27 ms·

OKRs Are Bullshit

• Terr_ 3y ago
  > I think the biggest problem with OKR's laser focus on measurement, though, is that not everything should be measured, even if you can! That reminds me of a quote on overemphasizing quantitative data: > But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. > It is a short, fatal step from the statement, "There are many intangibles and imponderables that we can't put on our computers," to the statement, "Let's measure what we can and forget about the intangibles." This step poses an even greater danger to us in the future than in the past. —Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)
  • josephg 3y ago
    The Tao Te Ching starts with this line, which I adore: > The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao “The Tao” here means “the rules / way to live your life”. Essentially, the point is that if you try to write down a set of complete rules for how to act - either in life generally or at work, well, that ain’t it. This is always my problem with OKRs. They’ll always inevitably lead you away from what you actually should / need to do in a given moment if you were in tune with your wisdom. Instead of trying to codify what leaders do, we should practice staying present to what’s actually going on and practice wisdom - for whatever that means in the current context.
    • verisimi 3y ago
      > “The Tao” here means “the rules / way to live your life”. Yes, another way to say it is that the map is not the territory. PS, I would personal interpret tao to be something like 'life' or 'the universe', rather than rules.
      • joquarky 3y ago
        In his audiobook "Leave it Be", Alan Watts has a chapter on [dt]ao and translates it as "the course" and likens it to a flowing river. What I take away from that chapter is to incorporate wu wei¹ into your actions. It has helped me tremendously. ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei
    • hinkley 3y ago
      Put this way, we start to wander into Gödel territory.
    • zer0tonin 3y ago
      The Tao Te Ching makes for a great management book. I especially love chapter 17: Great rulers are hardly known by their subjects, Then come those the people draw near and praise, Then those the people hold in fear, Then those the people revile. When one lacks trust, one finds no trust. Reluctantly, without boasting; Perform actions, accomplish deeds; The people will say it happened naturally.
  • tpm 3y ago
    That's the premise of Seeing Like a State, except that the State actively destroys anything that is unintelligible to it, and instead builds what can be measured.
    • Terr_ 3y ago
      By strange coincidence, that's on my library holds. To offer a random new edge on the tenuous graph: "Lying For Money: How legendary frauds reveal the workings of the world."
      • pjc50 3y ago
        That's an excellent book. If you enjoy it, try (hard to find) "The Man Who Stole Portugal".
  • hinkley 3y ago
    > The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. This is a summary of science and medicine practically since the Enlightenment. Is it a wonder that anti intellectualism is so rampant in North America now? Intellectuals are assholes. You can really only trust the handful of us who defect, and even that has limits.
    • jauntywundrkind 3y ago
      Some things are very measurable & isolatable. Writing code & making products is extremely multi-domensional. And most of these dimensions aren't easy to rank. Look, I really appreciate the photos we have made on the back of science &s experimentation. But in the act of creation there seems to be countless intangibles, little directions & flourished that build to set a very subtle implicit course. I see so much compromise for only doing things right now that have direct immediate results, and the people who argue and push that way have always seems like bullies (sometimes willfull sometimes ignorant). I really think you should step down off that ledge you are on, willing yourself to abandon. It doesn't seem right, it doesn't seem justified. You yourself are using a hard line to disregard & discard (which seems to be what you are apoplectic over), which is also ungraceful.
    • joquarky 3y ago
      Research the Vienna Circle¹ to see why we are in this state. There is so much more to life than that which can be measured. ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Circle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Circle
• ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  When things are growing, any nonsense is thought to be "the way". OKRs, matrixes, oh they must be so smart with all those "systems thinking". Somehow none of those systems work when things are going down. Look at Google and Intel today, none of those OKRs saved them did it? It's the same thing with CEOs. I don't remember which book it was, but it showed how the CEO changing didn't matter at all but was just natural market cycles.
  • mjburgess 3y ago
    In many cases leadership are best when they're effect-neutral on the performance of a company/project/etc. Consider coaches of two sports team: if they're both equally good, their effects wont be noticeable from the performance of either team. In a competitive environment, leadership ought wash-out if its any good. It's only bad leadership which will be noticed.
  • apienx 3y ago
    > When things are growing, any nonsense is thought to be "the way". Modeling reality properly is hard. Cargo cults are less cognitively expensive to establish.
    • joquarky 3y ago
      As I get into my late 40s, all I see is cargo cults anymore. Not just in tech, but everywhere. I thought we had people who knew what they are doing, but it feels like everything is being run by silver-tongued conmen now.
  • roenxi 3y ago
    I think "OKRs" exemplify this best because after reading the wiki page I'm not sure that they exist. As pointed out in the article, it seems to be a term that describes ... nothing in particular. Every serious industry since at least the days of Toyota's rise has used metrics. I don't think the tech industry has ever shown me something that has improved on what traditional industries use. The only change is the underlying processes of the tech industry are too chaotic to harness (what management process gives us Google? Given that we have literally 1 Google do we have enough evidence to reject it being built with a different management style? No. On the other hand Toyota could only exist with Toyota's management style.) and so any amount of management quickly becomes futile. Time will pass, we'll hit the boring part of the S curve in processor improvement and then management culture will start to be a factor. And the industry will be a lot more boring, less growth focused and care a bit more about consistency and reliability.
• jdlyga 3y ago
  At this point, what project management technique actually is working well?
  • jbl0ndie 3y ago
    Certainly not SAFe, despite what the project management department will tell you.
    • al_borland 3y ago
      I had a PM pull up the visual to explain SAFe to me. I just started laughing and said, “no”.
