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Comment by ibejoeb | Hacker News Reader

What is an OKR?

update: dead serious. I searched. It says "objectives and key results." But what does one look like? Is it a document?

Sorry you received unhelpful sass from other commenters. It stands for "Objective and Key Result" - it's a common "business-speak" initialism that basically translates to "a measurable, data-driven goal".

I'd say it's more than that. OKRs are a concrete framework that came out of Intel and was popularized by Google. But yes, the focus is on setting objectives backed by measurable results.

Can be a document, an app, whatever. One flavor is objectives are set at the top, their KRs are translated into objectives for the next management layer with their own KRs, and so on. It's an iterative process with some combination of top-down and bottoms-up activities. And afterwards, the results are reviewed. There's more to it, but that's the gist.

An objective is a qualitative goal. The key results are generally quantitative numbers that can help you measure if you are achieving that goal.

An example: an objective might be "improve application performance". The key results for that objective might be "reduce average page load time from 3s to 1.5s" and "reduce API response times by 60%".

Got it. I guess that was just illustrative, though, because why isn't "reduce average page load time from 3s to 1.5s" the objective?

Ah, I see. It bubbles. Explained by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40979799

Thanks everyone.

If you were to tell your CEO you're reducing page load time, they will rightfully ask you why and what problem you're solving. The objective is the simple sentence that makes the "why" clear. It might itself be subordinate to a higher level objective. The idea is that all work is clearly aligned to specific goals in a very transparent manner.

It's actually a very solid framework, but as the many comments indicate, poor implementations abound (also see Agile, DevOps, etc).

Let's say your day job is providing a website on which paying customers can upload images.

Youre currently only supporting jpeg and png.

Your objective for a quarter could be to broaden support.

So you'd plan to add 10 additional formats. If you add 8, you've achieved your goal. Makes sense, right?

Honestly, the snide comments are spot on. It was even dumber then SMART SCRUM, aka development via waterfall, which is totally agile xoxo

I swear this is entirely earnest. That example works. Except:

>So you'd plan to add 10 additional formats. If you add 8, you've achieved your goal.

My plan was to add 10, and I added 8. I achieved my goal?

In the original envisioning, yes; typically, 100% was set at a stretch goal, with ~70% being the more actual target. >= 70% was thus successful.

But, most of the places I've seen doing "OKRs" are just appropriating the word but not the actual system.

The point is that you set a goal and made progress towards it. Ideally you choose goals for yourself and it's expected that you won't complete them all.

I still don't like it.

My experience of them was that upper management set "Objectives" like "1% YoY Online Sales Growth" for your group or team or whatever and then each team in that group (again, or whatever) would come up with their own "Key Results" that they thought, if the result was achieved, would translate to that objective.

So for example, if you worked in online retail like I did, maybe you'd get an objective like that and then hypothesize a few things along the lines of "if we increase product image interactions by X% then sales should go up by Y%." as key results that you then report back out to management to show progress towards your objective.

astrology charting for MBA’s solely because Google did it at one point

Bless your heart

https://youtu.be/XAeKtyL2m-Q [Interview with Jr. Product Manager]

A buzzword that no one actually takes seriously and means very little in practice but that managers use to justify their jobs.

The biggest impact I've seen is that you cannot adjust priorities for an entire quarter.

I've sat by and watched an entire year elapse while we were forced to dispassionately pursue an OKR we knew was leading us nowhere.

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