https://review.firstround.com/set-non-goals-and-build-a-prod...
If you have time, listen to the podcast. This is really the most comprehensive treatment I have seen related to OKRs and goal setting. Basically, goals are the last thing you consider. What is often missing is the high levels of the stack clearly articulated such that the goals make sense and measure progress towards a strategic outcome:
"Our strategy is to increase revenue by 5%’ or ‘Increase retention by 10%.’ That’s not a strategy, that’s a goal. It’s great if you can achieve that goal, but only if it’s actually part of a larger strategy that the company is trying to advance,” Mehta says.
“I often see teams get into a mode where they’re just doing anything and everything to move the goal, without actually realizing they’re headed in the wrong direction from a strategic standpoint to create long-term value.” "
If you cannot start from the real Objectives and have to make up fake ones, determining effective Key Results to go with them is bound to lead to confusion.
My last place we intentionally didn't use K8s but we were upfront with our team and hires (it was almost one of the first things I mentioned when recruiting) along with the reasoning.
But unless people are honest about their motives, and this is something that has to cascade down from the top, you'll get all sorts of sabotaging behaviour, especially if OKRs are imposed from the top and not bought into/negotiated across the org.
This gets worse when (due to human psychology and fast brain/slow brain traits, with the slow brain backing up the knee jerk fast brain) goals like the ones you mention are hidden (in shadow - see Jung). Or as mentioned in other comments you get the whole Economics externalisation problem when all sorts of 2nd and 3rd order+ goals (like team/org cohesion, fixing technical debt, taking ownership of incidents/problems or going the extra mile) which aren't in any of the OKRs get gamed out of the system because no-one's tracking them. This would be fine if the OKRs are light touch guides and not excuses to stick everything else on the bonfire. i.e. OKRs are in service and not master.
I'm not sure how you mitigate this other than hiring people aligned with company values/goals/action who are less likely to just be (understandably because it's a jungle out there) maximising their pay and the modernity of the tech stacks they know and foster a culture of co-operation not competition.
I’m not sure it’s possible to grow beyond a small group of people and actually maintain that. People would need to feel some significant ownership in the company and you can’t spread a meaningful amount ownership across hundreds or thousands of people. And that’s after the investors and execs take their cut
2) but sabotaged by a general (lack of) friction in people's ability to move jobs (I'm averaging about 2 years now per company, down from 4-5 years around 20 years ago) and this isn't seen as a negative.
3) This obviously can create large internal friction, especially when every new person brings new challenges (or fads) to the strategic direction such that you can spend more time changing (tooling or process or organisation structure) than actually doing real work.
4) As mentioned in a recent post here, this tendency to pay market rate for new hires, but not to pay market rates to more productive people already working for you also exacerbates this, but everyone just shrugs and plays the game because no-one's invested enough in the process to challenge it (or those that are and do just get labelled as awkward).
So it's interesting the "fetish" for OKRs in many spaces that can make people look good, but how often do they actually track the actual "costly" actions like
a) perpetual people leaving -> hiring -> training/getting up to speed cycles
b) or number of hours wasted in meetings or context switching due to interruptions or
c) deciding to outsource something you've just spent 9 months insourcing to a different company than the original one you insourced from at great financial/opportunity cost (assuming they even succeed and it doesn't take 3 attempts) etc.?
d) Let's rewrite everything in new tool X I need on my CV because you won't pay me market rate so I'm now looking after myself...
Without surfacing these costs, how can you make effective decisions???
At the individual contributor level the manager is always pushing for “personal OKRs” too
And I’ve never been able to be honest or “authentic” about that
Nobody could ever explain if it was professional development goals, extra responsibility or goals within the company or coding project, or actual personal. Other ICs would be excited to write their actual personal.
The honest truth: I didn't have any goals, and still really don't. I just wanted good, interesting work to do during these dark times (pandemic, etc), with as few interruptions as possible.
When it comes to personal development, side projects, etc. I have had times when I was very interested in setting specific goals and other times when I really didn't want to.
The more you understand the real motivation of people the harder it gets to take business goals and decisions seriously.
If you want to become fitter, don't think "I want to lose 10kg of weight", think about finding a sport which you like and healthy food which you enjoy eating.
Your belly might not disappear 100%, but you will feel better, and you are in for the long run.
The Popeye spinach meme is real.
I suppose if you come from a culture that eats insects you could also get a large amount of these compounds.
I don't know what would be considered too much spinach, personally I include it in my salads but not as the base (usually that's romaine for me), and sometimes Sautee some to go with eggs for breakfast, but I don't get it every grocery trip.
https://www.livestrong.com/article/529555-what-are-the-effec...
