Unlocking your team’s full potential via OKRs

I was working once at a once-promising artificial intelligence startup which exited by being bought by a leading athletic clothes and shoes company. (Really!)

For me the beginning of the end was when we were all expected to write down 20 or more OKRs. The firm had (I thought) a brilliant vision but it struggled with execution. We had one real goal: product market fit, and I think adding more goals was just a distraction.

OKRs are a good fit for a company like Google that hires 150+ IQ people then destroys their productivity with Rube Goldberg tools like Kubernetes and Rube Goldberg processes like OKRs. If you are being judged on lots of little things as opposed to one big thing you are putting narcissists in charge who can cherry pick goals to make it look like they are succeeding and you fail.