“ Those successful companies aren’t successful because they use OKR’s. They use OKR’s because it is designed to leverage the empowered product team model. And as I have tried to make clear with years of articles and talks, the empowered product team model is a fundamentally different approach to building and running a tech-product organization.”
Amen to this. Google is an example company that claims to have had great success with OKRs. But let’s not forget that before OKRs, they had empowered teams, a growing market which they disrupted and grew, and a unique culture.
My bet is they would have done spectacularly well without OKRs, using some other method as well. You can’t say that OKRs caused Google to succeed, and they certainly won’t be enough to turn a company or org around, like the author argues.