  • threeseed 3y ago
    Project management is about organising people. And people are hard to organise. So they all work as well as they can depending on what your situation and goals are.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    In my experience, but I know I am unconventional, half-organized chaos. You do need motivated, good people for that so. The chaos bit is those people figurong out their stuff themselves, while the organized bit is szrict following up on deliverables, relevant deadlines, flexibility on not-so-relevant ones and, this is crucial, step in in to provide guidance, support decision maling and coordination between peoole and teams. If the latter means setting up a dozen 30 minute meetings between two people, the be it. Only gets you so far so. And needs everyone being aware of customer needs and requirements.
    • mjburgess 3y ago
      "chaos" is what relatively unproductive people, or people-at-arms-length call it. "Doing the job" is another term. I've had to remind people several times not to apologise for "causing chaos" when the outcome of this supposed chaos is that the project was successful. The purpose of your job is success, not the perception of others that their charts lacked forewarning of all the unknowables needed to successful execute anything. Chaos in many cases is just what you call the experience of looking at a chart, or a model of any kind, when you're familiar with the reality it's supposed to depict
• mjburgess 3y ago
  I think a fundamental problem with all management culture is that fundamentally, managers do not want plans to change. I suspect there's some systematic issue at work here, but in the kinds of people who are selected for these roles, how they're evaluated, and so on. I guess change requires you to be able to argue for change, and against the status quo, and management culture is the opposite of this. Whilst the super-structure of management culture exists, all these systems will be corrupted to fit it. They aren't fundamentally engaging with any real-world incentive structure.
  • intellectronica 3y ago
    From my experience, the opposite is true. Managers want to change, and most of the people they manage are extremely reluctant to changing anything, and if they do change it's often random and undisciplined. Tools like strategic planning and OKRs are how managers and executives implement change at scale.
    • mjburgess 3y ago
      I think my analysis needs some more depth then. I'd say most people are adverse to change. Probably key people at c-level and some people across the hierarchy are not. I'm talking about when there's been a plan established, and when that plan needs to change. Since managers are the implementers, in my sense of the term, not the planners -- they are highly change-adverse. Whereas plans are implemented "on" the people who are best placed to say change is needed, and managers are typically unable to incorporate this feedback. Perhaps because they cannot persuade the planner c-suite above that change is required. My underlying point was more about how organisations need to be analysed in terms of these incentive structures, say, in more Machiavellian terms -- and what happens with "Manifesto types" is they have no analysis of this, and instead come up with various dogmas that just become corrupted to align with organisational practice.
      • intellectronica 3y ago
        Thanks, I understand what you mean better now. I think it's indeed the case that the higher up the hierarchy you go people actually tend to be less averse to change. But also that they do not receive feedback from the people doing the work that can be extremely useful for directing that change, and so they end up sticking to plans that are suboptimal. At the extreme, people in management can be dogmatic and deaf. But often, they do understand the need to listen and update their plans, and that's just not easy to achieve. The best orgs and managers find creative ways to enable this bi-directional exchange and let their planning benefit from the input of the people who engage with the work day-in-day-out and have the domain expertise and fast feedback loop.
• ajkjk 3y ago
  OKRs are bullshit because they rot the entire willpower-based culture of an organization and replace it with a mindless metric-optimizing machine. People should be judged by their ability to do a good job at their jobs, not by their ability to hit stupid metrics at the expense of everything else. As far as I can tell being "data-driven" is completely toxic to long-term organizational health.
  • vkazanov 3y ago
    And how should one measure the "good at their jobs" metric?
    • ajkjk 3y ago
      By one's intelligent opinions. You hired them, gauge to the best of your ability if they're doing the job you hired them to do, at a level you deem acceptable. Your boss should measure you the same way.
      • vkazanov 3y ago
        This makes sense in a small company context when, say, a competent CTO/CEO personally knows everyone and can resolve conflicts, bottlenecks, disfunctions quickly. But what if a company in question is a relatively big, 1000s of employees, and something is clearly wrong in the org. Both managers and employees are friends, seemingly competent, have all the explanations at hand and all the right excuses. And nothing gets done.
        • willsmith72 3y ago
          i don't even think it does make sense for small companies, they can benefit hugely from setting clear, public commitments about what they're working towards focus is one of the most important characteristics in a startup, because time is too short to waste.
          • vkazanov 3y ago
• esafak 3y ago
  OKRs were brought into Google by an Intel-trained mentor and VC called John Doerr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doerr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doerr That 70% figure is simply to suggest that you should set stretch goals. One good thing that can come out of setting outlandish goals is that it forces you to take a revolutionary rather than evolutionary approach. I would not say you should do this for everything, but it seems to have worked for Google.
  • intellectronica 3y ago
    FWIW in many companies and organisations, including large parts of Google (from personal experience), OKRs are not interpreted with the 70% benchmark, but more along the lines of "this is what we want to achieve, more or less - more is better, a bit less is acceptable, if we didn't mostly achieve what was specified in the KRs that's not good enough". Some objectives lend themselves easily to 70%+ targets, and others benefit from tighter control - that's context-dependent.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • dilyevsky 3y ago
    Until everyone understands that your "stretch goal" is not a real goal and changes nothing which is what always happens.
• deathanatos 3y ago
  > should you complete 70% of your goals to 100%? Or should you complete 100% of your goals at 70%? 70% of the key result is supposed to be a good, attainable goal, with 100% of the key result being the "stretch" goal. > the response is always, in classic "no true Scotsman" style, "well, you're just not doing OKRs correctly." No, there's a definition of what a KR is. And in my experience, most companies fail to set KRs, instead writing down what amounts to nothing more than a goal as it usually fails to be measurable. (A discrete boolean "we did it, or we didn't do it", isn't a KR. There's no 70% of a boolean. TypeError, operation is not defined for bool.) > I guess my question is: if nobody in the industry does OKRs "correctly", why are we still trying to do them at all? I have no idea. That'd be the bullshit. If you're C-suite, enforce whatever goal-setting framework you want upon your company, but stop trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
• solatic 3y ago
  People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process. It's not a problem specifically with OKRs, it's a problem with the whole concept that if HR can just put in this one simple system then doing so will be magically motivational and the whole company will go to ludicrous speed. There is no replacement for good people. Not in leadership positions, and not in IC positions. Recruit for strengths, hire for culture, train for gaps. No process, least of which OKRs, can make up for recruiting weak people, people who don't fit your culture, or people not interested in personal growth (i.e. filling gaps).
