Thoughts on OKRs
I used OKRs on several teams to varying degrees at Google. Not a fan. Here are my complaints:<p>1. It makes organizations slow and inflexible. I used to joke that as soon as another team was involved in something you needed to do it would probably take a quarter. why? Well what you wanted probably wasn&#x27;t on this quarter&#x27;s OKRs so it would be an uphill battle to get them to do it. You&#x27;d have to argue about getting it into next quarter&#x27;s OKRs;<p>2. OKRs can be structured in such a way that you can grade quite well while having achieved absolutely nothing;<p>3. Teams can be held to different standards. Some get easy OKRs. Some get harder OKRs. So it&#x27;s still subject to the political-perception problems inherent in such organizations;<p>5. It is largely for show for upper management. I&#x27;ve been in 2 hour planning meetings where a bunch of teams speak for 2 minutes about what they&#x27;re working on. This might be useful for directors+ but is really a waste of the time of 50-100 other people. This is a problem with status meetings too;<p>6. Even grading OKRs can be subjective and political. I recall one famous example where someone (<i>cough</i> Vic <i>cough</i>) said they had a goal of 100M users. They actually only got to 10M. Grade? 0.7.<p>There was a running meme at Google about feedback that went something like this: This project would&#x27;ve failed without this person. It failed anyway but it definitely would&#x27;ve without this person.<p>I like this meme because it illustrates how the same set of facts can be used to argue how someone did a good job or a bad job and the difference between the two is whether or not the org likes them. The same set of facts can be summarized as &quot;this probject failed to ship&quot; and &quot;we failed fast, learned a lot and will take those learnings into future projects&quot;.<p>OKRs suffer from exactly those same problems.