“Incentive structures work, so you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do, because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequence

“Incentive structures work, so you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do, because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can’t anticipate.” - Steve Jobs My current employer has similar problem. Company hired executives from a certain company about two years ago (hint: nepotism) and shifted towards incentivizing teams who met OKRs and OKRs were only product focused - features. Though this makes sense on the surface, what it ended up promoting is doing whatever to meet the OKRs. Short-term solution was often acceptable leaving huge tech debts and it is hard to justify doing anything to maintain system complexity in a reasonable bound because they do not directly correlate to an OKR. Personal developments aren't part of OKR so junior engineers who should be focusing on learning struggled. Team collaboration became a hostile because dependent teams will call out other teams for blocking a feature releases. Executives shared during all-hands their intent isn't to neglect personal development or team collaboration but problem was it doesn't matter to employees because those aren't what's incentivized. Perhaps if the team or personal performance review required feedback from them (360 degree) and takes a non-negligible portion, then things might have been different but it's still all about what I got done