  • dheera 3y ago
    Yep, this. Also, every time some new-manager-on-the-block decides that we have to implement "agile" everything just goes downhill from there. I don't even know what "agile" means anyway, what about "nimble" or "dextrous" instead, as long as people are not understanding each other, they all mean "let's fuck shit up every 2 weeks"
    • moi2388 3y ago
      To me agile brings up a picture of Jean-Claude van Damme doing the splits. Because that’s what it feels like trying to manage expectations from management va stakeholders whilst also having daily meetings to discuss our effort and how we can remain lean and agile all the while building up tech debt
    • justinclift 3y ago
      Yeah. Instead of spending money on improving AGI, most places should spend it on improving WIS. ;)
  • Arisaka1 3y ago
    The first time my company decided to implement OKR's I told my manager that I'm already motivated by my own standards, and using OKR's as a carrot on a stick that I know it's deliberately and exclusively out of range is absurd. He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.
• fabmilo 3y ago
  Click bait title from someone that doesn't understand the true value of OKRs
  • Marazan 3y ago
    Is it to create a set of easily gameable measures so that you can get your performance review bonus?
    • fabmilo 3y ago
      OKRs are not merely tools for creating a set of easily game-able measures for performance review bonuses. Rather, they are a strategic framework designed to establish focus, inspire and build cohesion within teams. The essence of OKRs lies in setting ambitious goals (objectives) paired with concrete, measurable actions (key results) to achieve those goals. This framework encourages teams to think beyond the status quo and strive for exceptional outcomes. The success of OKRs depends heavily on the culture of the organization and the mindset of its members. They require a team that is not only willing but eager to tackle ambitious challenges—teams that view 'impossible' goals not as deterrents but as opportunities for innovation and growth. This mindset shift, from seeing goals as mere targets to viewing them as a path to organizational and personal development, is what differentiates OKRs from other goal-setting methodologies. Furthermore, the keywords 'functional' and 'team' are critical. A functional team, in this context, means a group of individuals with a clear understanding of their roles, responsibilities, and how they contribute to the collective objectives. The term 'team' emphasizes collaboration and shared responsibility for outcomes. OKRs are most effective when they are embedded within a culture that values transparency, accountability, and continuous learning. You may argue that OKRs can be manipulated for short-term gains or to superficially meet targets. However, this criticism overlooks the fundamental purpose of OKRs, which is not just to achieve specific metrics but to foster a culture of ambition and continuous improvement. When implemented with integrity and supported by effective leadership, OKRs can transform the way organizations approach their goals, driving innovation and performance across all levels. If you don't have a cohesive functional team, you have bigger cultural problems to solve than OKRs implementation.
• pompino 3y ago
  I think people should implement their own ideas and systems first, prove it to us, and then preach about why a competing idea/system is wrong. To me, it makes zero sense to tell someone they're wrong, when those people are seeing results.
  • mcluck 3y ago
    This is nonsense. You're allowed to criticize a system without having a solution. For what it's worth, I've worked at a few OKR driven companies and it sure seemed like a waste of time. Metrics and measurements shifted, goals changed as the product changed, and we wasted time measuring the thing instead of doing the thing. The measurements for OKRs never lead to meaningful action. Meaningful action was driven by customer interviews, market analysis, and R&D.
    • pompino 3y ago
      It makes complete sense if you don't strawman comments in bad-faith. This isn't about "allow" or "disallow" - there is no attempt here to abridge somebody's free speech. Anyone can criticize anything. It takes genuine effort to create a new system that works across an industry - if you think you can do better, go for it - I'll cheer you on.
      • Marazan 3y ago
        There isn't a system, new or otherwise, that works across the industry. The belief that there can be is a root cause of bad systems like OKRs.
        • pompino 3y ago
          You are entitled to your opinion, but pro tip: Telling people they're wrong when a system is working for them doesn't get the point across. Often those same people are well aware that each system has its flaws and no system is perfect.
          • 3y ago
• willsmith72 3y ago
  so many issues straight away > should you complete 70% of your goals to 100%? Or should you complete 100% of your goals at 70%? explicitly addressed in various articles and books. you average your scores across objectives and KRs to get a score. So the answer is both, looking for average score of 0.7 > if your key result is "migrate 100% of users to the new system" and you only migrate 70%, guess what? Now you're stuck maintaining two systems in perpetuity so you're going to migrate all of your users in a big bang moment?? hell no. it'll be bit by bit no matter what. of course you're maintaining two systems, that's a sign of a good migration, not a bad one. the KR just helps you get done with it faster of course there are valid criticisms of okrs, and many (most?) teams get them wrong. but saying "okrs are bullshit" has become a common trope for new-age companies who use that as a way to differentiate themselves. do you really think Andy Grove and John Doerr are bullshit artists?
  • FranksTV 3y ago
    It's not that I think Andy Grove is a bullshit artist, it's that I'm pretty sure the person assigning the OKRs isn't Andy Grove.
    • willsmith72 3y ago
      bullshit management is bullshit management that's a company/people problem, not a tool problem
      • zelphirkalt 3y ago
        But wait: "People over processes and tools."