I'm going to correct you, because it's relevant. Mehta says, "but only if it is actually accretive to the strategy." I think the accretive is important here, because one of my observations on how we were doing it wrong was that there were no stated goals for security against the company as a whole. This made it seem like each teams' OKRs were a chaotic free-for-all. Intuitively, the goals for security as a whole should be based on the overall needs of the company, divided up across the appropriate teams. These teams will have the tribal knowledge to write the best roadmap, determine who will own the workflow that the project generates on completion and generally know how to scope each task.
Going to listen to the podcast now. Maybe I will have more to say after. Cheers.
I can imagine those processes working well for lean, piecemeal teams (like refreshing frontend site cosmetics once a year, or pumping out contract work every few weeks), or for technology-lean consumer startups building an MVP they plan to throw away once they have market fit.
When I've seen project management work well, it's always been of the form (all these bullet points are mandatory, in my experience):
- The goal for the product for the next 3-24 months is clearly articulated.
- Each sub-team's 1-6 month goals are clearly articulated.
- ICs produce a list of projects that should take one IC about a month, and that, if completed, will meet the sub-team's goal (deadline requirements are ignored during this part of planning).
- Is "Number of projects / number of ICs" significantly less than the number of months to the deadline?
- If No, this sub-team won't be able to ship, so adjust the scope, the resources, or the deadline.
- Compensation is based on the performance of the product group, not the sub-teams. Somewhere between 1-10% of new hires end up being let go within 6 months. Hiring is never perfect, and firing people less bad for morale than having people sitting around being dead weight.
Number of months varies depending on project maturity, business needs, and scope of the changes. Anything past 24 months is best done in a graduate program, not a company.
And as always, there is no process substitute for adequate management.
I see this all the time. Everyone is so focused on the "KR" that they know nothing about the "O". I want my teams to be bought into the overall Objective well before we start thinking about objective measures of progress and/or success.
The quality movement went terribly wrong when the motivation became "We want to have an ISO 20022 sign in front of the factory" as opposed to "we want to crush the competition". See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_%28novel%29
Probably the best phrase of that novel is "There is only one goal".
I worked at an AI startup which was struggling to balance the long term needs of developing a technologically advanced product and the short term needs of delivering projects to major corporations.
I saw the adoption of OKRs to be the beginning of the end of my time there because instead of carefully teasing apart what goals were necessary to realize their strategy everybody was told that they needed to list 20 or 30 goals, simply to list 20 or 30 goals.
Not too long after I left the CEO announced that he was proud that the company had been acquired by a major athletic footware manufacturer. My hot take was "that's incredible!" because "incredible" was the CEO's favorite adjective, but really I told people all along that one of our engagements, if it fully realized its potential, would generate enough value for a customer that they'd see it as a bargain to buy the company.
So of course this just makes people even more scatterbrained than they were before and worse yet it's rocket fuel for the psychopaths and narcissists in your organization because they are geniuses at playing that kind of game and they will use it to make themselves look good while making hard working people who are more interested in doing work and realizing the strategy look bad.
But we had no historical metrics on... anything, really, related to software development or design. Nothing that'd be useful for quarterly goals, anyway. "Close X tickets" or "make X commits" are famously shit measurements. We did client work, so we couldn't just try to decrease load times on one of our own products, or something like that.
Having nothing meaningful to use for OKRs related to our actual jobs, developers & designers just latched on to sales & marketing projects and set our OKRs for those. Video views are relatively easy to measure. Sales funnel stuff's easy to measure. "Net promoter score". All that shit. The goal-setting for OKRs strongly favored sales & marketing, for whom measuring stuff was already a lot of what they did.
I'm not sure that's what they were aiming for, but it's what they got. I hope it was at least kinda useful for the company.
And yeah, using tickets as a success metric is gonna produce some incredibly awful behavior as people learn to game the system.
Good OKRs are not easy. It’s very hard to come up with good key results that incentivize the right behavior while actually measuring progress towards the goal. It takes quite a lot of skill to do that properly.
To me the most important part of OKR’s isn’t really the metrics… it’s the understanding that the team has been tasked with solving some problem without being told how to solve it. The team itself gets to own the solutions that drive the metric. Done correctly it lets everybody on the team take ownership of the product they are working on. It is far better than just being a feature factory that cranks out whatever sales or upper management thinks is a good solution.
I find #1 is more prevalent as most people are competent but I might be a bit generous in that assessment.
This is one of the most hostile things an employer can do to a person. I don't want them involved in my personal growth -- fuck allllll of that. I will grow when and how I want to, if I even want to.
IME this never-ending push for continual improvement discourages me when I inevitably fail to meet goals they want me to want.
I want to say "just leave me alone I'm speedrunning to early retirement" but that'll just get me in more trouble.
Unfortunately Doerr presented a football team example in a pathetic attempt to explain how okrs cascade directly.
Because of this, okrs have been done poorly at so many orgs. Sadly, okrs software companies saw the simple computation from set theory to make krs be children of higher level objectives so they could make cool visual maps illustrating how okrs connect.
So, yeah, I feel you, “Whateva”