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Comment by pylua | Hacker News Reader

I think this forgets the most important thing: how to accurately measure the okr.

Okrs are primed to be gamed by people seeking to maximize their contributions even if it isn’t relevant to a real world scenario.

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I think this is only hard for poorly informed KRs. If something has risen to your top hypothesis for what's holding your Objective back, just look at the signal that made you honestly believe this. Customers keep telling you the product is painful to use? You can rely on the same communication channel to discover when it's fun and guardrail that it hasn't also lost utility. If teams deliver their KRs but don't move the Objective then the problem isn't with the KR delivery.

What about this scenario: two teams, rnd and delivery team. Rnd has an okr to make the projects easier to deliver. How do you objectively measure that, as one team does not completely control the result.

Start by answering why projects need to be easier to deliver. Of course they should be, but the nuance of the answer is the thing you measure. You see something that indicates that they're "too slow." What impact would you see on the R&D team if the delivery team did better? Go back to why you have a delivery team at all.

Or you can ask in the reverse: when would you stop wanting to invest in delivery beyond maintenance? What does "good enough" look like?

This, and another comment I just read, lead me to believe that OKRs should have OKRs themselves.

How else you know they’re value? :)

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