9 ms·

And then customers complain that the driver is frequently crashing and the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs.

And then customers complain that the driver is frequently crashing and the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs. What you really want is: - every team working to improve the customer experience - guided by leadership priorities and initiatives

madeofpalk 2y ago
> it was always a metric closely aligned with what customers want
- liontwist 2y ago
  All OKRs help customers, but not all customer help meets an OKR. Finding and fixing product problems requires decentralized decision making and trust.
  - DrScientist 2y ago
    Indeed. What I find odd, is often the biggest proponents of the free market - with it's decentralised decision making process ( and redundancy of effort ), decide that total centralized, top down control is the best way to run their own company - as they think top down decisions and minimising waste through duplication is the way to go. As with all things - it's a balance of course.
    - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
      You might want to read "The Nature of the Firm", which discusses this.
      - DrScientist 2y ago
        That's a slightly different angle - if I understand correctly it's about why firms exist at all - and if I were to summarise it's because lack of trust costs - a firms boundaries are created to balance transactional costs ( within the firm it's low, between firms or individuals it can dominate ) versus the costs of perhaps not being market efficient. My argument above is about not what shapes a firm's boundary but how it operates internally - too much top down control potentially risks exacerbating the risks associated with being a company and also potentially increases internal transactional costs as well - worse of both worlds! - all that ceremony around decision making, time spent justifying existences, inability to just act. Obviously as I said above - it's a balance - just as it is with country/international systems.
    - liontwist 2y ago
      That’s an easy one to answer. Corporations don’t have police or taxation power and so have more limited impact on your individual freedom. In a “free market” you can choose what firms you work for and with, except the government. The government would be more efficient in an autocratic leadership. But government efficiency is not the societies efficiency and well being
      - DrScientist 2y ago
        > In a “free market” you can choose what firms you work for and with, except the government. Eh? Nobody ever leaves one country for another? > The government would be more efficient in an autocratic leadership. But government efficiency is not the societies efficiency and well being I think the free market proponents would say otherwise - one key problem is the myth of perfect information - you are imagining it's possible to concentrate all the required information to make any correct decision into a very small group of people at the top ( and assuming these people are competent and not corrupt). One of the ideas behind why distributed markets work is the information about what is needed is communicated by the mechanisms of the market itself. And to bring it back to the original post - does the CEO have all the information required to direct others to meet the customers need across all areas - or is it better to use the collective intelligence of the entire organisation?
  - aurareturn 2y ago
    >Finding and fixing product problems requires decentralized decision making and trust. Which is exponentially harder in a large company - hence why OKRs are invented.
  - jcgl 2y ago
    > All OKRs help customers And in the real world, not even this is true, due to the cost of satisfying OKRs--opportunity cost is one kind of cost, but optimizing an OKR can of course negatively impact other valuable things that aren't represented by OKRs.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Parent's point is that customers want more than single metrics, and the metrics you leave on the side to priorize the OKRs can be as critical. Put another way, if your client has 20 inherent metrics, you can't have 20 OKRs so you're always at risk to mess it when focusing on a smaller set.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Exactly. So a productive employee is one who identifies a problem and knows which of the following to do: - fix it themselves without anyone asking - bring it up to higher management - deprioritize it based on severity and leadership initiatives This is the pattern taught by Jethro to Moses in the Old Testament: every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee.
    - devsda 2y ago
      > fix it themselves without anyone asking - bring it up to higher management No matter what your intentions are, doing this frequent enough will give you reputation of being a lonely wolf and trouble maker.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - liontwist 2y ago
        I’m sorry that’s your experience. But it can’t function any other way. You are a filter of small problems for everyone in the org higher than you. If you bring up everything up the chain your level may as well not exist.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        There are many places out there where individual contributors are agency-less executors. I don't think it ever worked. (Remember when Japan destroyed the world's car industry just by changing that single thing? And that's industry work, highly repetitive and formalized.) But that never stopped managers from doing something.
michaelt 2y ago
> And then customers complain that the driver is frequently crashing and the team is well aware but won’t fix I slipped in the catch-all phrase "while maintaining the same quality" for exactly this reason :) > What you really want is: - every team working to improve the customer experience - guided by leadership priorities and initiatives What I'm saying is, in some types of organisation the goal-setting process can be how you express the leadership priorities and initiatives
