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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 compa

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.
  - djur 4y ago
    What this trainer was apparently describing as "bottom-up OKRs" sounds like what you're describing as "Kabuki theater". As for the top-bottom-top planning cycle, my experience has been that the "coordination and refinement" phase tends to mangle the OKRs beyond recognition. Management tends to "refine" what they were handed up by reframing it to sound like what their boss wants to hear. The concrete and achievable goals written by (or at least with the direct input of) the team get rewritten to sound more ambitious, but also more abstract, because management doesn't understand the goals as well as the team. The more layers of management you have, the more severe this effect, but it really only takes two or three to turn a solid list of team goals into a meaningless heap of synergy goo.
    - timr 4y ago
      Management doesn't write the KRs for the individual teams or people. If they are, they're engaged in something, it's just not OKR planning. Objectives and key results necessarily become less precise as you move up the org structure. > Management tends to "refine" what they were handed up by reframing it to sound like what their boss wants to hear. Sure, that always happens...but there's no system of management that is perfect. Humans gonna human. The only thing a system can do is make us aware of the biases of the people within it.
  - Tomte 4y ago
    Bottom-up OKRs are perfectly fine. But since objectives are often written at the top, with key results below them, this trainer believed that this is the top-down method. And bottom-up means defining key results and only after doing that deriving objectives from those. That's so obviously insane that I'm not surprised you misunderstood me, I should have written that more explicitly. :-)
    - timr 4y ago
      Ah, so you're saying he started from the KRs and back-calculated the O?
      - 4y ago
spookthesunset 4y ago
I actually don’t think it is too bad to reverse engineer OKRs from the backlog. Well, maybe not completely reverse engineer.. just strongly influence whatever the OKRs are. I guess… provided whatever is in the backlog is solving the highest priority problems.

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.
- djur 4y ago
  What this trainer was apparently describing as "bottom-up OKRs" sounds like what you're describing as "Kabuki theater". As for the top-bottom-top planning cycle, my experience has been that the "coordination and refinement" phase tends to mangle the OKRs beyond recognition. Management tends to "refine" what they were handed up by reframing it to sound like what their boss wants to hear. The concrete and achievable goals written by (or at least with the direct input of) the team get rewritten to sound more ambitious, but also more abstract, because management doesn't understand the goals as well as the team. The more layers of management you have, the more severe this effect, but it really only takes two or three to turn a solid list of team goals into a meaningless heap of synergy goo.
  - timr 4y ago
    Management doesn't write the KRs for the individual teams or people. If they are, they're engaged in something, it's just not OKR planning. Objectives and key results necessarily become less precise as you move up the org structure. > Management tends to "refine" what they were handed up by reframing it to sound like what their boss wants to hear. Sure, that always happens...but there's no system of management that is perfect. Humans gonna human. The only thing a system can do is make us aware of the biases of the people within it.
- Tomte 4y ago
  Bottom-up OKRs are perfectly fine. But since objectives are often written at the top, with key results below them, this trainer believed that this is the top-down method. And bottom-up means defining key results and only after doing that deriving objectives from those. That's so obviously insane that I'm not surprised you misunderstood me, I should have written that more explicitly. :-)
  - timr 4y ago
    Ah, so you're saying he started from the KRs and back-calculated the O?
    - 4y ago

spookthesunset 4y ago

I actually don’t think it is too bad to reverse engineer OKRs from the backlog. Well, maybe not completely reverse engineer.. just strongly influence whatever the OKRs are. I guess… provided whatever is in the backlog is solving the highest priority problems.