16 ms·

Pre-Work for Setting OKRs

44 points by adrianhoward 2y ago

redrove 2y ago
I wonder if we’ll ever grow up as an industry and get over these MBA-enforced buzzwords like OKRs, SCRUM, etc. It’s just sad to see so much energy from so many smart people poured into this crap.
- denvrede 2y ago
  Do you have an alternative? Genuine question. We‘re also using OKRs and I’m dreading it, but it’s better than nothing. Hoping for everybody to magically on their own align with company goals doesn’t work either.
  - stavros 2y ago
    Yes. OKRs for us (a mid-size? company, 150ish people) have been a disaster. They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else. It's been a lot of "this isn't in my OKRs, why should I work on it?", making it both hard to adjust course ("why would I work on this important thing when it's not an OKR?"), and to get the teams to help each other ("why would I work on their target when I have mine?") Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.
    - runlaszlorun 2y ago
      > Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can. Aha. That’s an interesting take I never would’ve thought of. Thx…
    - brookst 2y ago
      If your small company (150 is small!) has groups that need to work together but have OKRs so orthogonal that they don’t, something is seriously wrong with the OKR implementation or the culture. That kind of “not my OKR” nonsense shouldn’t happen in a 15,000 person company, let alone a company where everyone’s OKR’s are, what, two steps from the corporate ones?
      - stavros 2y ago
        Some feedback: Telling people "that's wrong" and leaving it at that isn't very useful. These days I try to either say something constructive, or nothing at all.
        brookst 2y ago
        While I appreciate the feedback, I also subscribe to not trying to diagnose without enough information. I believe it is accurate and constructive to say a 150 person company with OKRs producing counter-productive outcomes is doing it wrong, at least when replying to someone who seems to believe the problem is with the OKR model.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else. Don't you have higher level umbrella targets that everyone can contribute to? OKRs are a tree, working on targets that aren't your teams but helps the bigger picture above you is also a feature of OKRs, you aren't meant to just look at your local OKRs.
      - stavros 2y ago
        We do, but if people feel that it will be bad if they don't hit their immediate goals, they're unlikely to want to contribute to anything but those. Of course, it's better to be flexible, but when you give someone a goal, the goal is, well, the goal.
        Jensson 2y ago
        If the company need those team to help other teams, then those teams should have OKRs to help other teams. A good OKR is that they need to respond and/or fix things in X hours etc, depending on what kind of support they are expected to give. OKR shows you the state of the current organization, if the OKR are dysfunctional the organization is dysfunctional, it would be even if you didn't see the OKRs. The fix isn't to remove the OKRs, it is to align the OKRs with what each team is really expected to do as I said above. If the team you need help from had an OKR to help you quickly, so they focused on that, do you really believe that would be a bad thing? That is the only way to do it, such teams are slow to respond and provide help everywhere that doesn't give them OKRs to reduce latency on responses, they always have their own things to work in regardless if they are visible or not. Such OKR also makes life easier for that team, now they get rewarded for what they are supposed to do: provide support. And, if they don't have enough people to provide that support, now they have a good case to get more resources to enable them to provide that support.
        stavros 2y ago
        You're saying that OKRs should be SLAs, instead of hitting specific objectives? Our OKRs tend to be "release these features/fixes", not things like "hit team metrics".
  - benfortuna 2y ago
    We currently use JIRA for tracking practically everything, including objectives. Whilst I don't really like JIRA, I think this kind of tracking of objectives, initiatives and delivered results is a good way to capture OKRs based on reality rather than mission statements.
- lucidguppy 2y ago
  Why can't we just use goals? What is so wrong about using the word that everyone understands?
  - nemo44x 2y ago
    I think it’s for the desire to have measurable outcomes that are non-binary. So they can be put into a dial, etc on an executives dashboard. And be managed so that decisions can be made and tested to see how they affect the metric, etc. The Objective part of OKR is the goal I guess you could say. The KR part are the measurable tactics used to achieve the goal.
    - osigurdson 2y ago
      Last year, I had a personal OKR to take a course on OKRs (yes a little bit meta). I was surprised to learn that the instructor suggested less emphasis on measurability. The reason being, that if one only focuses on measurable things a lot can be missed.
      - baq 2y ago
