I worked at Google and been on teams where OKRs are used very ineffectively. Since then, I've read one thing that really changed the way I think about "goals" and could alleviate the problem you mention here. It's called the product strategy stack: https://review.firstround.com/set-non-goals-and-build-a-product-strategy-stack-lessons-for-product-leaders https://review.firstround.com/set-non-goals-and-build-a-prod... If you have time, listen to the podcast. This is really the most comprehensive treatment I have seen related to OKRs and goal setting. Basically, goals are the last thing you consider. What is often missing is the high levels of the stack clearly articulated such that the goals make sense and measure progress towards a strategic outcome: "Our strategy is to increase revenue by 5%’ or ‘Increase retention by 10%.’ That’s not a strategy, that’s a goal. It’s great if you can achieve that goal, but only if it’s actually part of a larger strategy that the company is trying to advance,” Mehta says. “I often see teams get into a mode where they’re just doing anything and everything to move the goal, without actually realizing they’re headed in the wrong direction from a strategic standpoint to create long-term value.” "
    • teraku 4y ago
      It's like with most things in life. If you want to become fitter, don't think "I want to lose 10kg of weight", think about finding a sport which you like and healthy food which you enjoy eating. Your belly might not disappear 100%, but you will feel better, and you are in for the long run.
      • goldenkey 4y ago
• fh973 4y ago
  OKRs are also a tool for communicating priorities and agendas in all directions of the hierarchy. I think they work reasonably well for that. They're succinct and the key results force them to be grounded on some reality that people can relate to.
• neogodless 4y ago
  Uh, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31420938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31420938 (Stop using grey text). Especially on a grey background. My eyes don't have enough life in them to try to read this. (Yes this is off topic and about formatting and it's boring.)
  • tomrod 4y ago
    I second your discomfiture at gray text.
  • deepsun 4y ago
    Firefox has "Reading mode" button right in URL box. Both on desktop and mobile. Enjoy!
    • neogodless 4y ago
      Thought of that after posting and closing the tab. But I don't feel like going back. It makes me angry that people think making text as hard to read as possible is good design. But it's just my opinion, and it's OK for people to have differing opinions. I just choose not to spend my time and eyeballs on their content.
  • joeblubaugh 4y ago
    Yeah, maybe I should reconfigure the default theme to light mode and try to add the CSS prefers-color-scheme media query. For now, if you want, you can click the circle in the upper right to toggle to light mode. Thanks for the feedback!
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    Ironically, you're being downvoted and right now your text is grey.
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• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  "We're introducing OKRs, they're for your benefit so you know where to focus and can track how you're improving and the team success, they wont be used to judge your salary" 6 months later "So yeah that's the most we're gonna offer you for this raise because your OKR score was only..." Every time.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Yeah. Objective: Pay rise. Key Result: Pay. Strategy; Apply.
  • djur 4y ago
    My experiences have tended more toward "everybody stresses out about OKRs for a couple weeks every quarter and then you might as well have deleted the file because nobody will ever, ever, ever talk about them again".
• cletus 4y ago
  I used OKRs on several teams to varying degrees at Google. Not a fan. Here are my complaints: 1. It makes organizations slow and inflexible. I used to joke that as soon as another team was involved in something you needed to do it would probably take a quarter. why? Well what you wanted probably wasn't on this quarter's OKRs so it would be an uphill battle to get them to do it. You'd have to argue about getting it into next quarter's OKRs; 2. OKRs can be structured in such a way that you can grade quite well while having achieved absolutely nothing; 3. Teams can be held to different standards. Some get easy OKRs. Some get harder OKRs. So it's still subject to the political-perception problems inherent in such organizations; 5. It is largely for show for upper management. I've been in 2 hour planning meetings where a bunch of teams speak for 2 minutes about what they're working on. This might be useful for directors+ but is really a waste of the time of 50-100 other people. This is a problem with status meetings too; 6. Even grading OKRs can be subjective and political. I recall one famous example where someone (cough Vic cough) said they had a goal of 100M users. They actually only got to 10M. Grade? 0.7. There was a running meme at Google about feedback that went something like this: This project would've failed without this person. It failed anyway but it definitely would've without this person. I like this meme because it illustrates how the same set of facts can be used to argue how someone did a good job or a bad job and the difference between the two is whether or not the org likes them. The same set of facts can be summarized as "this probject failed to ship" and "we failed fast, learned a lot and will take those learnings into future projects". OKRs suffer from exactly those same problems.
  • markrages 4y ago
    > This might be useful for directors+ but is really a waste of the time of 50-100 other people. This is a problem with status meetings too; A status meeting serves to reinforce the social status of the one who called the meeting. No other status is relevant.