  • Marazan 3y ago
    How do KRs help you migrate faster?
    • willsmith72 3y ago
      the whole purpose behind an okr is alignment. a public, committed KR for % of users migrated helps a team get there faster than not having one, and signifies to everyone at all levels what's important and what's being worked on that's the theory behind okrs in general
• maytc 3y ago
  Helping teams know what to say "no" to is the real power of OKR. You do that by having the entire organization's O and KR roll up and cascade down. My Objectives directly roll up to my parent organization's Key Result. My parent org's Objectives rolls up to their parent's KR, and so on to the top. Then, you have the top-level check downwards if the sets of OKRs still make sense in their entirety. Unfortunately, I have never seen any organization I was with ever do this...
  • Macha 3y ago
    That requires the high level OKRs to not be vague BS, because otherwise the team wanting you to do extra work can justify everything. Like the exec level OKR might be something like "customer first", which literally any feature work could be justified under (or is often used as an excuse to try push out needed technical work)
    • darkwater 3y ago
      I have seen company-wide Objectives that are basically euphemisms for "make more money". No shit, Sherlock! I can be a CEO as well!
• robust-cactus 3y ago
  I think so much of the commentary misses the point. Goals drive focus, they help folks say no and ask "how does project x help get more sign-ups?". If nothing else it's a communication tool. If you want to get another team to do something, show them how they'll succeed at their goal and help yours too. The opposite of a system like this means - every VP has an initiative they're trying to push and now there are 50 new projects to maintain and eventually sunset.
• intellectronica 3y ago
  OKRs are good for solving the problem of communicating strategic decisions in a meaningful way in large organisations. Without such a device, it is common for people "on the ground" to not have a good understanding of the priorities of people several levels above them, with the result that they can do great work and still not move in the direction the company decided to move in. It is easy to misunderstand that and trash OKRs when you're the "leaf" in an organisational tree. But ask your manager, or their manager, or your VP or CEO, and they'll tell you that they need a device for effectively communicating to everyone in the org what the priorities are.
  • skrebbel 3y ago
    I don’t understand this. Why can’t they just tell them? How does it being an OKR make the communication more effective? (Note: I mean this literally. I’ve never worked in an organization with OKRs, all I know about OKRs comes from HN. I want to understand your point better, not criticize it)
    • intellectronica 3y ago
      Imagine that you are an executive managing an org with 3000 people in 4-5 levels of hierarchy. That's common in large companies. You get to "talk" to the enire team perhaps a once a quarter, in some town-hall event where most people aren't really listening, and maybe send a mass email every now and then, which no-one reads. You get to talk to your immediate management team more often, and they talk to their reports, and so on, but of course whatever message you've had is greatly diluted, sometimes comically so, like in a game of telephone. People are not robots, their understanding and communication is very ... creative. And context-dependent. And self-motivated. So that's not effective. Most people need to engage with the message you have - your priorities, changes in direction, specific goals - on a daily basis. Otherwise you are not really giving them any direction. And so you need some device to enable that. And OKRs are a part of the solution.
      • skrebbel 3y ago
        I understand the problem, thanks, but I still don’t understand how an OKR is a good solution.
• nox101 3y ago
  They certainly are for me. I fill them out with my manager's help and then 100% ignore them because they generally have nothing to do with the things that end up actually needing to be done.
  • bad_username 3y ago
    And nothing to do with the actual indicators of performance that matter to your manager and their manager.
• brotchie 3y ago
  Used to think OKRs were total bullshit, until I started working on a project spanning multiple teams with cross-org dependencies. OKRs are effectively a quarterly negotiation to get alignment across teams so that large, complex, projects get done on time. They create accountability and the ability to escalate up the chain when a team you have a dependency on isn't prioritizing what you need to unblock your project. Generally, if you think OKRs are bullshit, it means they're being applied at a too granular level, or misapplied in an organization that doesn't require strong collaboration across team or org boundaries. It "seems" easy and obvious when you're a leaf node how a team, org, company should be run and coordinated, but when you actually try and do it, and lead, it's nowhere near as easy as it seems. OKRs, misapplied, suck. But there has to be some way to get large groups of people to align on specific targets. Effectively something like them have to exist.
  • smugglerFlynn 3y ago
    This. There is a heavy lifting issue hiding behind using OKRs as a tool: you need to build an organization that is able to held teams accountable, and has a working escalation chain. The prerequisite for OKR is that your organization is driven by objectives which cascade from C-level down to teams, and then all the way back via feedback loops, instead of VPs and directors micromanaging every link of the chain on the go. Drive-by style of objective setting, when things get randomly thrown at random teams, is another problem that needs to be resolved first. Your OKRs will fail without building this kind of management culture. And you’ll be surprised how many orgs are not working that way, and insane amount of resistance people in the org have when you try to implement these (logically efficient) practices.
  • bhawks 3y ago
    OKRs are primarily a communication tool, then a prioritization tool, then an execution tool. If you don't need to improve comms or prioritization then OKRs are of limited value.
  • drdrek 3y ago
    Bad org culture will be bad no matter the mechanisms. You can use OKRs to be toxic and you can use Agile to be toxic and you can use your own bespoke bullshit to be toxic. There is no management framework that can fix bad culture because its only a part of it. Incentives structure, existing culture, hiring practices, company life cycle, market conditions, etc all contribute to it and no amount of data can fix those. Managing a company is like parenting, if you think that you can replace attention, care and hard work with a framework you are doing it wrong.
• KingOfCoders 3y ago
  OKRs without strategy are just random walk.