        Did the instructor recommend having mutually exclusive or at least opposing KRs? I wonder if a mandate to define some of them like that would help with Goodheart’s law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- JonChesterfield 2y ago
  The challenge is how to get lots of people of varying aptitude and ambition to do things you consider useful. All the tools for that are pretty rubbish. Say you're running an organisation if a few thousand people structured as a rough hierarchy. The goal is to move the stock price over a period of a few quarters. How should one do that?
  - dakiol 2y ago
    Sure, perhaps for organizations of thousands of people, that may be needed. For startups with less than a hundred employees? OKRs are a waste of time.
  - osigurdson 2y ago
    If you don't know then you probably should not be CEO.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      The people who do know do it via OKR and similar, so you are basically saying that we shouldn't try other things since we don't know if those will work.
    - runlaszlorun 2y ago
      Ouch. A tad personal, no?
      - osigurdson 2y ago
        Not personal at all. A very general statement I would say.
- crispyambulance 2y ago
  In most places OKR, SMART, etc, just pops up around performance-review time. During other times the ACTUAL goals and priorities drift and rearrange like deck chairs on the titanic. As long as one can finagle the rhetoric to make it seem like there was a coherent narrative where one has done the things they wrote down they were going to do last year-- nobody cares. But really, now there's "pre-work" for setting OKR's? Like it's not enough busy work already to just devise them.
  - redrove 2y ago
    All metrics like this either immediately or eventually become targets to be gamed [0]. If you’re part of the execution apparatus you’re just caught in the crossfire in trying to make some old fart’s powerpoint presentation green when showing it to other directors. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
    - Jensson 2y ago
      Only if you reward people based on completion. IF you just use them to communicate goals I don't see why they would be bad. When I worked we did OKR but nobody talked about them and it wasn't a big deal whether they succeeded or not, it was just a place to put goals, just like a bug tracker. If you have a place where you write down goals you are basically doing OKRs, it is good to do in general.
      - runlaszlorun 2y ago
        > Only if you reward people based on completion. IF you just use them to communicate goals I don't see why they would be bad. I concur. But I personally have never seen that happen. Not to mention, instituting it organizationally means you don’t have much idea how it’s being applied elsewhere in the org.
      - redrove 2y ago
        That’s like saying communism works because all you have to do is distribute the wealth equally right? It may look good on paper but in practice it always becomes a target and it’s considered a failure if you miss one. If it doesn’t work in practice the theory is wrong.
- runlaszlorun 2y ago
  Ah yes… the mythical MBA boogey man. I knew he’d make an appearance in the comments. :) Apologies in advance for the rant… The irony is that OKR’s are nothing but a rehashing of Peter Drucker’s Management By Objectives (MBO)- invented in 1954 and already ignored by MBA programs by the 1970s. Management By Objective is useless until one is talking about the business unit level where folks have direct impact on profit and loss. If its not already immediately obvious what numbers are relevant to your job, there’s rarely anything to be gained by groping for them in the dark corners of a middle manager’s quarterly performance ritual. Apologies in advance to who(m)ever posted this article or may have found it useful since I’m not trying to be a dick here… but… at least to this idiot… the article is a list of maudlin management cliches actually far more tired than even OKR’s or MBO. As far as OKR’s, personally I find them a management charade at best, and destructive prob more often than not. Having wonderfully aligned goals and objectives is a good thing. But goals and objectives that aren’t wonderfully aligned? Not so much. Especially around self-driven folks- who most likely do the right thing in the absence of goals. And they’re especially bad if at all tied to compensation or promotion. The fact that many in the tech world have both trotted out this old, tired, and often destructive technique; and then pinned the blame on the mythical MBA; is so rich with irony that I prob shouldn’t have bothered to even open my mouth on the topic. p.s. Are MBA’s throwing around Scrum buzzwords these days? Man, we need to police our own… lol.
  - trealira 2y ago
