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One of the downfalls of OKRs is that in many cases the true objective for people and/or teams is not something that can be mentioned without being unspeakably impolite. For example, the political goal "I as CTO want my department to grow by N FTEs so that I will gain in prestige compared to my peers in the C-suite" is definitely not something you will ever see on an OKR sheet but is definitely something that happens. On the other end of the influence spectrum, "I want to learn technology X because it will look good on my resume when I job-hop in a year from now" is also something you can't really use as a reason in a corporate setting but still definitely something that happens all the time.

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.

> in many cases the true objective for people and/or teams is not something that can be mentioned without being unspeakably impolite

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.

It's funny.

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.

I totally hate that bullshit. The last time I ran into this "personal goal setting" nonsense was at a company where I wasn't planning on staying around very long. You could say it was rather challenging to be authentic.

What kind of goals did you choose, that time?

I just told them what they wanted to hear, like "promoting knowledge sharing through brown bag sessions" with no intention of ever doing it.

Ok :-) I wonder if team/department goals would have been more fun in your case

I was unhappy there after the first month, so any sort of goals would've been pointless. Don't get me wrong, I did decent work and would receive excellent reviews / praise for it, I just didn't like the culture / environment.

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.

Whenever someone asks that question I tell them my personal goal is to make more money. Ironically this sometimes leads to productive conversations.

This is the dream response for any manager. I am the opposite and cared very little about making more money. I was more interested to reduce my life's operational expenses to get more out of the money I was already making. I got bounced around from manager to manager because of this. Nobody knew how to get me to do anything.

“I want to make more money” is an easy thing for a manager at a not-failing company to handle because it is so concrete and concretely deliverable.

Speaking for the devil -- that's going to happen anyway, but OKRs will force to put that into a framework, to come up with a reasonably looking excuse to do that. Better with excuse than without, no?

This hidden agenda issue can be very problematic, as you say it might be self-evident based on watching people leave that they've gone somewhere else for the "better" tech stack but you'll unlikely to get anyone to admit to it, unless you're working somewhere progressive and/or with a progressive manager etc.

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 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

That's an interesting angle, which I guess would tie in with 1) Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game concept [1] which would seem to be analagous in some sense to creating community,

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???

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chKZ5BVxTfY

> If you cannot start from the real Objectives and have to make up fake ones

The more you understand the real motivation of people the harder it gets to take business goals and decisions seriously.

It's like with most things in life.

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.

Specifically, eating sources of ecdysteroids like Spinach, Quinoa, Masal Root, etc. These are anabolic but do not have any androgenic side effects like conventional steroids.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecdysteroid

I’ll bite. Are you suggesting that those foods you mentioned have anabolic effects analogous to exogenous steroids?

I'm not suggesting, I'm stating.

Eating spinach is generally good, but don't go overboard with it. For one, it's got the highest concentration of oxalic acid amongst green vegetables, and high concentrations of that can lead to kidney stones.

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...

Thanks for this. I recently left an otherwise awesome job mostly because of OKRs. I am still trying to articulate why.

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.

What you are describing is the opposite of agile, and also flies in the face of devops, so it's really hard to sell it in today's management culture. However, I've never seen agile or devops development processes work. I only work on big systems with year-plus timespans.

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.

Yes - ICs have tasks, not okrs. The tasks can be intended to impact a higher-level kr which defines progress of an O and that O MUST be connected the strategy of the company or it is a crap/BS O.

Honestly, what I'm hearing in this podcast is that front line teams end up with OKRs that don't anchor into any strategic product vision. I agree, OKRs should be able to trace down. Since OKRs are supposed to cascade down, this failure falls squarely on upper management, for either failing to provide and communicate a strategy, or for failing to demand that recursively itemized OKRs actually trace up to the holistic vision.

And as always, there is no process substitute for adequate management.

> “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.”

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.

That is sad. Hope you are doing something to fix that. Sounds like people are just randomly doing stuff even though they took time to define okrs. Why define okrs in first place if just doing random stuff? Seems like a leadership issue. If you see the problem, address it. Lead or leave.

Oh yeah, I'm definitely on top of it and it's one of the constant themes of my discussions with my managers and skip-level reports. I very much start with making sure we're all clear on "why" before we even think about "what". When people know "why", they're able to contribute much more effectively and bring their own ideas and creativity to bear.

Goal setting is like other techniques in management.

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.