• Stranger43 3y ago
  The problem with OKR and every other fad managment system weather it be agile. SaFE, or LEAN is that they are all essentially cargocults once the leave the orgnisation that spawned them. The problem is that organisations that feels the need to import management dogma's are trying to avoid doing the hard and potentially ego-destroying for upper management task of examining why they arent getting the performance from their mid management they want, by simply copying in the surface aspect of someone more succesfull, Add to this that there is a surpricingly small number of people both in management and programming that have ever managed a project from cradle to grave at all let alone done so successfully and you get a culture of management consultants that have never been with a project long enough to watch the pretty facade crumble diue to a lack of solid foundations.
  • pvdoom 3y ago
    Hell yeah! And on top of that management rarely learns or understands that they need to think and design what their organization should be, nor that their power to introduce change is much more limited than they think.
  • willsmith72 3y ago
    sounds like you've just worked in a bunch of bad organisations btw, agile is not a management system, and a tech worker who thinks that it is raises a huge red flag to me
    • Stranger43 3y ago
      Agile is everything to everyone because it's derived from an manifesto made up of non-actionable feel-good slogans but is very often used as a shorthand for a set of project management practices, that have an less then perfect real world track record.
    • syndicatedjelly 3y ago
      What does the red flag tell you to do?
  • des429 3y ago
• Ygor 3y ago
  OKRs are just a tool. They can work pretty well if you have competent people and apply them correctly. But, that can be said of any other project management system, goal management system, gamification system... Some are worse, some are better, but most have books written about them that heavily feature survivor bias and correlations/causation bias. The OKR book assigns most of Google's success on OKRs. Assuming there is an alternate reality somewhere, where Google chose SMART goals in that critical point in time. In that timeline Google of today is one floor below Yahoo in some random Verzion corporate building. I haven't seen a goal management system yet that I cannot destroy with bad management and misaligned incentives.
• 28304283409234 3y ago
  My first question when my manager tells me it is time to plan OKRs: "Sure thing! Show me the OKRs of C-Level so I can align with those." They never deliver. I never do OKRs. We all win.
  • koliber 3y ago
    What do you do instead to drive non-trivial goals that take a quarter or longer to accomplish? How do you plan the work? How do you motivate yourself and your team? How do you show progress? How do you communicate with other teams on whom you depend to hit your goal? OKRs are one tool to do the above. There are others. Curious how you do it.
• n49o7 3y ago
  It seems to me that companies might want to implement OKRs as a way to align everyone on the same goals and check progress. The actual numbers aren't too important since everyone is free to miss their targets. OKRs don't give as much steering control as some might hope.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  my experience with OKR's is that it doesn't really apply to the product or specifically software engineering teams like, whatever the CEO is doing and whatever the HR team is doing or whatever the sales team is doing are not processes that affect or should include the engineering teams in that way. The OKR process - in its unfalsifiable glory - doesn't really have the utility to all teams. for example "don't do binary goals" is just a waste of time then there are some implementations where personal OKR's are the final end of the cascading concept of OKR's, and that's a waste of time too. oh like learn rust? or like go hiking? pass leetcode hards so I get the f* out of here? its not the company's business but done on company devices or collaborative tools for all or an admin to judge then there's the "if you meet your goals then you weren't ambitious enough", okay tell that to the product manager who is reducing the story points per sprint every two weeks because the team as a whole can't meet any goal and that's the PM's most innovative reaction and then you're going to spend half the quarter doing OKR rituals on top of that, christ
  • koliber 3y ago
    Often OKRs are forced into engineering teams and the result is that they don't deliver value. However, there are ways of doing OKRs in engineering teams as well. I recently wrote up a little account of how I used an OKR around linter errors to get a team to take quality more seriously. It worked surprisingly well: https://koliber.com/articles/reduce-tech-debt-with-okrs https://koliber.com/articles/reduce-tech-debt-with-okrs It's not that OKRs such. It's that they are often done in a ham-fisted fashion.
    • yieldcrv 3y ago
      That tale is inspirational, the OKR aspect of it seems not important. You were having weekly engineering meetings regardless. You were giving positive reinforcement regardless. Its like because your team were subjugated by a hamfisted OKR feifdom, you conformed a goal into an OKR. Would you have ignored this issue if the OKR didn't tell you to go find something to be an issue? Was the maturity of your development team driven by your drive to find a problem, and then the root of the problem, because the OKR told you to find something?
• poisonborz 3y ago
  You need _some_ system for accountability on goals and to cut down tasks to units that go through some workflow (specification, implementation, testing). That's all it can and should do. Beyond that it's only about motivated, capable people. You can't create culture with a methodology. You can bash all of them the sun if the org is just aping it and the culture is not there.
• iamleppert 3y ago
  Reminds me of the time I had an OKR to reduce page load time by some ridiculous amount. The speed wasn’t even bad and there was no theory about how exactly it would help the product. We didn’t sell ads or anything like that. We ended up achieving our goal by greatly reducing the quality of all images to almost nothing, such that they looked like a rorschach test, and measuring performance on a fast internal network. Management was so happy they bought a white sheet cake and had the graph of improvement drawn on it in icing. The next quarter, customers started to complain and a new OKR was set to improve image quality by 50%. So we just reverted all the prior changes, and once again victory was declared. This company operated like this for the entire year I was there. I finally had to quit because I started to question my own sanity. Ever since that experience I have PTSD whenever someone says the word OKR.
  • kubb 3y ago
    Classic management.
  • scott_w 3y ago
    I have a comment with my own issues with OKRs but I do want to stick up for OKRs here: this really is a management problem and, let's be honest, they'd have fucked up any framework that was put in place (and a lack of framework would have probably been just as bad!)
    • datadrivenangel 3y ago
      The problem is bad management. A handful of incompetent people can really mess up an organization.
