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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

> Start by revisiting your organization’s mission (why you exist) and vision (what you want to achieve).

This is the root of where every company I’ve worked for gets OKRs wrong. They always have some flowery statement for mission and vision and build their goals around that. However in the day to day work when decisions are made it becomes apparent that the mission is to make money and the vision is to make more money. And that’s how my OKRs always become divorced from reality, having been derived from the flowery bullshit that rolls downhill.

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I've found that there's lots to be gained by splitting the difference and anchoring mission statements in money. Forget team spirit and shared purpose and whatnot; craft a sentence that says exactly how you beat the competition. It gives you a broad target to shoot for.

OKRs as the summary of a strategy conversation (not a “visioning” session) that actually happened, in the words of those who will do the work, fine. In most other scenarios I would proceed with extreme caution.

> the mission is to make money and the vision is to make more money.

This is just fine, but it's not enough.

The purpose of writing a proper mission and vision is to say something about how. There should be some coherent strategic guidance, some notion of where the company is and/or wants to be in the marketplace or in customers' minds, and so on and so forth.

If you have that (and it's actually backed up by reality), then the OKRs emerge organically across the portfolio of investments the company is pursuing. Land N more deals with this existing customer segment, experiment with new features in pursuit of that other customer segment, staff a team to ensure customers aren't lost for reason X or Y, etc.

The real magic, of course, is that every person in the company can then make a clear statement about how they're contributing to the broader mission and vision of the corporation. When it all lines up, it really is a beautiful symphony of capitalism.

I don’t doubt it can work and be used correctly, I’ve just never experienced that.

In my experience I’m left scratching my head when it cures time to write my OKRs since as an IC, who doesn’t get to choose what I work on or what gets released, everything comes down to essentially “do my job more gooder”.

Maybe I’m just bad it or my managers were bad at guiding me, but every OKR I’ve written was essentially bullshit and at performance review time my manager sat down with me and we bullshitted how they were achieved so I could keep my job. It’s what everyone did. No one ever did not achieve a goal. How could I write a measurable goal that contributed to revenue if I had no control over anything but my own work? I can’t say “release N features” because I can’t control if I’ll work on N features that actually get released. And so on.

I’m just happy OKRs are firmly in my rear view mirror now.

Here's the thing I learned, tying it to revenue gets the company more revenue, tying it to BS gets middle managers promoted faster. Why? Because money may not materialize while BS doesn't require anything except itself to be a success. And since your own promotion and bonus are strongly based on how much middle managers like you...

"I like to say 'revenue solves all known problems' it’s the one metric that PMs and execs can’t game." - Eric Schmidt

https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/507219358246903809?lang=en

I'm not sure if you're being serious or ironic given the recent press attention about Google Search being crap to ensure that Google Ads makes more revenue.

So, yes, they definitely can game it by focusing on short term unsustainable wins and ignoring all medium and long term negative impacts. Push the AB testing games to their limits, like running the same text 5 times with minor "improvements", so that the statistical metrics no longer apply. Dark patterns that cause long term user value to drop but drives some short term revenue. And so on. Then you get the more fun ones like stealing work from other departments without giving them credit. They eat the R&D cost and you get the revenue win. A good middle manager will even spin it so it looks like their team did the R&D as well.

That said, it all works fairly well when you've got a monopoly in the area (ie: search and ads for Google) but in those cases most everything works fairly well.

I generally agree with your original comment, and I think a lot about Schmidt's quote when operating in a startup context. You're right that it's ironic in the Google context. Search should absolutely go back to being measured on retention and they should disentangle from the revenue team. And I agree that the real death of Google was in the statistical game: 95% confidence in a microscopic metric improvement still lets through serious quality degradation 5% of the time. This gets to another important point: OKRs should be _big_ or they're not worth doing.

I think revenue or any other KPIs makes sense when it's easier to drive the KPI the "right" way versus the "wrong" way. As a business grows the low hanging fruit are used up and things start to shift to the "wrong" way being significantly easier. Moreover if the culture is about driving a KPI then, like any culture, it's very hard to shift it and no one wants to eat the political cost of trying to do so. I think executives often forget that people are clever and will game any metric if it's possible. I was at a company where there was a silent agreement across the EMs to over-level engineers. The pay was below competitors at the same level and set by HR but the promotion committees were not run by HR. Every new EM that joined was horrified at first at the competencies of their engineers, but then either learned to play the game or eventually got pushed out by their ever growing enemies.

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