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OKRs are a management fad and a performance review bludgeon. They don't improve performance or alignment. The best pre-work you can do on OKRs is to not do them.

Startups dont need OKRs for either performance or alignment and later stage companies that implement OKRs are in the beginning phase of stagnation and descent.

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How do you propose companies approach goals setting?

Surely there has to be some way for a company to communicate to employees “Our goal is to grow 30%” and we will do this focusing marketing on a rebranding, focusing sales team on shifting to outbound sales model, product will build features x, y, z, etc…

Very simplistic example but companies need some way to flow goals down to smaller groups of people down the chain, don’t they?

In the same way that you can take a simple idea like iterative and responsive planning and turn it into a management monstrosity like agile, so too can simple goal setting and alignment be turned into the management and performance review monstrosity that is OKR.

My charitable view is, they can serve as an error correction function in a product led org. I.e., product and sales people don't care about the internals, just feature, feature feature. Over time this increases entropy. OKRs can be used to make time to address entropy.

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