BD 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.
What is BD, OR and PMF?
Why OKRs might not work at your company
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Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#12Tell people what's important and what isn't. How innovative. OKRs are for managers who are incapable of telling their staff what's important.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#13BD 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.
What is BD, OR and PMF?
Probably business development and product market fit. The "OR" I think was just an emphatic "or"
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#14One 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.
"teaching all devs on how to do devops within 2 months, so they can be self sufficient"
There's so much wrong with this key result it's incredible :( One big reason that OKRs can fail is just flat out bad OKRs. Teaching all devs to do "devops" within two months ignores the actual issue that they seem to be trying to solve (which I'm guessing is that not having sufficient ops is hurting the company and velocity). It's far too easy to fail and puts pressure on individuals rather than letting the team find the right solution.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#15This 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…
Regardless of whether OKRs are meaningful or important (IMO they aren't), Google had OKRs in 1999, less than a year after founding, before AdWords. They didn't have notable product teams before OKRs.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#16One 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.
Before OKRs did you have any plans or goals or strategy?
How do OKRs relate to devops timelines?
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#17One 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.
Similar story at my place.
New executive hired who loves OKRs. Ends up not changing anything because the engineering OKR is “work on the product roadmap” aka what we’ve always been doing.
Only lasting impact is there are a few more slides in the company wide meetings.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#18Biggest 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…
If your business relies on a blogger for its operating strategy, you are doomed.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#19Tell people what's important and what isn't. How innovative. OKRs are for managers who are incapable of telling their staff what's important.
Easy enough in a small org, much more difficult in a big org. Part of the point of OKRs, when done right, are that it shows how the thing you're working on today ladders up to the big thing that drives the entire company forward. That said, in reality it's rarely executed well or with any precision whatsoever. I worked at a 1000 person place whose top level OKRs were so vague they were garbage. You could have created any feature whatsoever and shoed it into those.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#20I’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…
Most times they don't even read the books. They just stop at "what doesn't get measured doesn't happen." Great, that leads people to measure all sorts of stupid stuff like lines of code to production. Who cares if it isn't something that contributes to a thing that someone's going to use.