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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

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.

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.