    • sc68cal 3y ago
      Yes but it's always framed as a failure of either procedure or the people they manage that failed them. Management itself can never fail it can only be failed
      • scott_w 3y ago
        I really don’t see how this counters my point at all…
• raffraffraff 3y ago
  OKRs are for underpants gnomes
• scott_w 3y ago
  I really liked this post and it hit on a few problems I've encountered when trying to use OKRs: namely, what I'm going to call the "we know what we want to do, so just fucking do it" problem. I've been guilty of trying to contort things into an "OKR-like" view of the world when really, the answer was to just say "this quarter, we'll work on this task." It makes everything difficult when I'm then asked to turn this into a roadmap of things we'll do. I do think it's worth remembering that John Doerr's implementation of OKRs at Intel actually did include binary goals. I remember reading the book and seeing "complete design and begin fabrication of chip X by Y date" (I'm paraphrasing because I don't feel like going through the book to find it). Yes, the higher-level objective was "establish Intel as the top chip maker" but that, by necessity, included "actually make the chip."
  • mewpmewp2 3y ago
    Nowadays you can write up what you really need to do, then ask ChatGPT to make BS OKRs out of them, with numbers to sound just impressive enough, but really easy to achieve even when you do the correct things unrelated to the OKRs.
    • boredemployee 3y ago
      I love how ChatGPT is good enough for the boring corporate BS.
    • scott_w 3y ago
      Honestly, I don't like this approach. I think it's better to just write down what needs to be done and say "this is what I'm doing." At least that's clear to everyone instead of everyone in the org trying to BS each other.
      • mewpmewp2 3y ago
        I mean that's from the individual perspective. The alternative is to start telling everyone that OKRs are BS, and then have everyone on one level above you do the same to have it make any difference. You are asked to provide OKRs, everyone else are doing it and the only way not to do it is if you start your crusade or I guess just say "no" and see what happens?
• hinkley 3y ago
  Wikipedia: “The development of OKR is generally attributed to Andrew Grove who introduced the approach to Intel in the 1970s” Yes, let’s copy management strategies from a company that is currently trying to disintegrate. Worked so well for Six Sigma (GE and Motorola both fell apart just a couple years after SS hit its apex).
  • Macha 3y ago
    I mean, they had like 30 years of success after it was implemented , before the current troubles, so at least it's very unlikely that OKRs were the cause of the collapse (compared to hubris in deciding how much they needed to invest in product development once their primary competitor was on the ropes)
    • hinkley 3y ago
      I’m not saying the processes are necessarily bunk (well, except digital SS is definitely hot garbage), but something about popularizing them is rotten. Like we are getting someone’s castoffs.
• anymouse123456 3y ago
  I endured the OKR fiasco at Google. It was pure waste. See... one must carefully calibrate OKRs such that only 80% of them are accomplished. Do too much, and you were sandbagging. Do too little and you're not a competent planner. You cannot imagine the stupid horse shit that would wrap every quarter as managers would try to manipulate outcomes to look like they hit 80% dead on.
  • nine_zeros 3y ago
    > Do too much, and you were sandbagging. Do too little and you're not a competent planner. BS processes with BS metric targets lead to BS outcomes. In this case, the management is too scared of their own performance reviews (a process) to be unable to take risks (<80% complete) or to accept success (>80% complete). They would much rather spend months massaging 1 quarter's OKR to fit the 80% bounding box than do any work end-to-end that helps the business.
• koliber 3y ago
  OKRs are often done wrong. I would not go as far as call them "bullshit" or useless. Just because many people are doing something incorrectly, does not mean that there is no way of doing it well in a way that provides value. The biggest bullshit with OKRs is that many organizations go through the motions of doing OKRs, but are actually just making up numbers and sweating through the end-of-quarter presentation hoping no one asks hard questions. One of the things that is wrong with OKRs is that people often focus on the wrong thing. There is a lot of room in how to do OKRs. People pick some of the fringe things and focus on them as if they are the most important thing. This article cites two of such things. While many people do say that OKRs should be ambitious, there is no fundamental rule that says that OKRs need to be ambitious. It's perfectly OK to do OKRs where you aim for 100% success. Or you can use OKRs to get the ball moving and overcome static friction on an initiative and be happy at the end of the quarter that things got moving. Or you can aim for 70% completion like many people do. The key thing is that "aiming for 70%" is not a defining characteristic of OKRs. It's one way of doing them, but it is not a defining feature of OKRs. The article also says that OKRs need to cascade. Again, this is flavor of doing OKRs. OKRs should support higher-level organizational goals. However, making them cascade perfectly through multiple levels of an organization is "hard mode". In many companies, there is a stated top-level goal, and then OKRs need to support it in some way, without necessarily cascading. That's fine. It's also perfectly OK to use OKRs in isolation in some department to advance toward an important goal, even if no one else in the company uses OKRs. If these are not defining characteristics of OKRs, then what is? Here's how I implement OKRs on my teams. These are the three golden rules of OKRs: 1. The objective (O in OKRs) sets the direction in which you are going 2. The key results (KRs in OKRs) are the rulers which measure your progress 3. MOST IMPORTANT: You must update your OKRs every week, come hell or high water. If you cannot update the value, add a note about what kept you from updating it, and spend time working on that. This rule is the forcing function that will make your OKRs work well eventually. Start like that. It's hard enough to follow these core rules. Adding alignment, flowery language, reach goals, and whatever else comes on top of it makes OKRs more complicated. Once you get the basics down and you get a feel for OKRs, you should improve your OKR game. But start small. So yeah, the way many organizations do OKRs is bullshit. However, OKRs are not bullshit in general. I'm kind of passionate about OKRs in engineering. I've spent a decade at 15Five building a system for tracking OKRs, and getting teams to use them well. Here are some things I wrote about how to get OKRs working in an engineering team. https://koliber.com/articles/opinionated-essential-guide-to-okr-wrangling https://koliber.com/articles/opinionated-essential-guide-to-... https://koliber.com/articles/top-okr-mistakes https://koliber.com/articles/top-okr-mistakes https://koliber.com/articles/reduce-tech-debt-with-okrs https://koliber.com/articles/reduce-tech-debt-with-okrs
• nhggfu 3y ago
  the irony is that nobody at google really uses them, afaik
• ZeWaren 3y ago
  The way I've seen OKRs work so far was always the same: Top management defines a strategy for the company. Each department (commercial, marketing, product, etc.) create department OKRs from the company OKRs. The year/term starts. Each department comes to the implementation teams (product, IT, BI, support, etc.) with a HUGE list of poorly defined objectives or tasks. The implementation teams only have limited capacity and can only deliver maybe 15-20% of what everyone wants. No one actually thought of checking if the objectives have any reasonable possibility of being delivered at all during the term. Optional drama to decide what's going to be actually worked on might happen. When the term ends, and if communication isn't a disaster between the departments, some MVPs are delivered. A new term starts, and either the previous objectives are continued, or they're simply forgotten in favor of new ones. Rinse and repeat. edit: formatting and typo.
