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I was head of Engineering at exec level in different startups that grew past series B and started implementing OKRs... they never made sense to me fir the tech

I was head of Engineering at exec level in different startups that grew past series B and started implementing OKRs... they never made sense to me fir the tech side. I could see sales, marketing and customer success OKRs that were aligned with their day to day tasks. But for Engineering? I had all kind of nice reading OKRs: reduce mttr, mttf, reduce bugs, reduce feature implementation time, etc. But in reality the day-to-day work of Engineering was "build the shit that the product team defines", we had little influence in stories that went on each sprint, and invariably every time we pushed for some technical matter, business always trumped us and the stories went to the backlog.

nkrisc 4y ago
This is basically what I saw. All the objectives in engineering and product orgs basically boiled down to “do you job more gooder.”
andrekandre 4y ago
> But in reality the day-to-day work of Engineering was "build the shit that the product team defines", we had little influence in stories that went on each sprint, and invariably every time we pushed for some technical matter, business always trumped us and the stories went to the backlog. in the end i think this is basically the unstated goal... no one can say it out loud because its a bad look, so they use an intermediary (some framework like okrs, or scrum etc) to attain that "business trumps engineering" culture...