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
"every team working to improve the customer experience - guided by leadership priorities and initiatives" The fundamental issue is that in almost all larger companies, upper management does not trust that their employees are either intrinsically motivated to do a good job, or are smart enough to determine what "a good job" is. So rather than having a chain of trust from upper management to middle management to individual contributors, they seek to create a measurable control system. This inevitably replaces people's intrinsic motivation to do a good job with an extrinsic motivation, which only poorly represents the company's actual goals. At this point, most people are no longer trying to do a good job, they're instead trying to make their numbers look good. Upper management has effectively replaced real, meaningful work with a game where everybody tries to score points, and the people who don't participate in that game are eventually stackranked out of the company.
- blased 2y ago
  best explanation I've seen, this describes the org I'm at
- cnotv 2y ago
  This literally applies to everything in this world except global warming :D
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    $400 a tonne CO2 tax ($4 on a gallon of gas) is enough to modify behavior and encourage real CCS. This could be rebated to consumers (everybody gets a $6500 check a year) to make it revenue neutral. Two problems: (1) A legitimacy gap. People think taxation is on ratchet and wouldn't trust it to be revenue neutral and not a money grab. (2) It's a global problem. If there is a carbon tax in the US and no carbon tax in China that's unfair for our manufacturers. People will complain about the fairness of any particular rebating scheme inside the US, but there will always be much worse complaints about a system which embraces all nations from Luxembourg to Burundi.
    - ericd 2y ago
macspoofing 2y ago
>And then customers complain that the driver is frequently crashing and the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs. You highlight the danger of goal setting - where the goal becomes an end onto itself. I disagree with your adjustment however. It's too vague as written, and if you attach KRs to it, you'll end up where you started (with a KR like 'improve fps performance of game X by 25%') Ideally, you fix the issue, but you track it as having impact on achieving the OKR. Achieving OKRs should not be seen as a "be-all and end-all" ... Failing an OKR should be seen as a opportunity for improvement. If the corporation sets a goal of improving game FPS performance but is unable to meet it because of technical debt, that is good information that needs to be managed.
PaulHoule 2y ago
Something I appreciate about small workplaces is that, often, people have a shared sense of the purpose of the organization and strong teamwork. It manifests in little things. We were waiting outside the conference room last week for our manager to get the keys to unlock it. Nobody told me to, I wasn't responsible for snacks, but I picked up the trays of pastries and brought them in and put them in the right place and joked "It's my New Years resolution to squat anything I can get my arms around." I got thanked. In startups you often have to get things done quicker than you can hire new people to do it. A lot of people have the attitude that they have a certain circle of responsibility, which is necessary and appropriate in a large organization, but in a small organization I like it that people have internalized the goals of the organization and are willing and able to pinch hit. I think people often get this attitude working in small businesses, like a little shop that sells knick-nacks at the beach or the summer that I got re-hired at a supermarket that owed me a favor despite not really hiring at the time. I worked about 50% at the front end and the other 50% doing odd jobs directly under the store manager which meant they'd have me paint a metal line that ran around the outer wall of the store or sub for people in the deli (learn to work the meat slicer) or bakery, etc. In a big organization you need some rigidity, but big organizations can also be seen as a collection of small organization (e.g. "employees don't leave companies, employees leave managers") It's a pet peeve of mine when people in a startup don't have a flexible attitude.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- JALTU 2y ago
  100% and people in startups tend to have more of an ownership approach vs "not my job, nor in my job description" attitude. Not suggesting here that options are the answer, just echoing my experience in the small workplace vs large.
haolez 2y ago
"KR #3: the amount of bugs reported by users must not increase from our baseline" Solved :)
- jayd16 2y ago
  Replace the bug report system with a maze of menus so as to reduce the reports. Now we're getting key results.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Policy: “Bug reports are only accepted once they are validated and fixed”
  - haolez 2y ago
    This only happens if people are evaluated based on OKRs, which is not what this tool was originally about. High Output Management, as far as I can remember, says that such a tool must be used solely for communication, i.e. to avoid having people ask the same questions over and over again (and to enable descentralized decision making).
gosub100 2y ago
> the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs. Oh, someone will fix it. But it won't be the glamorous team that does the "lead" development. It will be a less desirable team that is relegated to "maintenance coding" and is paid substantially less than the premier team that created the big and got the bonus