    > Apologies in advance to who(m)ever posted this article FYI, and this is just a tangentially related grammar remark, but "whomever" wouldn't be correct here, because the phrase "whoever posted this article" has the person in subject position here, even though the whole phrase is used in an object position (i.e "apologies to [whoever posted this article]"). You can think of it like "whoever" replaces something like "the person who," and "the person whom posted this article" sounds more obviously incorrect. You could use "whomever" if it were something like "whomever your friend met," as the subject is "your friend" in that case, and "whomever" refers to an object. The equivalent noun phrase would be "the person whom your friend met." Of course, most people just don't say "whom" ever, so it barely matters anyway.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > MBA-enforced buzzwords like OKRs OKRs just means you write down measurable goals in a place where people can see them. The word is popular since it is obviously a good thing to do, it is something everyone should do. In school your OKRs are your classes etc, having such short term measurable goals is really good for personal productivity and alignment. So OKRs are like unit tests, you can do them badly but it is a thing you almost always want when you do software development, unit tests aren't just a "buzzword", and neither are OKRs. The alternative to OKR is that your manager writes down your OKRs in a hidden place where you can't see them, the only thing that changes is that now you are less informed. Ignorance is bliss, but reality will smash you anyway. Personally I thought it was good that I could see what goals my manager had, what goals his manager had, what goals that managers manager had etc. I don't see why people are so angry at that level of transparency.
  - fifilura 2y ago
    I my experience, measurable goals is a pipe dream. It promotes menial tasks like "take a 2 day course in React". "Clean my desk twice a week" "write 10 unit tests" over "spending 100% of my time creating value for customers"
    - Jensson 2y ago
      A measurable goal can be "Deliver feature X" etc, how is that not value for customers? But yeah OKR are usually done at higher level than individuals, I didn't write any OKRs just the people above me. In general it is something managers should do, the lowest level employees shouldn't have to. I can agree that individuals being forced to write OKRs is a bad thing, but managers being forced to write OKRs is a good thing. At higher level OKRs looks like "attract X more customers" or "reduce customer churn by Y%" etc, to achieve those they instruct people like you to create customer value, at your individual level such goals aren't as easy to write since they are the result of contributions from many parts. Edit: But if you can come up with good measurable goals for you as an individual since you have enough individual freedom to do so, then yeah writing that down is good. But if you don't have any long term project and don't have control to plan what you work on then writing down an OKR is just hazing, you need to be responsible for the things your OKR measures, if you lack long term responsibilities then you shouldn't write down any OKRs.
nkrisc 2y ago
> Start by revisiting your organization’s mission (why you exist) and vision (what you want to achieve). This is the root of where every company I’ve worked for gets OKRs wrong. They always have some flowery statement for mission and vision and build their goals around that. However in the day to day work when decisions are made it becomes apparent that the mission is to make money and the vision is to make more money. And that’s how my OKRs always become divorced from reality, having been derived from the flowery bullshit that rolls downhill.
- zemvpferreira 2y ago
  I've found that there's lots to be gained by splitting the difference and anchoring mission statements in money. Forget team spirit and shared purpose and whatnot; craft a sentence that says exactly how you beat the competition. It gives you a broad target to shoot for.
- asplake 2y ago
  OKRs as the summary of a strategy conversation (not a “visioning” session) that actually happened, in the words of those who will do the work, fine. In most other scenarios I would proceed with extreme caution.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  Here's the thing I learned, tying it to revenue gets the company more revenue, tying it to BS gets middle managers promoted faster. Why? Because money may not materialize while BS doesn't require anything except itself to be a success. And since your own promotion and bonus are strongly based on how much middle managers like you...
  - MatthewCampbell 2y ago
    "I like to say 'revenue solves all known problems' it’s the one metric that PMs and execs can’t game." - Eric Schmidt https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/507219358246903809?lang=en https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/507219358246903809?lang=en
rexreed 2y ago
OKRs are a management fad and a performance review bludgeon. They don't improve performance or alignment. The best pre-work you can do on OKRs is to not do them. Startups dont need OKRs for either performance or alignment and later stage companies that implement OKRs are in the beginning phase of stagnation and descent.
- cj 2y ago
