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One way to create a "measurable goal" is to focus on what you can control. In our case this meant improving the platform, far away from chaotic customers. Lo an

One way to create a "measurable goal" is to focus on what you can control. In our case this meant improving the platform, far away from chaotic customers. Lo and behold, the result was down-prioritizing customer delivery.

Jensson 2y ago
You don't have higher level management? Those are there to organize collaboration between your teams and them giving you OKRs and setting shared OKRs is an excellent way to do that, teams setting their own OKRs to be very greedy goals to suit the teams themselves just means the higher level managers aren't doing their job.
- fifilura 2y ago
  Yeah, probably company politics. But this is also real. What happened here was 1) that the techy guys convinced higher management that this is essential for success. (Replacing a fully functional CI/CD tool with another CI/CD tool) 2) The OKR deadline suddely got very close so instead of investigating how to do this step by step, it was decided they do it all at once without any detailed investigation how it affects all services. And without planning. 3) The customer feature teams of course did all the heavy lifting since it was their services that were affected. 4) 1.5 years later customer feature teams are still not done replacing the 150k lines of legacy CI/CD code with code for the new tool. At what point do you hit the brakes?
  - Jensson 2y ago
    I agree in that case the dysfunctions stems from the other company, that is much harder to work with since you don't share the same organization so don't have a joint manager. In that case your manager has to decide, and seems they decided to ignore the customer in this case which is probably reasonable. Anyway, not sure why that was due to OKR. Maybe the decision was rushed due to OKR deadlines as you say, maybe it would have been rushed anyway, but at least OKR makes these problems more visible and makes it easier to work with them. OKR in general makes it much easier for managers to do their job, and you really want your managers to do their job properly.
    - fifilura 2y ago
      Just wanted to say I appreciate discussion and i don't feel any animosity. In this case these were all internal priorities. But you are right, maybe it is not for me to be reaspn why or be upset about.
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    I agree with the sibling comment: this is just broadly dysfunctional and the presence of a something formally labeled an "OKR" is not the cause. At worst, the OKR enabled or exacerbated it.
    - fifilura 2y ago
      I think the "at worst" was what happened here. Both in terms of taking a shortcut in the priority queue because it was easily measurable, lived on it's own right without complex dependencies and "the platform guys also need an OKR" But also in terms of how it was handled with regards to the OKR deadline, and possibly bonuses/performance reviews connected to how well it was achieved. Yes, it was dysfunctional, but the OKRs enabled it IMO. A huge company like google can swallow this because this fancy CI/CD tool was what they wanted all along, and there will always be another customer/project. But for a smaller company, this kind of shift in priorities can be lethal.

Jensson 2y ago

You don't have higher level management? Those are there to organize collaboration between your teams and them giving you OKRs and setting shared OKRs is an excellent way to do that, teams setting their own OKRs to be very greedy goals to suit the teams themselves just means the higher level managers aren't doing their job.

fifilura 2y ago
Yeah, probably company politics. But this is also real. What happened here was 1) that the techy guys convinced higher management that this is essential for success. (Replacing a fully functional CI/CD tool with another CI/CD tool) 2) The OKR deadline suddely got very close so instead of investigating how to do this step by step, it was decided they do it all at once without any detailed investigation how it affects all services. And without planning. 3) The customer feature teams of course did all the heavy lifting since it was their services that were affected. 4) 1.5 years later customer feature teams are still not done replacing the 150k lines of legacy CI/CD code with code for the new tool. At what point do you hit the brakes?
- Jensson 2y ago
  I agree in that case the dysfunctions stems from the other company, that is much harder to work with since you don't share the same organization so don't have a joint manager. In that case your manager has to decide, and seems they decided to ignore the customer in this case which is probably reasonable. Anyway, not sure why that was due to OKR. Maybe the decision was rushed due to OKR deadlines as you say, maybe it would have been rushed anyway, but at least OKR makes these problems more visible and makes it easier to work with them. OKR in general makes it much easier for managers to do their job, and you really want your managers to do their job properly.
  - fifilura 2y ago
    Just wanted to say I appreciate discussion and i don't feel any animosity. In this case these were all internal priorities. But you are right, maybe it is not for me to be reaspn why or be upset about.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  I agree with the sibling comment: this is just broadly dysfunctional and the presence of a something formally labeled an "OKR" is not the cause. At worst, the OKR enabled or exacerbated it.
  - fifilura 2y ago
    I think the "at worst" was what happened here. Both in terms of taking a shortcut in the priority queue because it was easily measurable, lived on it's own right without complex dependencies and "the platform guys also need an OKR" But also in terms of how it was handled with regards to the OKR deadline, and possibly bonuses/performance reviews connected to how well it was achieved. Yes, it was dysfunctional, but the OKRs enabled it IMO. A huge company like google can swallow this because this fancy CI/CD tool was what they wanted all along, and there will always be another customer/project. But for a smaller company, this kind of shift in priorities can be lethal.