He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.
We'd spend weeks in meetings coming up goals and things we could measure, and end up with something like, "increase foo from X% to Y%". Here, "foo" is a placeholder for something or other, but the X and Y are not. We would literally leave them as variables, under the impression we'd fill them in eventually.
A year later, we'd look at them again and see that we never filled in the numbers. Then repeat. It was pretty wild.
The fad wore off before we agreed on how to write OKRs and we never spoke of it again.
My struggle at work is usually _reducing_ my standards for quality, performance and customer satisfaction to match those of management & colleagues, because caring more than everybody else is a recipe for burnout.
These type of people really need to work on their own startup where they can dictate the quality of work vs selling the product. It's the only way they will understand how to make the compromise between high standards and other long term product decision consequences.
If a game is setting me up to fail, I don’t want to play that game. My productivity has gone in the toilet ever since our management started pushing their brand of OKRs.
In all the teams I been in we have whiteboard sessions where come up with ideas. Then we slowly move ideas into the ones we want to work on, our Objectives.
Then for those Objectives, we set a qualifier to determine if that thing was done, the Result. Next we rank these Objective/Results by priority and we remove ones that will probably not get done, boom OKRs. Not difficult.