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    > what you wanted probably wasn't on this quarter's OKRs so it would be an uphill battle to get them to do it Everywhere I've ever worked - OKRs or DPMs or Goals or whatever you want to call them or not - I've had a set of work that's assigned to me via JIRA tickets or Bugzilla tickets or some kind of ticket tracking system, and I've also had a constant deluge of co-workers asking for my help with something or other. The longer I work there, the greater the deluge of both requests for help and volume of work assigned. Every day I've ever come into work in my life (besides the one-two month "honeymoon period" when I start a new job), I have to decide between ignoring my coworkers pleas for help or slipping the deadlines on the individual tasks assigned to me. Over the course of the past three decades, I've tried both ways - first, focusing on my assigned tasks and second, dropping everything every time I get a request for help. I've found that, overall, the second way works best. I have to constantly apologize for constantly missing deadlines, but if I keep turning away coworkers, not being enough of a "team player" shows up as a nastier mark in my performance reviews than always being behind on tasks.
• zippergz 4y ago
  I don't disagree with any of this, but really these are problems with every goal-setting framework I have experienced in my career. Similar to performance review frameworks. It isn't the framework that sucks; it is the exercise itself. I've become convinced that at a certain scale, it is impossible for a corporation to have a company-wide goal process or performance review process that adds more value than it detracts. I don't know what the solution is, but I really don't think it's just "find a better process."
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    > I don't know what the solution is I do, but they're not going to like it, so they're not going to do it. The mindset behind these goal-setting frameworks is "everybody is stealing from me and I have to watch them like a mafia boss to catch the cheaters". The solution is to actually treat the team as a team and work together, but the type of people who rise to a management role in any organization (especially a corporation) aren't the type of people who are capable of doing so.
• lloydatkinson 4y ago
  I've only been at one place that had OKR's. That was my shortest job due to the toxic work environment. OKR's are simple enablers of toxic environments due to the amount of goal post moving and gaslighting. "Here is an arbitrary goal """you""" agreed to, why has it not been achieved?" "Well, you didn't really give me a choice and you also moved me to another project or the project was killed off" "not good enough" Yeah, I'll pass anywhere that encourages this.
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• CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  > All of them set a hierarchical pyramid of OKRs that cascaded down, rather than a set of OKRs that worked bottom-up, even if the company wasn’t in a crisis and would have benefited from promoting innovation. Maybe I've only worked companies that do OKRs wrong, but I can't imagine what the bottom-up version of this would even look like. Individual teams pick their own OKRs, and then the exec above that looks at all of the OKRs that their various teams have decided on and then summarizes them in some way as their own OKRs after the fact?
  • technovangelist 4y ago
    That’s kind of the only way I have seen them. Individual teams define the okr and they bubble up. I don’t know what summarizes as their own would mean, but the first part was right.
  • spookthesunset 4y ago
    Bottoms up works really good. It needs to always be understood that bottom tier OKRs don’t always directly tie to higher level OKRs and that is okay.
    • djur 4y ago
      This is a good insight. The biggest problem I've seen with OKRs is the desire to "align" them, which always ends up meaning that each manager rewrites their team's OKRs to fit into their director's OKRs and so on up the ladder. This doesn't "align" anything, it conceals a lack of alignment and makes it impossible to address whatever the underlying issue is. It seems to me that if the result of an OKR process is a bunch of team OKRs that have little to do with the company strategy, the result of that should not be to repeat the process or rewrite the OKRs but for company leadership to spend the next quarter figuring out what's going on (communication issue, too many underlying technical struggles to be able to prioritize, the company strategy is bad and nobody understands or likes it, etc.).
      • spookthesunset 4y ago
        In truth I kind of question the usefulness of "higher level" OKRs. They become too fuzzy and meaningless. Worse, I think it is almost impossible to come up with quantifiable key results that are directly influenced by the work of "lower level" OKRs.
• crsv 4y ago
  Ah yes, the 1000 word useless collection of thoughts on a nuanced and dense topic, followed by a flurry of kvetching and outlier horror stories in the comments. Classic HN work organization and management discussion.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    I miss n-gate updates, but this made my minute!
