Show HN: An AI-based OKRs generator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An AI-based OKRs generator

tability.io

32 pointsspittet17 comments

Having to write OKRs makes me feel like I'm trapped in a satirical comedy. The work means nothing and the meta work means even less. This adds another layer that has me looking around for the cameras.

My favorite is the layers of management who apparently only job is to analyze and concern themselves with OKRs. What actual work is getting done? Who knows!

No joke. My director's only job is farming OKR ideas from reports, presenting OKRs to execs, evaluating OKR completion at the end of the quarter, hiring people to complete OKRs, Pipping those that did not complete OKRs.

And for this BS, he gets paid a million. And here I am coming up with actual solutions to real problems for the company, and yet getting paid less. Wtf!

Imagine how much you would get paid if you can automate that communication and planning aspect that the director does to/from the board of shareholders.

I would get fired because my director wouldn't like me passing the chain of command.

Such is the stupidity of middle management.

God I hate OKRs and think they're one of the best ways to kill your startup. ("There is only one Goal" from the cover of The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt)

If I am working at a place that wants me to write OKRs I will be very happy to have something like this to help me out.

OKRs are another victim of semantic diffusion by consultants and others cutting corners and missing the philosophy of them.

Done properly they should be the equivalent of "we're gonna slam dunk this thing we think is important to do by smashing these X and Y targets" so everyone high fives and is super pumped and energised making it happen.

Now they've turned into "you should do this because we tell you to and we will track you as you do it" and so everyone feels like they have no autonomy.

My take is the opposite, I’ve been asked to make up 20 OKRs for myself (the only real corporate “goal” is “make 20 OKRs”. If I had a small number of goals that were clearly linked to the business that would be one thing, but with a large number of bullshit goals many of them would fall by the wayside, particularly when “drop everything for customer X” was a common occurrence.

I didn’t really mind the “drop everything” bit, we were looking for product-market fit after all, but when performance reviews come around and I killed 3 of those goals, sofa kind did 7 and spaced 10 it’s a situation where narcissists will convince management is half full and that mine is half empty.

I hear you. I think OKRs suffer from having a lot of literature covering the surface (benefits of OKRs, general definitions, success stories...) but not a lot of content providing a prescriptive approach.

To me it feels a bit like structuring a JS/TS app. You've got powerful tools, but it can quickly become a mess without a good structure around it.

My general recommendation: no one should have more than 7 KRs to track on a weekly basis. And an OKR plan should be a 3x4 matrix: 3 Objectives and 4 KRs/Objective.

Thanks for the feedback. Part of the motivation was to remove the pain out of having to figure out what your OKRs should look like.

It won't be perfect, but usually the AI can come up with a good draft.

Tabby is the name of an ai code assistant open source project I think. Quick feedback, I feel that OKRs are really context dependant, is there any way to make them a bit more specific to the project ?

Tabby is actually the name of our mascot (Tability.io). I agree that OKRs are context dependant, and you can add a lot of context in the box to get better suggestions (ex: We have an eCommerce platform selling mainly _____, and we want to double the number of returning customer).

That being said, the goal for us was to help people get a draft plan that they can tweak later. For instance, I don't know anything about PR, but I can ask the AI to generate a plan to get press and use that as a starting point.

We've also experimented with an AI that looks at past data to provide better advice, but you'd have to be in the product to see it.

Nice one. Maybe you put on some templates followed by famous companies, or get it to collect some info about the company to easily generate em

We've tried to find some public templates but Gitlab was pretty much the only one having public OKRs[1].

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/okrs/

Gpt4 writes mine. Hate that bullshit

Tried it on a project we did, results are generic but good overall.

seems like this is not working if the description was over 2 sentences.

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