• SilverBirch 3y ago
  This seems oddly badly argued. Take the criticism of 70%, the author essentially poses the question "What do you mean by 70%" and goes on to illustrate an example of where it is extremely obvious what it means. It's almost a malicious compliance attitude towards OKRs. Ok so the objective was to migrate, we got to 70%, well I guess then we're just going to stop doing any more work on it and cause an obviously preventable bad situation. Of course the goal is 100% migration, and if you get to 70% migration you've done well but not hit your stretch goal, of course you're then going to still spend time doing it. The real question is what is the alternative to OKRs? Is the author literally just advocating for not setting objectives? How do you propose to align what the engineers are doing with what the company needs? Are we suggesting we don't create metrics to measure our progress towards those objectives? Yes, there is some overhead in creating ways to measure the results, but the alternative - not measuring the results - is terrible!
  • scott_w 3y ago
    > It's almost a malicious compliance attitude towards OKRs. Ok so the objective was to migrate, we got to 70%, well I guess then we're just going to stop doing any more work on it and cause an obviously preventable bad situation. This is a misunderstanding of 70%. The idea is 100% should be a very high standard e.g. increase revenue by $3bn this year, such that even if you hit 70% you'd be happy. I don't think it's specifically about stopping people slacking off and more about pushing people to think differently about the problems they need to tackle. For some things, this is really helpful (such as increasing revenue, customers, etc.) In these cases, if you reach the end of the quarter and stop doing the things that were aiming for that stretch goal, everyone should still be pretty happy with what they achieved. It falls over when you want to do something concrete (like migrating users). It's not a stretch goal at all, it's just the requirements! The 70% target simply doesn't apply in the slightest to this type of work. It's not an argument against setting objectives, just pointing out that OKRs—as taught—doesn't work for this type of work.
    • magicalhippo 3y ago
      So the 70% is to 100% as ten is to eleven[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE
• nickd2001 3y ago
  Years ago I worked at a place where we were meant to set objectives to please HR. Instead, at the end of year we always found what we'd needed to work on had completely changed, so instead, we retrofitted objectives for the work we'd actually done. So, hacked the system / circumvented the spirit of it, but did a very effective end of year annual review i:e what have you actually achieved this year, are you/we happy with that, what do you ideally wanna achieve next year (with caveat that we can't necessarily predict what we'll actually need to do), any training or anything else you need to achieve that. I recommend this approach to anyone encountering OKR nonsense. Change your objectives after the event, to fit what you've done. Just make sure you got a decent list of stuff you've done. Its ridiculous. Think of a plumber for example. Should they specify how many toilets they're gonna fix next year? ;) Depends how many break, in what way they break, how hard they are to fix. I suppose, maybe you could average it out. But software is far more unpredictable.
• dgellow 3y ago
  Maximum 1 year before a large company announces proudly they came up with an LLM that sets OKRs for the whole organization. In some ways it would be hilarious to see hallucinated goals the LLM came up with but that would also feel pretty depressing
• yurytom 3y ago
  I was absolutely useless in my previous company. Waste of time.
• ngrilly 3y ago
  Too many organizations are making OKRs much more complex than they need to be. The fundamental idea of OKRs is actually useful: define a few high-level goals the organization wants to achieve, and for each goal define a few key outcomes that will materialize if the goal is achieved. Good OKRs help with focus and alignement, particularly in large teams. We can keep our OKRs simple: - Key Results don’t necessarily have to be measurements, as long as it’s possible to evaluate them in an objective way. - OKRs don’t have to be cascaded deep down to the individual level. - No spreadsheet is needed either. You can just have your OKRs in Notion, Confluence, or similar. - And OKRs don't have to be stretched if it's not part of the company's culture.
• frank_bb 3y ago
  [dead]
• nottorp 3y ago
  The thing is... give a bunch of relatively smart people who can solve optimization problems in their sleep a bunch of numbers to optimize for... What will they do eh?
• lloydatkinson 3y ago
  OKRs are a fucking cult. They are essentially permanent rolling PIPs.
• marenkay 3y ago
  Essentially they are bullshit. Every company implementing OKRs literally has no clue what is going on in their business, so OKRs tend to be some disconnected bullshit where someone will pretend they have any relevance, when actually not a single person really understands why the company has customers, or makes money, etc. OKRs are usually just pretending you have a clear understanding of that notion, which always is a lie.