madeofpalk 2y ago

> it was always a metric closely aligned with what customers want

liontwist 2y ago
All OKRs help customers, but not all customer help meets an OKR. Finding and fixing product problems requires decentralized decision making and trust.
- DrScientist 2y ago
  Indeed. What I find odd, is often the biggest proponents of the free market - with it's decentralised decision making process ( and redundancy of effort ), decide that total centralized, top down control is the best way to run their own company - as they think top down decisions and minimising waste through duplication is the way to go. As with all things - it's a balance of course.
  - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
    You might want to read "The Nature of the Firm", which discusses this.
    - DrScientist 2y ago
      That's a slightly different angle - if I understand correctly it's about why firms exist at all - and if I were to summarise it's because lack of trust costs - a firms boundaries are created to balance transactional costs ( within the firm it's low, between firms or individuals it can dominate ) versus the costs of perhaps not being market efficient. My argument above is about not what shapes a firm's boundary but how it operates internally - too much top down control potentially risks exacerbating the risks associated with being a company and also potentially increases internal transactional costs as well - worse of both worlds! - all that ceremony around decision making, time spent justifying existences, inability to just act. Obviously as I said above - it's a balance - just as it is with country/international systems.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    That’s an easy one to answer. Corporations don’t have police or taxation power and so have more limited impact on your individual freedom. In a “free market” you can choose what firms you work for and with, except the government. The government would be more efficient in an autocratic leadership. But government efficiency is not the societies efficiency and well being
    - DrScientist 2y ago
      > In a “free market” you can choose what firms you work for and with, except the government. Eh? Nobody ever leaves one country for another? > The government would be more efficient in an autocratic leadership. But government efficiency is not the societies efficiency and well being I think the free market proponents would say otherwise - one key problem is the myth of perfect information - you are imagining it's possible to concentrate all the required information to make any correct decision into a very small group of people at the top ( and assuming these people are competent and not corrupt). One of the ideas behind why distributed markets work is the information about what is needed is communicated by the mechanisms of the market itself. And to bring it back to the original post - does the CEO have all the information required to direct others to meet the customers need across all areas - or is it better to use the collective intelligence of the entire organisation?
- aurareturn 2y ago
  >Finding and fixing product problems requires decentralized decision making and trust. Which is exponentially harder in a large company - hence why OKRs are invented.
- jcgl 2y ago
  > All OKRs help customers And in the real world, not even this is true, due to the cost of satisfying OKRs--opportunity cost is one kind of cost, but optimizing an OKR can of course negatively impact other valuable things that aren't represented by OKRs.
makeitdouble 2y ago
Parent's point is that customers want more than single metrics, and the metrics you leave on the side to priorize the OKRs can be as critical. Put another way, if your client has 20 inherent metrics, you can't have 20 OKRs so you're always at risk to mess it when focusing on a smaller set.
- liontwist 2y ago
  Exactly. So a productive employee is one who identifies a problem and knows which of the following to do: - fix it themselves without anyone asking - bring it up to higher management - deprioritize it based on severity and leadership initiatives This is the pattern taught by Jethro to Moses in the Old Testament: every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee.
  - devsda 2y ago
    > fix it themselves without anyone asking - bring it up to higher management No matter what your intentions are, doing this frequent enough will give you reputation of being a lonely wolf and trouble maker.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - liontwist 2y ago
      I’m sorry that’s your experience. But it can’t function any other way. You are a filter of small problems for everyone in the org higher than you. If you bring up everything up the chain your level may as well not exist.
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        There are many places out there where individual contributors are agency-less executors. I don't think it ever worked. (Remember when Japan destroyed the world's car industry just by changing that single thing? And that's industry work, highly repetitive and formalized.) But that never stopped managers from doing something.

michaelt 2y ago

> And then customers complain that the driver is frequently crashing and the team is well aware but won’t fix I slipped in the catch-all phrase "while maintaining the same quality" for exactly this reason :) > What you really want is: - every team working to improve the customer experience - guided by leadership priorities and initiatives What I'm saying is, in some types of organisation the goal-setting process can be how you express the leadership priorities and initiatives