• motohagiography 4y ago
  While I think OKRs are necessary, and strategic leadership is necessary to achieve them, consider that whether a company is being led to an objective, or managed to optimize itself - is entirely dependent on the stage of the company. I'd argue optimization phase OKRs are negatively defined, where growth phase OKRs are positively definied. Stages I think of as survival/subsistance, product market fit, and max market share, are growth phases, whereas stages like max stock price and max gross margins, are optimization phases of a company. Optimization phases are when you already have market fit and a revenue stream, where as a board you can just drop in a bunch of MBAs to refine and hollow out the org and stabilize the company as a revenue stream in a portfolio. Management is value extraction, and it is a specific skillset that a company needs when it has a revenue producing asset, which it needs to optimize for stability, so that it can be used as collateral for leverage into new ventures. That's the point of management: to stabilize an asset with steady hands so that it is a coherent asset that can be traded and leveraged. Leadership qualities in managers are mainly plumage on (or cover for) their foundation of extractive skills, and are neither sufficient or necessary. You can't manage something until there is a null hypothesis, where the thing makes value or money already (default-alive in PG parlence). This is why managers creating OKRs often sound so vague, it's because they rig the OKR definition to avoid a perception of failure that would cause their attrition in a zero-sum optimization environment. OKRs are necessarily about black-and-white outcomes, whereas, managing is a matter of sustaining and directing an equllibrium. (yes, b&w thinking is usually considered "bad," but mainly from a mangerial frame of reference). I'm proposing OKRs are a growth/leadership phase tool that feels cargo culty in optimization/management phase companies. Smart people become managers because they can reason abstractly about stuff that makers, leaders, and IC's take personally, and there is a lot of value in learning to respect that skill, even when it is repellant, and not fall into the trap of merely moralizing our own limitations. (my bias should be obvious) Leadership is for the growth phases of a company, where you need to get from zero to one, a to b, subsistance to product market fit - where the function of leadership is to affect change. A company whose majority growth phase is behind it is in a stable state doesn't need change, it needs to be managed and optimized as an asset for leverage. It's dumb to drop leaders into stable companies because the inertia of the company is already headed toward an equillibrium of being a commodity asset, a piece of financial furniture in portfolios, and change agents (leaders) either have to derail that to succeed, or get frustrated and leave. For a FAANG company to have OKRs below the manager level now seems misguided, as their growth phases are behind them, e.g. the majority of the change in their revenue growth is going to come from cost management and margins, and not from growing into new market share. Their best hope for market share growth is demographic change, as if you haven't adopted their product by now, you're probably not going to unless you were born recently and are just discovering the product, or you have just arrived and the products are part of your new life. Otherwise, I'm probably not going to become a new user/market share of a FAANG product. As an optimization phase company you can't tell your engineering staff that the future is lean and that the company is now a zero-sum optimization problem, which their job is to beat out everyone else at doing the same or more with less. That's a great and strategic place to make a P&L mark as a manager, but a shitty place to be someone who builds and makes things. Your upside comes from outsourcing functions and services, integrating with tech debt, and other brain damaging tasks. An OKR in an optimization stage company is whether a function can survive being operated by cheap and the absolute minimally competent people. It's mainly about cost reduction. Imo, OKRs in an optimization stage company are like skinny jeans on a middle aged man, where nobody wants to have to be the one to say it, but they're past the stage where it's appropriate. OKRs make more sense in a startup or a growth stage company where there is a sense of shared mission and clear outward direction for growth, and where you're betting on growing your way out of a lot of problems. Deliver a feature that positions us for this market share growth, make something someone wants, establish PMF, establish feature parity w/ competitors, improve conversions in the pipeline by x% - these are the things that leadership is designed to achieve. It's high risk and leadership has terrible failure modes, but that's an artifact of the company stage. Long comment with intent to provoke discussion, but if your OKR is not concrete and a b&w binary outcome, I'd ask whether you are in an org that is still in a growth phase, and whether this is what you want. Nothing wrong with being in an optimization phase company (e.g a bank) but not being aligned personally to the phase of your company is a recipe for suffering.
• nkrisc 4y ago
  I've been through several jobs that used OKRs, and even had to read a book on it at one point, and to be completely honest I still have no idea what they are. Maybe I'm just dumb or can't grasp it, but while I know what all the words mean, I still don't understand what it is or why it's useful. I'd write some "OKRs" based on what my boss told me to write, who was told be their boss, and then I'd enter them into some HR system and never saw or heard from them again. It was all very cargo cult-y. I never really understood how an OKR is at all applicable to an individual. Maybe our OKRs were bad but they were always related to increasing some metric or measure. I can't personally, directly affect any of that. I can do my damnedest to do good work that I think will help with that, but ultimately I have no control over whether our conversion rate goes down because some other department did something that hurt it. Yeah we did a great job on some landing page but then marketing pushed the wrong audience to it so it tanks. How does an OKR help with that? Now it looks like I haven't met any of my goals? Maybe the problem was we always had these executive-level, vague "objectives" set by the C-suite, but then nobody knew what to actually do with that. Object: be an industry leader in innovation. What does that even mean?
  • djur 4y ago
    > then I'd enter them into some HR system and never saw or heard from them again My favorite version of this is when it's personal goals attached to some kind of performance review framework, but the company keeps on changing its performance review system every 6 months so you literally never can see them again.
    • the_af 4y ago
      > the company keeps on changing its performance review system every 6 months so you literally never can see them again. Yes! In my past two jobs I finally learned to never pay attention to official performance reviews and career goal plans and personal goals tracking systems: every 6 months to 1 year, like clockwork, someone important in HR gets replaced, a new tool to track goals gets bought, and everything is redesigned from scratch. The only way to get a promotion or a pay rise is to push for it on a completely different band, nothing to do with these systems.