  How do you propose companies approach goals setting? Surely there has to be some way for a company to communicate to employees “Our goal is to grow 30%” and we will do this focusing marketing on a rebranding, focusing sales team on shifting to outbound sales model, product will build features x, y, z, etc… Very simplistic example but companies need some way to flow goals down to smaller groups of people down the chain, don’t they?
  - rexreed 2y ago
    In the same way that you can take a simple idea like iterative and responsive planning and turn it into a management monstrosity like agile, so too can simple goal setting and alignment be turned into the management and performance review monstrosity that is OKR.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- osigurdson 2y ago
  My charitable view is, they can serve as an error correction function in a product led org. I.e., product and sales people don't care about the internals, just feature, feature feature. Over time this increases entropy. OKRs can be used to make time to address entropy.
yobid20 2y ago
This is a fad that already came and left our org. We realized this was just a giant waste of time with no gains.
petecooper 2y ago
>OKRs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_key_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_key_results
pylua 2y ago
I think this forgets the most important thing: how to accurately measure the okr. Okrs are primed to be gamed by people seeking to maximize their contributions even if it isn’t relevant to a real world scenario.
- runlaszlorun 2y ago
  This, and another comment I just read, lead me to believe that OKRs should have OKRs themselves. How else you know they’re value? :)
- MatthewCampbell 2y ago
  I think this is only hard for poorly informed KRs. If something has risen to your top hypothesis for what's holding your Objective back, just look at the signal that made you honestly believe this. Customers keep telling you the product is painful to use? You can rely on the same communication channel to discover when it's fun and guardrail that it hasn't also lost utility. If teams deliver their KRs but don't move the Objective then the problem isn't with the KR delivery.
  - pylua 2y ago
    What about this scenario: two teams, rnd and delivery team. Rnd has an okr to make the projects easier to deliver. How do you objectively measure that, as one team does not completely control the result.
    - MatthewCampbell 2y ago
      Start by answering why projects need to be easier to deliver. Of course they should be, but the nuance of the answer is the thing you measure. You see something that indicates that they're "too slow." What impact would you see on the R&D team if the delivery team did better? Go back to why you have a delivery team at all. Or you can ask in the reverse: when would you stop wanting to invest in delivery beyond maintenance? What does "good enough" look like?
iandanforth 2y ago
I assumed this was going to be satire. "Let's pre-meeting these TPS reports." Sadly it is not.
ramijames 2y ago
Sorry, but fuck OKRs. I'm so tired of meta-work. Work that adds to the workload of already overloaded and stressed employees of a company. It feels like nonsense that everyone goes along with simply because they are all too terrified to say "no, this doesn't help me get my job done". HR that pushes for OKRs can bite me.
- SillyUsername 2y ago
  I find it's (the devils) idle work added by BAs and "Agile Specialists" who have no real skin in the game, but used to make them look productive, at the expense of adding meta work to everybody else's pile. They get a nice back pat at the faux results everybody using them then has to create to pretend they're not failing them (lest they be sacked).
acaloiar 2y ago
Having not worked in a large corporate environment in a couple of years now, and thus having not seen every type of meeting and organizational process under the sun prefixed with "pre" in quite a while, this title gave me a bit of a flashback to that time. I'd forgotten how emblematic "pre"-prefixed meetings are of larger organizations that have meetings to plan for other meetings, e.g. "Pre-planning", "Pre-OKR brainstorm". Seeing pre-meetings always reminds me of a scene in Office Space where "The Bobs" are seen [1.] in front of a whiteboard that clearly reads "Planning to Plan". It's a subtle visual of the movie's central theme of poking fun at corporate culture. It's been a real treat being in an environment where we don't plan to plan, or have such a vague concept of our meetings that they're best described as a "syncs". [1.] https://i.imgur.com/4d0FE.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/4d0FE.jpeg
ein0p 2y ago
AKA: “Answer the question, is it good FOR THE COMPANY”. /s If you have clear vision you don’t need “OKRs” - all you need is a bug queue and weekly sync-up. Trouble is, most organizations don’t have vision.
ggernov 2y ago
Being the guy who starts using OKRs even if you claim it's not for reducing head count is not a way to become popular. Measure these things quietly. Keep a positive attitude with employees, but imo making sure employees feel value and aren't under surveillance is a better path to ironically actually improving OKRs.