• giantg2 3y ago
  I knocked out an OKR for my entire team in 1 day. It was dumb. The OKR was that everyone earns a certificate in this achievement frame work for stuff they demonstrated they know how to do. All I had to do was submit the evidence for them. Then I sent instructions to the rest of the department on how to do use the system as request their first certificate. Now they have me heading up the department effort until they hire in someone who's 3 levels above me.
• getoffmyyawn 3y ago
  In my experience, the vast majority of companies that use OKRs do it incorrectly, misunderstand the point, and cause more harm than good. As a member of the management team, I was able to get my current company to leave them behind, by giving a well sourced presentation on what OKR is for and when/how to use them. After 1 quarter the lights went on and nobody wanted to use them anymore. Here are the biggest mistakes I commonly see. 1. Use OKRs are for quarterly or year targets. No, OKRs are for managing big changes to things. Never for Business as Usual activities. 2. Require every team to write OKRs for every quarter / interval. See number 1. 3. Focus on the Key Results instead of the Objective. If the Key Results can be achieved without achieving the Objective, that's a broken OKR. Overall, I think OKRs are a tool that has its uses but its misuse causes far more problems than its absence. Update: typos
• qwertyuiop_ 3y ago
  It depends on who defines and why they define the O in OKR.
• bborud 3y ago
  There is money in fashions. Nowhere more so than in fashionable ways to manage companies, projects or work. Whenever some methodology is applied to some process, the precise way in which it is applied tends to vary. A lot. How many times have you heard "we use <methodology>" followed by "well...our version of it anyway". Of course, whenever someone admits to not strictly following orthodox doctrine there are howls of "you are not doing it properly". I've been a software developer a long enough to take neither the peddlers of fashionable methodologies, nor the people who decry them as utter nonsense, very seriously. It is odd how people tend to confuse wishful thinking with reality when they start to get a bit hot under the collar arguing about these things. I've seen OKRs work and not work. I've seen scrum work and not work. I've seen kanban work and not work. You can't really predict what will work for a given team, doing a given project in a given organization. You try, you adapt and if something works, then great. Two things never cease to amaze me: 1) delusional or blind leaders who think that some methodology works for them just because they like to think so, while their employees hate their life. And 2) people who think that some orthodox system of thought invented outside their organization is going to work without modification. The problem isn't so much OKRs. It is the failure to either make it work in your organization *or* find something else that does. I've worked in places where OKRs worked supremely well. I've worked in more places where OKRs didn't work at all. Mostly because people got caught up in the ceremony and didn't really stop to ask "does this help us accomplish what we need to accomplish?".
• shantnutiwari 3y ago
  One of the reason I stick with contracting , other than the higher pay, is that I avoid all the bullshit “performance” reviews. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me reviews/goals are just ways to humiliate employees and show them whos the boss
• wodenokoto 3y ago
  I actually think they are quite reasonable compared to a lot of the alternatives. It gives a good framework for going from business’ overall goal down to what are we going to do with this product the next four months? I am asked to set my yearly goals in January and in December I have to argue how I met them. With okrs being tertiary you get a bit more manageable time horizon, while maintaining half year and yearly goals. There are a few silly things about the framework, like how goals should be unobtainably optimistic and that phrasing of goals are not “improve user satisfaction”, but “I want to make the user cry of joy when opening product”. It’s stupid, but user stories also dictates silly phrasing. But as the article and comment section shows, it’s no cure for stupidity or bad managers.
• hardware2win 3y ago
  I really like OKRs when they are executed well
• bfrog 3y ago
  Corporate america seems to love them, in small biz I never needed such things as we directly worked with customers and knew all the finances. There was a direct personal understanding of what was important and what wasn’t. That’s missing in Big Co. I’m not confident OKRs are a good replacement or not yet myself.
• rgavuliak 3y ago
  The point of OKRs is that doing the right thing is the most important thing for the business. But how do you know if you're doing the right thing if you don't set and measure goals? You can then reflect and learn from your success/failure. The whole point is to learn whether our assumptions were correct. Otherwise it's just gut feeling and wishful thinking.
• probably_satan 3y ago
  It's communism
• wildermuthn 3y ago
  OKRs are subjective goals that have objective measures of success. Naming is a problem here, but the idea that a company shouldn’t have goals that are measurable is flatly wrong. In practice, OKRs seem to break down due to two problems: 1) choosing goals that have subjective or unobtainable measures of success, 2) failing to implement hierarchical and cross-department goals that build synergy rather than siloing.
• onyxringer 3y ago
  It's not OKRs. It's management as a whole. Whatever they do it turns into bullshit, because they are all bunch of bullshiters. Waterfall, Agile, Sprint, Performance Reviews, doesn't matter what. They all turn into Bullshit because they are applied by bunch of bullshiters that usually have no clue what they are doing, but they would like to keep their job. Generally people on all levels are incompetent most of the time, but in management your incompetence just have a bigger blast radius, while the consequences of it are vague and much easier to blame on something else.
• drewcoo 3y ago
  Recipe for getting on HN: 1. Pick a contentious topic that everyone knows something about. 2. Intentionally misunderstand what you're doing. 3. Claim it's all bullshit. 4. Adopt a defensive stance: anyone saying you're doing it wrong is guilty of a "no true Scotsman" argument. 5. Blog about it.
• vackosar 3y ago
  I see only the problem of no ability to change the OKRs, otherwise the core idea of making a plan is right. Changing the goals should introduce a additional change process, because priorities change with new knowledge. I haven't see that done well yet. Maybe just having 6 weeks cycle OKR [1] instead could work better as in Shape Up? [1] https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.2-chapter-08 https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.2-chapter-08
• xialvjun 3y ago
  OKR should be something those managers use, not things we programmers(well if you like, call me coder is ok, I don't care) should do. Because it's those managers manage our jobs. If no one can manage my job except me, I'd like to use OKR.