  • 4y ago
• Traster 4y ago
  Quite recently I quit a company just as they were bringing in OKRs. The reason they bought in OKRs was because they felt that the engineering organisation was failing to meet the needs of the company. So they put together a list of Objectives and key results. They basically said "This is what we have to do to be successful". There were a few small hitches. Half the Objectives were outside the scope of the engineering team. We could execute perfectly, but if our internal customer fucked up, our objective would be blown. They explained this was because it doesn't matter if we meet some technical objective if it turns out that wasn't necessary for the company to make money. The second small hitch was they were diametrically opposed objectives. We were to going to increase our release cadence 10x. We were also going to reduce production issues by 100%. That's right, our objective was 0 production issues whilst massively increasing our release cadence with 0 extra resources. The third issue is that they were unacheivable - we were supposed to deliver a 3 year project that would take 10 people in 1 year with 5 people. It missed that the reason the engineering org failed to deliver was that the internal customer would change the requirements of 6 month projects roughly once a week. It was basically an exercise in trying to pin blame on engineers for the failure of the company. It didn't bother me too much because I was quitting anyway. OKRs don't fix dysfunctional organisations.
  • theptip 4y ago
    > OKRs don't fix dysfunctional organisations. Very true. However -- note that the process of implementing OKRs has caused the leadership team to write down their expectations, which previously might have been unspoken. This is a first step towards resolving the problem. The next step is for the CTO to push back, hard, on the bits of these that aren't actually realistic, and hopefully get the leadership team aligned on what can actually be done. And so, the process of OKRs potentially has value here in flushing out unrealistic or mismatched expectations between different parts of the org. This is one of those rare "my way or the high way" moments in leadership; as CTO at this company it's your job to either get the leadership team to realize that they are asking you for more than you can be expected to deliver, or quit. You can't stick around and put your name on a plan that you know is impossible; otherwise you're going to be the one that failed for every quarter to come. And even worse, you can't sign your team up for this BS. It's your job to shield them from this kind of shit. > Half the Objectives were outside the scope of the engineering team. Shared OKRs are difficult, but sometimes they are unavoidable. The most difficult business problems usually are cross-functional. At their best, OKRs can help to make these cross-functional dependencies more explicit, and foster communication and collaboration around them. If they are trying to have engineering take full ownership of a shared OKR, that's a big problem. But if you clearly call out the shared ownership, and consider both parties responsible for implementation, then I think that's OK. > We were to going to increase our release cadence 10x. We were also going to reduce production issues by 100%. That's right, our objective was 0 production issues whilst massively increasing our release cadence with 0 extra resources. As a tangential point, increasing release cadence can definitely decrease your long-term rate of issues (see "Continuous Delivery" by Humble[1]) -- this forces you to automate manual processes, and manual processes are one of the main places that errors creep in. Though I think "count of issues" is a very poor metric, you're better off with an uptime metric. And "100%" is the only strictly-incorrect number to pick for uptime, because it is literally impossible; my (super-unscientific, don't hold me to this) rule of thumb for business people is "every extra 9 costs you 10x". So do you need 99.9% uptime or 99.99%? [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 https://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automa...
• hatware 4y ago
  I can't be the only one who thinks the primary goal of OKRs is to keep non-technical managers employed, right?
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    No, that's not the only goal - it's also there to create a paper trail to safely fire technical people who non-technical managers don't personally like.
• jaeming 4y ago
  I remember when one member of my team put in an OKR for "learn to play the guitar" and mapped it into a training objective from above. It got approved, no questions asked. I was sort of disappointed management didn't follow up and ask him to perform for us all at the end of the quarter.
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    "I was sort of disappointed management didn't follow up and ask him to perform for us all at the end of the quarter." that would have been pretty cool and given me lots of respect for management.
    • partloyaldemon 4y ago
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Probably the best OKR i have heard. At least it is good for morale!
• kbenson 4y ago
  So, if you follow the link from the first word of the blog (the one giving details on what OKRs are), it takes you to a site[1] which when you go to the cookie prefs when prompted about what cookies you want, has a section I haven't really seen before (or was oblivious to before), called "Unclassified" with quite a few cookies. The difference between this section and the others? While others have a checkbox forced checked (Necessary cookies) or a checkbox you can toggle to accept or not (Preferences and Marketing), the Unclassified section doesn't offer up any checkbox at all. Seems awfully convenient to have a bunch of cookies you haven't classified so don't need to offer a choice to your users about. 1: https://www.whatmatters.com/ https://www.whatmatters.com/
• serial_dev 4y ago
  There are so many ways to do OKRs poorly, and I've seen many. I love the book in theory, but when I saw OKRs in practice, every company implemented this poorly. > Let's not have objectives just yet, we are not ready to communicate our goals yet with you, let's come up with key results... More like tasks, really just Jira tickets, our team already had to commit with management for the next year, we have a release plan and everything, so there is very little wiggle room there. > And please, don't ask about any of those goals, you are just a code monkey, and you weren't there at all the meetings, but trust us, it's the most important and impactful thing we can do... > Anyway, What's in the next 6 sprints? Let's just put them somehow in this OKR spreadsheet. Let's hope we don't need to change anything in the next sprint... > Hmm, alright, it looks like we have some space there, let's come up with 2-3 extra projects that realistically would need a team effort and a month focused work to complete, but you will do it on your own... Just remember that you should only work on items in the sprint, and the next 12 sprints are already planned, and we can't add your tasks to any of the sprints. You also need to convince the team that it's important, but please don't bother the team with your tasks, they will lose focus on sprint items. > I remember the book said something about something-something measurable. Unfortunately, no matter how many analysts we hire, they all quit around 3-4 months after they join, I wonder why that is. Anyway, we don't really have "numbers", so we can't come up with metrics, and we can't measure our success in any way, and we don't know whether gigantic projects bring any improvement at all. > Oh, and I'm pretty sure I will not be your boss, whoops, sorry, "competency lead" in three months because I'm actively interviewing to get out of here. Cheerio!