44 points by adrianhoward 2y ago

I wonder if we’ll ever grow up as an industry and get over these MBA-enforced buzzwords like OKRs, SCRUM, etc. It’s just sad to see so much energy from so many smart people poured into this crap.

denvrede 2y ago
Do you have an alternative? Genuine question. We‘re also using OKRs and I’m dreading it, but it’s better than nothing. Hoping for everybody to magically on their own align with company goals doesn’t work either.
- stavros 2y ago
  Yes. OKRs for us (a mid-size? company, 150ish people) have been a disaster. They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else. It's been a lot of "this isn't in my OKRs, why should I work on it?", making it both hard to adjust course ("why would I work on this important thing when it's not an OKR?"), and to get the teams to help each other ("why would I work on their target when I have mine?") Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.
  - runlaszlorun 2y ago
    > Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can. Aha. That’s an interesting take I never would’ve thought of. Thx…
  - brookst 2y ago
    If your small company (150 is small!) has groups that need to work together but have OKRs so orthogonal that they don’t, something is seriously wrong with the OKR implementation or the culture. That kind of “not my OKR” nonsense shouldn’t happen in a 15,000 person company, let alone a company where everyone’s OKR’s are, what, two steps from the corporate ones?
    - stavros 2y ago
      Some feedback: Telling people "that's wrong" and leaving it at that isn't very useful. These days I try to either say something constructive, or nothing at all.
      - brookst 2y ago
        While I appreciate the feedback, I also subscribe to not trying to diagnose without enough information. I believe it is accurate and constructive to say a 150 person company with OKRs producing counter-productive outcomes is doing it wrong, at least when replying to someone who seems to believe the problem is with the OKR model.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else. Don't you have higher level umbrella targets that everyone can contribute to? OKRs are a tree, working on targets that aren't your teams but helps the bigger picture above you is also a feature of OKRs, you aren't meant to just look at your local OKRs.
    - stavros 2y ago
      We do, but if people feel that it will be bad if they don't hit their immediate goals, they're unlikely to want to contribute to anything but those. Of course, it's better to be flexible, but when you give someone a goal, the goal is, well, the goal.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        If the company need those team to help other teams, then those teams should have OKRs to help other teams. A good OKR is that they need to respond and/or fix things in X hours etc, depending on what kind of support they are expected to give. OKR shows you the state of the current organization, if the OKR are dysfunctional the organization is dysfunctional, it would be even if you didn't see the OKRs. The fix isn't to remove the OKRs, it is to align the OKRs with what each team is really expected to do as I said above. If the team you need help from had an OKR to help you quickly, so they focused on that, do you really believe that would be a bad thing? That is the only way to do it, such teams are slow to respond and provide help everywhere that doesn't give them OKRs to reduce latency on responses, they always have their own things to work in regardless if they are visible or not. Such OKR also makes life easier for that team, now they get rewarded for what they are supposed to do: provide support. And, if they don't have enough people to provide that support, now they have a good case to get more resources to enable them to provide that support.
        stavros 2y ago
        You're saying that OKRs should be SLAs, instead of hitting specific objectives? Our OKRs tend to be "release these features/fixes", not things like "hit team metrics".
- benfortuna 2y ago
  We currently use JIRA for tracking practically everything, including objectives. Whilst I don't really like JIRA, I think this kind of tracking of objectives, initiatives and delivered results is a good way to capture OKRs based on reality rather than mission statements.
lucidguppy 2y ago
Why can't we just use goals? What is so wrong about using the word that everyone understands?
- nemo44x 2y ago
  I think it’s for the desire to have measurable outcomes that are non-binary. So they can be put into a dial, etc on an executives dashboard. And be managed so that decisions can be made and tested to see how they affect the metric, etc. The Objective part of OKR is the goal I guess you could say. The KR part are the measurable tactics used to achieve the goal.
  - osigurdson 2y ago
    Last year, I had a personal OKR to take a course on OKRs (yes a little bit meta). I was surprised to learn that the instructor suggested less emphasis on measurability. The reason being, that if one only focuses on measurable things a lot can be missed.
    - baq 2y ago
      Did the instructor recommend having mutually exclusive or at least opposing KRs? I wonder if a mandate to define some of them like that would help with Goodheart’s law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
JonChesterfield 2y ago
The challenge is how to get lots of people of varying aptitude and ambition to do things you consider useful. All the tools for that are pretty rubbish. Say you're running an organisation if a few thousand people structured as a rough hierarchy. The goal is to move the stock price over a period of a few quarters. How should one do that?
- dakiol 2y ago
  Sure, perhaps for organizations of thousands of people, that may be needed. For startups with less than a hundred employees? OKRs are a waste of time.
- osigurdson 2y ago
  If you don't know then you probably should not be CEO.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    The people who do know do it via OKR and similar, so you are basically saying that we shouldn't try other things since we don't know if those will work.
  - runlaszlorun 2y ago
    Ouch. A tad personal, no?
    - osigurdson 2y ago
      Not personal at all. A very general statement I would say.
crispyambulance 2y ago