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

"every team working to improve the customer experience - guided by leadership priorities and initiatives" The fundamental issue is that in almost all larger companies, upper management does not trust that their employees are either intrinsically motivated to do a good job, or are smart enough to determine what "a good job" is. So rather than having a chain of trust from upper management to middle management to individual contributors, they seek to create a measurable control system. This inevitably replaces people's intrinsic motivation to do a good job with an extrinsic motivation, which only poorly represents the company's actual goals. At this point, most people are no longer trying to do a good job, they're instead trying to make their numbers look good. Upper management has effectively replaced real, meaningful work with a game where everybody tries to score points, and the people who don't participate in that game are eventually stackranked out of the company.

blased 2y ago
best explanation I've seen, this describes the org I'm at
cnotv 2y ago
This literally applies to everything in this world except global warming :D
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  $400 a tonne CO2 tax ($4 on a gallon of gas) is enough to modify behavior and encourage real CCS. This could be rebated to consumers (everybody gets a $6500 check a year) to make it revenue neutral. Two problems: (1) A legitimacy gap. People think taxation is on ratchet and wouldn't trust it to be revenue neutral and not a money grab. (2) It's a global problem. If there is a carbon tax in the US and no carbon tax in China that's unfair for our manufacturers. People will complain about the fairness of any particular rebating scheme inside the US, but there will always be much worse complaints about a system which embraces all nations from Luxembourg to Burundi.
  - ericd 2y ago

macspoofing 2y ago

>And then customers complain that the driver is frequently crashing and the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs. You highlight the danger of goal setting - where the goal becomes an end onto itself. I disagree with your adjustment however. It's too vague as written, and if you attach KRs to it, you'll end up where you started (with a KR like 'improve fps performance of game X by 25%') Ideally, you fix the issue, but you track it as having impact on achieving the OKR. Achieving OKRs should not be seen as a "be-all and end-all" ... Failing an OKR should be seen as a opportunity for improvement. If the corporation sets a goal of improving game FPS performance but is unable to meet it because of technical debt, that is good information that needs to be managed.

PaulHoule 2y ago

Something I appreciate about small workplaces is that, often, people have a shared sense of the purpose of the organization and strong teamwork. It manifests in little things. We were waiting outside the conference room last week for our manager to get the keys to unlock it. Nobody told me to, I wasn't responsible for snacks, but I picked up the trays of pastries and brought them in and put them in the right place and joked "It's my New Years resolution to squat anything I can get my arms around." I got thanked. In startups you often have to get things done quicker than you can hire new people to do it. A lot of people have the attitude that they have a certain circle of responsibility, which is necessary and appropriate in a large organization, but in a small organization I like it that people have internalized the goals of the organization and are willing and able to pinch hit. I think people often get this attitude working in small businesses, like a little shop that sells knick-nacks at the beach or the summer that I got re-hired at a supermarket that owed me a favor despite not really hiring at the time. I worked about 50% at the front end and the other 50% doing odd jobs directly under the store manager which meant they'd have me paint a metal line that ran around the outer wall of the store or sub for people in the deli (learn to work the meat slicer) or bakery, etc. In a big organization you need some rigidity, but big organizations can also be seen as a collection of small organization (e.g. "employees don't leave companies, employees leave managers") It's a pet peeve of mine when people in a startup don't have a flexible attitude.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JALTU 2y ago
100% and people in startups tend to have more of an ownership approach vs "not my job, nor in my job description" attitude. Not suggesting here that options are the answer, just echoing my experience in the small workplace vs large.

haolez 2y ago

"KR #3: the amount of bugs reported by users must not increase from our baseline" Solved :)

jayd16 2y ago
Replace the bug report system with a maze of menus so as to reduce the reports. Now we're getting key results.
Spooky23 2y ago
Policy: “Bug reports are only accepted once they are validated and fixed”
- haolez 2y ago
  This only happens if people are evaluated based on OKRs, which is not what this tool was originally about. High Output Management, as far as I can remember, says that such a tool must be used solely for communication, i.e. to avoid having people ask the same questions over and over again (and to enable descentralized decision making).

gosub100 2y ago

> the team is well aware but won’t fix the ticket because it doesn’t help them meet OKRs. Oh, someone will fix it. But it won't be the glamorous team that does the "lead" development. It will be a less desirable team that is relegated to "maintenance coding" and is paid substantially less than the premier team that created the big and got the bonus