• krnlpnc 4y ago
  The main problem I've seen with OKRs in a technical setting is that they haven't accounted for steady state support, or sudden urgent issues. Both of those make up important work that has to be done in a timeframe shorter than the OKR reporting period. As a result important work goes untracked, and completeness of KRs are affected since people had to focus on "unexpected" issues instead. A compounding effect is burnout because a persons OKR workload and review process doesn't accurately reflect the day-to-day work that they did. Heroics are needed to avoid people higher up the management ladder seeing unfinished work under your name.
  • spookthesunset 4y ago
    I’ve seen this too. Unless upper management fully understands and supports the fact there is day to day “keep the lights on” work… a lot of what your team does won’t get credit. It takes a lot of work to drill into everybody’s heads that OKRs aren’t an exhaustive list of what a team is working on.
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    Me irl :( Every time I'm sent the quarterly email demanding my OKRs I just copy over the couple of single line items like "Support X" and "Maintain Y". I'm sure there's someone I've never met wearing a suit and thinking I'm worthless as a result.
• digitalsanctum 4y ago
  While I admire the optimism of what OKRs are suppose to do, I've never seen them done well or with a positive net outcome. In reality, it's been another one of those things that require discipline by everyone involved and is harder to accomplish at a large organization.
• hardware2win 4y ago
  I feel like OKRs are poor version of google's 20% free time policy
• beebmam 4y ago
  Never seen OKRs be anything but a disaster. Probably never will see anything else.
• SpaghettiX 4y ago
  I read about OKRs briefly and worked at 2 companies that tried* to do it. Unfortunately, at both companies, management announced it to everyone, but I practically never heard anything after those announcements. I would like to boil OKRs down to a combination of 2 things: "goals + habits". Pick good goals, and design your days/behaviours/habits to get to that goal. Goals, habits, objectives, key results would all benefit from being measurable, clear, simple, etc.
• dboreham 4y ago
  OKRs are a tool that barely competent psychopaths reach for. Possibly they work for other use cases (sales?) where everyone's a psychopath. The high functioning psychopaths don't need such ineffective tools.
• savrajsingh 4y ago
  This is why I prefer to work in startups. The objectives are more paying customers, more retention, and (for later stage companies) at a lower cost. If you're not doing something that moves the needle on those things in a startup, you're working on the wrong thing.
• timcavel 4y ago
• akomtu 4y ago
  OKRs are New Year resolutions: "this year I'm try to stop drinking" or, if you want to sound more realistic, but still ambitions, then reword it to "this year I'll get less than 2 DUIs."
• UglyToad 4y ago
  I've only done them at one place over 1 year but they're easily among the worst things to come out of the Silicon Valley cargo-cult school of management. The root problem is that what works for the front-page of the internet who have a firehose of money and millions of users probably doesn't work for a pre-PMF start-up or B2B product. Primarily there's insufficient 'pressure' in any metrics to derive any meaningful signal from any changes a small group of developers can make. Any metric you can derive is way too noisy and spread over sales, marketing and development. Sure, Gmail can change the location of the Compose button and measure the change in emails started with high reliability, but when your feature has at most 5 users and takes 2 months to deliver the impact is far less clear. I felt in the company using OKRs we had one C-level person who was incredibly enthusiastic about them but with only 10 developers we'd have been far better served by a unifying vision and shared product understanding.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• theuri 4y ago
  I've been wrestling with this recently as well, and found a great read re: OKRS versus a framework called OGSM. It provides the metrics and strategies that OKRs are missing - and results in deeper thinking up front. Here's a good read on this - https://medium.com/infinite-beta/ogsm-okr-8761dcb50e02 https://medium.com/infinite-beta/ogsm-okr-8761dcb50e02
• lisper 4y ago
  The problem with OKRs is that they force you to set goals without doing anything to guide you about how to actually achieve those goals, or even to improve your odds. The industry fetish for OKRs is entirely due to survivorship bias. A few successful companies do OKRs and so now everyone does OKRs because no one stops to think about whether the success stories are because of OKRs or despite them. As an early Googler I can tell you from my firsthand experience that it was "despite" not "because". In fact, now that I reflect on it, the real function of OKRs is to get you to put in more hours, because either you haven't met your KRs yet and you need to keep working, or you have met them, and so you didn't set the bar high enough.