In most places OKR, SMART, etc, just pops up around performance-review time. During other times the ACTUAL goals and priorities drift and rearrange like deck chairs on the titanic. As long as one can finagle the rhetoric to make it seem like there was a coherent narrative where one has done the things they wrote down they were going to do last year-- nobody cares. But really, now there's "pre-work" for setting OKR's? Like it's not enough busy work already to just devise them.
- redrove 2y ago
  All metrics like this either immediately or eventually become targets to be gamed [0]. If you’re part of the execution apparatus you’re just caught in the crossfire in trying to make some old fart’s powerpoint presentation green when showing it to other directors. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - Jensson 2y ago
    Only if you reward people based on completion. IF you just use them to communicate goals I don't see why they would be bad. When I worked we did OKR but nobody talked about them and it wasn't a big deal whether they succeeded or not, it was just a place to put goals, just like a bug tracker. If you have a place where you write down goals you are basically doing OKRs, it is good to do in general.
    - runlaszlorun 2y ago
      > Only if you reward people based on completion. IF you just use them to communicate goals I don't see why they would be bad. I concur. But I personally have never seen that happen. Not to mention, instituting it organizationally means you don’t have much idea how it’s being applied elsewhere in the org.
    - redrove 2y ago
      That’s like saying communism works because all you have to do is distribute the wealth equally right? It may look good on paper but in practice it always becomes a target and it’s considered a failure if you miss one. If it doesn’t work in practice the theory is wrong.
runlaszlorun 2y ago
Ah yes… the mythical MBA boogey man. I knew he’d make an appearance in the comments. :) Apologies in advance for the rant… The irony is that OKR’s are nothing but a rehashing of Peter Drucker’s Management By Objectives (MBO)- invented in 1954 and already ignored by MBA programs by the 1970s. Management By Objective is useless until one is talking about the business unit level where folks have direct impact on profit and loss. If its not already immediately obvious what numbers are relevant to your job, there’s rarely anything to be gained by groping for them in the dark corners of a middle manager’s quarterly performance ritual. Apologies in advance to who(m)ever posted this article or may have found it useful since I’m not trying to be a dick here… but… at least to this idiot… the article is a list of maudlin management cliches actually far more tired than even OKR’s or MBO. As far as OKR’s, personally I find them a management charade at best, and destructive prob more often than not. Having wonderfully aligned goals and objectives is a good thing. But goals and objectives that aren’t wonderfully aligned? Not so much. Especially around self-driven folks- who most likely do the right thing in the absence of goals. And they’re especially bad if at all tied to compensation or promotion. The fact that many in the tech world have both trotted out this old, tired, and often destructive technique; and then pinned the blame on the mythical MBA; is so rich with irony that I prob shouldn’t have bothered to even open my mouth on the topic. p.s. Are MBA’s throwing around Scrum buzzwords these days? Man, we need to police our own… lol.
- trealira 2y ago
  > Apologies in advance to who(m)ever posted this article FYI, and this is just a tangentially related grammar remark, but "whomever" wouldn't be correct here, because the phrase "whoever posted this article" has the person in subject position here, even though the whole phrase is used in an object position (i.e "apologies to [whoever posted this article]"). You can think of it like "whoever" replaces something like "the person who," and "the person whom posted this article" sounds more obviously incorrect. You could use "whomever" if it were something like "whomever your friend met," as the subject is "your friend" in that case, and "whomever" refers to an object. The equivalent noun phrase would be "the person whom your friend met." Of course, most people just don't say "whom" ever, so it barely matters anyway.
Jensson 2y ago
> MBA-enforced buzzwords like OKRs OKRs just means you write down measurable goals in a place where people can see them. The word is popular since it is obviously a good thing to do, it is something everyone should do. In school your OKRs are your classes etc, having such short term measurable goals is really good for personal productivity and alignment. So OKRs are like unit tests, you can do them badly but it is a thing you almost always want when you do software development, unit tests aren't just a "buzzword", and neither are OKRs. The alternative to OKR is that your manager writes down your OKRs in a hidden place where you can't see them, the only thing that changes is that now you are less informed. Ignorance is bliss, but reality will smash you anyway. Personally I thought it was good that I could see what goals my manager had, what goals his manager had, what goals that managers manager had etc. I don't see why people are so angry at that level of transparency.
- fifilura 2y ago
  I my experience, measurable goals is a pipe dream. It promotes menial tasks like "take a 2 day course in React". "Clean my desk twice a week" "write 10 unit tests" over "spending 100% of my time creating value for customers"
  - Jensson 2y ago
    A measurable goal can be "Deliver feature X" etc, how is that not value for customers? But yeah OKR are usually done at higher level than individuals, I didn't write any OKRs just the people above me. In general it is something managers should do, the lowest level employees shouldn't have to. I can agree that individuals being forced to write OKRs is a bad thing, but managers being forced to write OKRs is a good thing. At higher level OKRs looks like "attract X more customers" or "reduce customer churn by Y%" etc, to achieve those they instruct people like you to create customer value, at your individual level such goals aren't as easy to write since they are the result of contributions from many parts. Edit: But if you can come up with good measurable goals for you as an individual since you have enough individual freedom to do so, then yeah writing that down is good. But if you don't have any long term project and don't have control to plan what you work on then writing down an OKR is just hazing, you need to be responsible for the things your OKR measures, if you lack long term responsibilities then you shouldn't write down any OKRs.

