OKRs vs. KPIs: understanding measurements for your SaaS business
Apologies in advance for the rant.As an engineer, I’m really tired of these processes and metrics that are supposed to increase focus and enable delivering value but in practice often don’t. A lot of organizational time is spent coming up with OKRs only for them to be either overridden due to the reality of running a business (gotta do what clients need, gotta do what you can to compete with competitors) or just by VPs/Directors deciding that something else requires the teams focus. Ultimately it seems like a whole bunch of busy work for PMs and TPMs, to justify their existence and hiring more of them.“But you’re not doing OKRs correctly!” Sure, I agree to that. But what use is a system or process that’s so difficult to get right that most organizations fail? I would argue that it is useless.I’ve seen this happen with another process: the church of agile. The way I’ve seen agile being used effectively is for orgs to agree to use the parts of it that make sense for them, not worry about what’s “right”, and constantly try out new ways of improving in response to feedback. That gives the team a sense that it’s a process that is evolving to meet their specific needs, rather than evolving to meet a dogma.