Why OKRs might not work at your company
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Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#2This is the key of the article:
“ Those successful companies aren’t successful because they use OKR’s. They use OKR’s because it is designed to leverage the empowered product team model. And as I have tried to make clear with years of articles and talks, the empowered product team model is a fundamentally different approach to building and running a tech-product organization.”
Amen to this. Google is an example company that claims to have had great success with OKRs. But let’s not forget that before OKRs, they had empowered teams, a growing market which they disrupted and grew, and a unique culture.
My bet is they would have done spectacularly well without OKRs, using some other method as well. You can’t say that OKRs caused Google to succeed, and they certainly won’t be enough to turn a company or org around, like the author argues.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#3This is the key of the article: “ Those successful companies aren’t successful because they use OKR’s. They use OKR’s because it is designed to leverage the empowered product team model. And as I have tried to make clear with years of articles and talks, the empowered product team model is a fundamentally different approach to building and running a tech-product organization.” Amen to this. Google is an example compa…
Thanks for the tldr. Maybe good to always add that when posting a link :)
Also from the article: "You can’t take your old organization based on feature teams, roadmaps and passive managers, then overlay a technique from a radically different culture, and expect that will work or change anything."
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#4I’ve always found it shocking (well not that shocking honestly after years at 10 person startups to 5,000+ people companies) that you get these folks who read “measure what matters” or some cherry picked Andy Grove stuff & decide “this will fix our velocity and other problems”.
Like no, hard no. OKRs are great, I personally love them but if your company has deeper issues a set of OKRs won’t help and likely hurt as it obfuscates the underlying issues that exist.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#5Agree that the method is not guaranteed to be a success-maker. Our experience adopting in a small healthcare thinktank was difficult -- the pattern didn't really fit our present and future workflows very well.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#6This is the key of the article: “ Those successful companies aren’t successful because they use OKR’s. They use OKR’s because it is designed to leverage the empowered product team model. And as I have tried to make clear with years of articles and talks, the empowered product team model is a fundamentally different approach to building and running a tech-product organization.” Amen to this. Google is an example compa…
Thanks for the tldr. Maybe good to always add that when posting a link :) Also from the article: "You can’t take your old organization based on feature teams, roadmaps and passive managers, then overlay a technique from a radically different culture, and expect that will work or change anything."
Well said!
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#7One of our senior leadership people read the book, got in his mind that we need this at the company, got together the managers of all departments, they figured out some OKRs and now everyone’s off working on implementing them.
Some of them are rather impossible, like teaching all devs on how to do devops within 2 months, so they can be self sufficient.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#8Biggest complain I have with Marty Cagan is he always describes the perfect product organization and says anything else is shit.
Well you can't choose your execs, you can't choose your culture,.. so thank you for describing what is the ideal world, but almost no company will be able to apply your advice.
Again in this article he doesn't explain how to replace OKR, but just says, if OKR doesn't work then your culture is the issue
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#9BD needs to generate enough sales to keep the engineers stressed out. When you don't have that, you end up with politics. OR the company is pre PMF, and everyone needs to operate in that mode.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the tldr. Maybe good to always add that when posting a link :) Also from the article: "You can’t take your old organization based on feature teams, roadmaps and passive managers, then overlay a technique from a radically different culture, and expect that will work or change anything."
Well said!
Just copy pasted ;)