nkrisc 2y ago

> Start by revisiting your organization’s mission (why you exist) and vision (what you want to achieve). This is the root of where every company I’ve worked for gets OKRs wrong. They always have some flowery statement for mission and vision and build their goals around that. However in the day to day work when decisions are made it becomes apparent that the mission is to make money and the vision is to make more money. And that’s how my OKRs always become divorced from reality, having been derived from the flowery bullshit that rolls downhill.

zemvpferreira 2y ago
I've found that there's lots to be gained by splitting the difference and anchoring mission statements in money. Forget team spirit and shared purpose and whatnot; craft a sentence that says exactly how you beat the competition. It gives you a broad target to shoot for.
asplake 2y ago
OKRs as the summary of a strategy conversation (not a “visioning” session) that actually happened, in the words of those who will do the work, fine. In most other scenarios I would proceed with extreme caution.
marcinzm 2y ago
Here's the thing I learned, tying it to revenue gets the company more revenue, tying it to BS gets middle managers promoted faster. Why? Because money may not materialize while BS doesn't require anything except itself to be a success. And since your own promotion and bonus are strongly based on how much middle managers like you...
- MatthewCampbell 2y ago
  "I like to say 'revenue solves all known problems' it’s the one metric that PMs and execs can’t game." - Eric Schmidt https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/507219358246903809?lang=en https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/507219358246903809?lang=en

rexreed 2y ago

OKRs are a management fad and a performance review bludgeon. They don't improve performance or alignment. The best pre-work you can do on OKRs is to not do them. Startups dont need OKRs for either performance or alignment and later stage companies that implement OKRs are in the beginning phase of stagnation and descent.