• neerajk 4y ago
  Any pro-OKR arguments now sound more and more like "But Real communism has never been tried" :)
• mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Since OKRs are becoming so commonplace, what are some good strategies for playing the game sufficiently well enough to stay under the radar without a lot of time investment into it?
  • corytheboyd 4y ago
    Make sure your manager likes you.
• kiloreven 4y ago
  My current employer use OKRs to align the different levels of the org and to help each team structure their work. We use an approach that is mostly owned on the lowest level; company leadership set long and medium term objectives for the company, area/department heads set goals for each 4-month period, and each team gets to work out their own OKRs for the next period. The team objectives do not not need to match area objectives 1-to-1; area objectives are mostly guiding. I started rather recently, and I'm in my second OKR-period currently. This has been my first experience with OKR, and so far it's been on the strong side of positive; we get some guiding principles to work towards (but nothing too concrete or checkbox-final) and it works well. Sure, we won't be able to solve everything we write down, but our team is aligned on our own direction and a course that we control ourselves , to a large degree, but still within the overall goals of the company. In my experience, software engineering is about 20% creating the solution, 15% tuning and debugging the solution and 65% understanding the problem. Within this perspective, the work of talking through the problems that your team is working to solve, and contextualizing why you're solving them, is highly valuable and counts towards understanding the problem. The process of defining OKRs, within the correct frame of reference and expectations, can work very well for this. IMO, using the backlog to define upcoming work can enrich this process as well; it brings context, but should not becone the final OKR "product" alone. I've only ever encountered OKRs on a team level, but I cannot grasp the value they bring as individual goals. The real value in OKRs lies in the process leading up to defining them, not the objectives and results themselves. A recurring theme in the horror stories I've read regarding corporate strategies is that they tend to be implemented with a goal of rigidity rather than fluidity. And making rigid processes that aren't compatible with team autonomy brings with helplessness and alienation between the goal-setters and those working to deliver.
  • lostdog 4y ago
    > The real value in OKRs lies in the process leading up to defining them, not the objectives and results themselves. I couldn't agree more, and the article is headed in completely the wrong direction. Companies fail at using OKRs when they are rigid about treating OKRs as a measure of successfulness of the team. In my experience, the true goals almost always become clearer as the quarter progresses, and hitting the OKR objectives you set months ago is a sign that your team is not flexible enough to solve the real problems. Oversimplifying your work into key results also hides the true status. It overemphasizes measurable, but meaningless, metrics over truly checking the work for quality.
• larsrc 4y ago
  There's plenty of problems with OKRs, but almost all the OKRs I encountered were bottom-up. I'm sure it was different in other parts of the company, though. Working on developer tools is the best.
• krinchan 4y ago
  I think the only time I've seen OKRs work correctly is when they were super specific, singular, and very short term. The team I've seen use them generally picks something that aligns closely with something leadership wants to see progress on, that isn't a multi-year project, and is easy to measure directly. An example: Q1's goal was around tagging of AWS resources for billing. Our CBO came down with some new practices and automation around tagging and was having trouble getting traction in our BU with getting those tags in place for existing projects. The work was tedious, but not difficult. Progress is directly measurable (X of Y resources in Z account are tagged correctly) and the measuring is easily automated into a dashboard. It has a massive benefit for automating Change Management and Billing/Budgeting bureaucracy. I think OKRs have a place but I also think you just can't centralize them the way various big companies do. Even the "bottom-up" version just doesn't work because by the time the OKRs hit the C-Suite they're just mangled and incomprehensible. The OKR in my example never "escaped" past middle management. All the C-Suite knew was the CBO stopped whining about people not tagging their stuff.
  • theptip 4y ago
    I couldn't agree more here -- one of the biggest challenges I've faced (only rolling out OKRs to a ~50 person company, with just two layers, so nothing like Google-scale) was figuring out how to keep the different layers legible. I found the lower layer (team-facing) to be extremely useful, and the CEO-facing layer to be much more difficult. The dream is that you can imbue each employee with a "chain of objectives" that gives their work more purpose and clarity; I read an article on SpaceX that gave a rocket engineer saying something like "SpaceX's mission is to colonize Mars. In order to do that, one requirement is to build reusable rockets. My job is to build <rocket component X> in such a way as to enable cost-effective reusability." Perhaps that was a PR stunt but you can see how an employee with broader business context will be much more effective at making tactical adjustments within their domain of responsibility. In theory it should be possible to make some software to manage OKRs better than a spreadsheet; I looked at https://gtmhub.com/ https://gtmhub.com/ ages ago and didn't find it too useful. Maybe there is a good option now.
• ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  Objectives and key results (OKRs). It's baffling that software engineers don't understand they have to define a variable before using it.
• simonswords82 4y ago
  Tired of people such as author of this post jumping on the OKRs are bad bandwagon. OKRs are a tool - they are not inherently good or bad but used well they can be good and misused they can be bad. My source for this is when I first used OKRs to manage a small team they were fantastic. Really focussed our energy and drove the team forward. Now I'm trying to grow the business I'm struggling to make OKRs stick as well as they did previously. I truly believe I'm misusing them as a tool - and now need to rethink my approach.
  • maleldil 4y ago
    I think we all understand that tools are just tools. But when a tool is as widely misused as OKRs are, there's probably something wrong with the tool.
• dbrueck 4y ago
  OKRs just seem like another attempt in a long line of failed attempts to make development costs more predictable. I applaud the effort, but at any company I've worked, they've always turned into a stick used to beat on the underlings. I think I get how they could work in an ideal scenario, but the implementation of them has always failed, because the adopted process doesn't allow them to shift even as things arise outside your control, because they got tied to raises/bonuses in unfair ways, etc. My only "successful" encounter with OKRs was at a company that really bought into them hard, and so over the course of about half a year I got the teams in my group to slowly get ahead of the curve, such that 90+% of every next-quarter OKR items were things we were done with already, so that we could spend pretty much the whole quarter dealing with fires or secretly getting new stuff done for the next-next quarter.
• tonioab 4y ago
  80% of the value of OKRs is in the discussions they create, not in the actual list of OKRs that is produced in the process. The more an organization focuses on the technical aspects of producing a perfect OKR list or on "grading" the OKRs, the less value they will have. In particular, the "KR" part - quantifiable outcomes for the goals - usually helps in clarifying vague projects or ideas that may otherwise harm the team's focus. It's similar to the famous Warren Buffett's advice on identifying your priorities: pick 20 ideas you have and identify the top 5 goals that you absolutely want to get done; then, throw away the other 15 goals and make sure that you never get tempted to work on them.
  • 121789 4y ago
    Yeah, I agree with this. It's like writing a summary study sheet before an exam...the actual sheet is not that useful, but the work that went into it is. I've found OKRs to be pretty good for clarifying focus areas, both in my org and for personal development. Both the Os and the KRs will frequently change, but good managers/orgs don't really care about granular tracking
• bezospen15 4y ago
  OKRs are a joke made up by MBA product focused types to try and remain relevant
• Patrol8394 4y ago
  OKRs have become, like peer reviews, just one of those "corporate" things that you have to do, but that nobody really cares. My performance/bonus/promotions were never affected positive/negative, in any way by my OKR. Frequent re-org and change of direction very often invalidate any OKR one might even have tried to achieve. I wish companies realize that OKR, like working from the office, are things of the past that no longer fit in the world we live in, where things move at an incredible fast pace.
• msoad 4y ago
  Whenever I see a website making the SIGN UP button bold and big but SIGN IN small and faded I am reminded how toxic OKRs are and how it end up hurting the user and eventually the business. Making people mistakingly create new accounts indeed helps you hit your # of sign ups goal but at what cost?
• esel2k 4y ago
  Quiet shocked by the negative comments regarding OKR. As a Product Manager I constantly have to tell the story to management after what I go. Whats the goal… And so the Objective is usefull. Example: Increase usage - so I look for weekly active users increase by x. If I now set that as part of my salary target etc is a different question, I am not a fan off. But having a direction and looking ar various is a good solution. As always if OKR don’t help you, don’t do them. But still better to try to measure and improve to get a better outcome, than to blindly follow the CEO or other brainfarts…
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    As the resident 'fire-put-outer' engineer on my team whose priorities appear and vaporize every week or two, how do I quantify that work into quarterly OKR(s)?
    • Jensson 4y ago
      OKR are about the reason you get paid. The main reason they pay you seems to be to put out fires, so something like "Put out fires before things go bad" should be your OKR. If you did a good job putting out fires you get a high score. So many here say "OKR doesn't match what I really need to do", the answer is then always "then write down what you really need to do/focus on as your OKR". If your manager complains ask him "would you rather I work on this project instead of fixing a fire when a situation happens?", if he says yes then you should stop fixing those fires it isn't your job, if he says no then he should be fine with it being a part of your OKR's.
