Thoughts on OKRs
While I think OKRs are necessary, and strategic leadership is necessary to achieve them, consider that whether a company is being led to an objective, or managed to optimize itself - is entirely dependent on the stage of the company. I&#x27;d argue optimization phase OKRs are negatively defined, where growth phase OKRs are positively definied.<p>Stages I think of as survival&#x2F;subsistance, product market fit, and max market share, are growth phases, whereas stages like max stock price and max gross margins, are optimization phases of a company. Optimization phases are when you already have market fit and a revenue stream, where as a board you can just drop in a bunch of MBAs to refine and hollow out the org and stabilize the company as a revenue stream in a portfolio. Management is value extraction, and it is a specific skillset that a company needs when it has a revenue producing asset, which it needs to optimize for stability, so that it can be used as collateral for <i>leverage</i> into new ventures. That&#x27;s the point of management: to stabilize an asset with steady hands so that it is a coherent asset that can be traded and leveraged.<p>Leadership qualities in managers are mainly plumage on (or cover for) their foundation of extractive skills, and are neither sufficient or necessary. You can&#x27;t manage something until there is a null hypothesis, where the thing makes value or money already (default-alive in PG parlence). This is why managers creating OKRs often sound so vague, it&#x27;s because they rig the OKR definition to avoid a perception of failure that would cause their attrition in a zero-sum optimization environment. OKRs are necessarily about black-and-white outcomes, whereas, managing is a matter of sustaining and directing an equllibrium. (yes, b&amp;w thinking is usually considered &quot;bad,&quot; but mainly from a mangerial frame of reference). I&#x27;m proposing OKRs are a growth&#x2F;leadership phase tool that feels cargo culty in optimization&#x2F;management phase companies.<p>Smart people become managers because they can reason abstractly about stuff that makers, leaders, and IC&#x27;s take personally, and there is a lot of value in learning to respect that skill, even when it is repellant, and not fall into the trap of merely moralizing our own limitations. (my bias should be obvious)<p>Leadership is for the growth phases of a company, where you need to get from zero to one, a to b, subsistance to product market fit - where the function of leadership is to affect change. A company whose majority growth phase is behind it is in a stable state doesn&#x27;t need change, it needs to be managed and optimized as an asset for leverage. It&#x27;s dumb to drop leaders into stable companies because the inertia of the company is already headed toward an equillibrium of being a commodity asset, a piece of financial furniture in portfolios, and change agents (leaders) either have to derail that to succeed, or get frustrated and leave.<p>For a FAANG company to have OKRs below the manager level now seems misguided, as their growth phases are behind them, e.g. the majority of the change in their  revenue growth is going to come from cost management and margins, and not from growing into new market share. Their best hope for market share growth is demographic change, as if you haven&#x27;t adopted their product by now, you&#x27;re probably not going to unless you were born recently and are just discovering the product, or you have just arrived and the products are part of your new life. Otherwise, I&#x27;m probably not going to become a new user&#x2F;market share of a FAANG product.<p>As an optimization phase company you can&#x27;t tell your engineering staff that the future is lean and that the company is now a zero-sum optimization problem, which their job is to beat out everyone else at doing the same or more with less. That&#x27;s a great and strategic place to make a P&amp;L mark as a manager, but a shitty place to be someone who builds and makes things. Your upside comes from outsourcing functions and services, integrating with tech debt, and other brain damaging tasks. An OKR in an optimization stage company is whether a function can survive being operated by cheap and the absolute minimally competent people. It&#x27;s mainly about cost reduction. Imo, OKRs in an optimization stage company are like skinny jeans on a middle aged man, where nobody wants to have to be the one to say it, but they&#x27;re past the stage where it&#x27;s appropriate.<p>OKRs make more sense in a startup or a growth stage company where there is a sense of shared mission and clear outward direction for growth, and where you&#x27;re betting on growing your way out of a lot of problems. Deliver a feature that positions us for this market share growth, make something someone wants, establish PMF, establish feature parity w&#x2F; competitors, improve conversions in the pipeline by x% - these are the things that leadership is designed to achieve. It&#x27;s high risk and leadership has terrible failure modes, but that&#x27;s an artifact of the company stage.<p>Long comment with intent to provoke discussion, but if your OKR is not concrete and a b&amp;w  binary outcome, I&#x27;d ask whether you are in an org that is still in a growth phase, and whether this is what you want. Nothing wrong with being in an optimization phase company (e.g a bank) but not being aligned personally to the phase of your company is a recipe for suffering.