cj 2y ago
How do you propose companies approach goals setting? Surely there has to be some way for a company to communicate to employees “Our goal is to grow 30%” and we will do this focusing marketing on a rebranding, focusing sales team on shifting to outbound sales model, product will build features x, y, z, etc… Very simplistic example but companies need some way to flow goals down to smaller groups of people down the chain, don’t they?
- rexreed 2y ago
  In the same way that you can take a simple idea like iterative and responsive planning and turn it into a management monstrosity like agile, so too can simple goal setting and alignment be turned into the management and performance review monstrosity that is OKR.
- deleted 2y ago
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osigurdson 2y ago
My charitable view is, they can serve as an error correction function in a product led org. I.e., product and sales people don't care about the internals, just feature, feature feature. Over time this increases entropy. OKRs can be used to make time to address entropy.

yobid20 2y ago

This is a fad that already came and left our org. We realized this was just a giant waste of time with no gains.

petecooper 2y ago

>OKRs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_key_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_key_results

pylua 2y ago

I think this forgets the most important thing: how to accurately measure the okr. Okrs are primed to be gamed by people seeking to maximize their contributions even if it isn’t relevant to a real world scenario.

runlaszlorun 2y ago
This, and another comment I just read, lead me to believe that OKRs should have OKRs themselves. How else you know they’re value? :)
MatthewCampbell 2y ago
I think this is only hard for poorly informed KRs. If something has risen to your top hypothesis for what's holding your Objective back, just look at the signal that made you honestly believe this. Customers keep telling you the product is painful to use? You can rely on the same communication channel to discover when it's fun and guardrail that it hasn't also lost utility. If teams deliver their KRs but don't move the Objective then the problem isn't with the KR delivery.
- pylua 2y ago
  What about this scenario: two teams, rnd and delivery team. Rnd has an okr to make the projects easier to deliver. How do you objectively measure that, as one team does not completely control the result.
  - MatthewCampbell 2y ago
    Start by answering why projects need to be easier to deliver. Of course they should be, but the nuance of the answer is the thing you measure. You see something that indicates that they're "too slow." What impact would you see on the R&D team if the delivery team did better? Go back to why you have a delivery team at all. Or you can ask in the reverse: when would you stop wanting to invest in delivery beyond maintenance? What does "good enough" look like?

iandanforth 2y ago

I assumed this was going to be satire. "Let's pre-meeting these TPS reports." Sadly it is not.

ramijames 2y ago

Sorry, but fuck OKRs. I'm so tired of meta-work. Work that adds to the workload of already overloaded and stressed employees of a company. It feels like nonsense that everyone goes along with simply because they are all too terrified to say "no, this doesn't help me get my job done". HR that pushes for OKRs can bite me.

SillyUsername 2y ago
I find it's (the devils) idle work added by BAs and "Agile Specialists" who have no real skin in the game, but used to make them look productive, at the expense of adding meta work to everybody else's pile. They get a nice back pat at the faux results everybody using them then has to create to pretend they're not failing them (lest they be sacked).

acaloiar 2y ago

Having not worked in a large corporate environment in a couple of years now, and thus having not seen every type of meeting and organizational process under the sun prefixed with "pre" in quite a while, this title gave me a bit of a flashback to that time. I'd forgotten how emblematic "pre"-prefixed meetings are of larger organizations that have meetings to plan for other meetings, e.g. "Pre-planning", "Pre-OKR brainstorm". Seeing pre-meetings always reminds me of a scene in Office Space where "The Bobs" are seen [1.] in front of a whiteboard that clearly reads "Planning to Plan". It's a subtle visual of the movie's central theme of poking fun at corporate culture. It's been a real treat being in an environment where we don't plan to plan, or have such a vague concept of our meetings that they're best described as a "syncs". [1.] https://i.imgur.com/4d0FE.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/4d0FE.jpeg

ein0p 2y ago

AKA: “Answer the question, is it good FOR THE COMPANY”. /s If you have clear vision you don’t need “OKRs” - all you need is a bug queue and weekly sync-up. Trouble is, most organizations don’t have vision.

ggernov 2y ago

Being the guy who starts using OKRs even if you claim it's not for reducing head count is not a way to become popular. Measure these things quietly. Keep a positive attitude with employees, but imo making sure employees feel value and aren't under surveillance is a better path to ironically actually improving OKRs.