• 21723 4y ago
  I want to compare OKRs to Performance Reviews and Roadmapping. They’re all worthwhile ideas that can bring discipline and structure to the chaotic world of business, all dreaded by their participants for some reason. It's not mysterious, why those things are hated. In business, there are innate conflicts of interest. The company wants to suck as much out of people, and pay as little, as it can. You want... something else. Not to be exploited. To have a career. To make more money. Doesn't matter. The company is a paperclip maximizer and you are made of atoms it can use for something else. When you write OKRs, you have to generate information that will only be used against you--never for you. You have to pretend that you're doing this out of some sense of mutuality when, in fact, the situation is inherently adversarial. You might have a decent manager. Great. That happens sometimes. However, all these devices exist as ways for companies to make managers unable to protect their own people. That's why "Agile" time-tracking exists. That's why there are two management structures (product and people management) for reptilian executives to pit against each other. That's why performance reviews with failure quotas exist. For your boss to be able to protect you from the company is the last thing the company wants.
• chopete3 4y ago
  /s The best thing about OKRs People: It helps companies dump as many people/contractors as it can afford into a pod. Result: It supports this[0] kind of development process That said, there will always be one or two genuine workaholics in every pod who write enough code to show something tangible. That helps keep the OKR/Agile business go on forever. 0: https://imgur.com/a/IeKjsff https://imgur.com/a/IeKjsff
• balefrost 4y ago
  I think a lot of people's introduction to OKRs is John Doerr's book "Measure What Matters". That's where I learned about them. The book explains how Andy Grove introduced the practice at Intel and it was very effective. The book seems to attribute the success to the practice itself and seems to say "if you adopt OKRs, you will succeed like Intel did". I suspect that this success is misattributed. I suspect that Andy Grove was probably an excellent manager and I think he could have succeeded with something other than OKRs. I think he understood that what was really important was to get everybody across the organization to focus on essentially one big goal. He needed to make sure that everybody was pulling in the same direction and together, and OKRs provided a tool to do that. When my organization decided to implement OKRs, my question to my peers was "who is our Andy Grove?" If the people implementing OKRs focus too much on the practice and not enough on the motivation, I think you just end up with cargo-culting. The setting and tracking of KRs becomes the objective. So people treat it like busywork because OKRs don't really seem to matter - they just gets in the way of the "important" stuff. As one of my coworkers says, the title of the book is "Measure What Matters", but it's too easy to slide into "What Is Measured Is What Matters".
  • hysan 4y ago
    > I think he understood that what was really important was to get everybody across the organization to focus on essentially one big goal. I think “focus” is the keyword and am very glad to see this pointed out. The company I’m at has gone into OKRs thinking that it’ll be some magical, productivity unlocking tool. However, when multiple people asked what the company strategy was and what we were planning to focus on, the response was that they (C-suite leaders) wanted to continue tackling every opportunity. That they think having OKRs will lead to the same workforce being able to tackle more things. It was really weird to try and write OKRs where literally any measurable outcome could be considered success. It wasn’t a surprise when I read the OKRs for other teams and orgs and saw everyone rowing in different directions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    • collin128 4y ago
      This was the biggest struggle we had with OKRs, rocks, EOS, etc... Goals != Strategy and that took a while to realize. I wish I read Good Strategy Bad Strategy and The 7 Powers first.
• sigmaskipper 4y ago
  OKRs written properly drive business and development initiatives. They should be boiled down to the smallest team so that they can make a big impact on the business while not doing worthless dev work.
• brutus1213 4y ago
  I have heard about OKRs but feel I don't really grok them. How can the whole org have common goals. Consider an IT dept. In my company, they ONLY focus on security .. which means they spend all their time locking things down and making life intolerable for end users. From my perspective, security should be one metric but others would be subjective (user's perspective of IT systems and services) and objective (avg number of tickets, turn-around time, etc.). Even in a chip company, how does a sub-org like IT implement OKRs?
• ucdavisguy 4y ago
  So, in conclusion: 1-okrs should not be used to evaluate staff or be scored for pay raise decision. Oops, seems like some people still do that. 2-individuals should not be defining okrs at their level. I don’t see many people doing this anymore… even Google came out and advised against this practice as it leads to a lack of collaboration. And okrs end up looking like personal goals such as “buy house in Mountain View” 3-okrs should not be a to-do list, but looks like many, if not most, teams who think they are doing “okrs” simply make a to-do list and call it “okrs” which is ironic since okrs are about outcomes not output. 4-Okrs work best when leadership stops saying just “be innovative” and instead says “successfully expand the ecosystem of product ABC” Then describes why that objective is important and why now to educate and motivate the company. And then gets input to solicit how we will agree on what measurable progress will define the achievement of the objective so we all know what the goals are for the short term. But okrs do not work when krs look like “reduce the backlog” or “fix bugs” as those are not actually “krs” they are “to-do lists” 5- last point, and most importantly… okrs is a “verb”, a way of asking questions. You are doing okrs when you are asking yourself and others include the following questions: A-what is the most important area to focus on making progress in near term? Why? B-how will measure progress on the objective? C-what is the intended outcome of the task (because people will answer question B with a task list) If you ask these questions of yourself and others, good things happen. If you use okrs to make a to-do list or evaluate performance of staff, you will end up complaining that okrs don’t work. Your choice.
• deleted 4y ago
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