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Why OKRs might not work at your company

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Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#51

Post by osipov »

packetlost wrote: post #36
staticassertion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems terribly run, frankly. I wouldn't use them as an example of good process, organization, or really anything other than that being early to advertising and being the internet's front page for ~20 years is a great way to make money

This. Google seems to not have anyone with a cohesive vision or even anyone that knows how to build a platform or maintain a product. I personally would like to know what's going on with the product owners at Google, because it really seems like none of them talk to each other. Google is a fantastic engineering company, but terrible at building products.

>Google is a fantastic engineering company, but terrible at building products.

not anymore

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#52

Post by gorpomon »

I've worked with OKR's at large e-commerce companies, small tech incubators, consultancy firms and "Unicorn" stage startups. At each stop OKR's were absolutely worthless.

What I really appreciate in reading this article is that they were absolutely worthless for the reasons this author has stated: there was no real empowerment behind them. Most often they were used for personal development since I had no meaningful say in my actual work. It's always a stretch to put personal development in terms of OKR's: "I'll write two blog posts this quarter." "I'll run one lunch and learn"-- ok those are fine activities but we hardly need OKR's to grow as engineers-- and just imagine how annoying it is to be at quarter's end struggling to write a blog post when you find out midway that you're enjoying learning in an entirely different manner.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#53

Post by andrewingram »

polote wrote: post #8

Biggest 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…

There's some idealism, but the rub with OKRs is that it's obvious that it requires a culture of individual empowerment, at least it always has been from my perspective. It's been a baffling reality of my own startup experience that OKRs get introduced by management teams that aren't willing to truly delegate decisions to individual teams (and perhaps individuals); despite the fact that the entire framework they just introduced, requires this in order to have any real value.

After all, what's the value in a tool aimed at providing alignment in decision-making, if nobody actually gets to make decisions?

So yeah, idealism, but of a form that's worth aiming for.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#54

Post by irjustin »

habitue wrote: post #48
irjustin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to grasp what's wrong with that. That statement is true for every set of system/values. A set of systems won't work for 100% of the cases because that system was designed around a particular team. And there are times it won't work well. Whether the system is good/effective has nothing to do with "you aren't doing it right" part. The "you aren't doing it right" can be applied to literally everything.

The common thread is that they're frameworks which promise to be very general and be applicable everywhere, but which in practice "everyone does wrong". If no one can actually successfully use your framework the right way, maybe the framework isn't as generally useful as it purports to be.

Ah got it.

Having gone through scrum and OKRs I agree with the idea that people tend to sell them to be 'generally' useful at least on the surface.

But once we started doing training/testing towards scrum, it's very clear we needed change as an organization. Some people ended up leaving as a result because it's not everyone's cup of tea.

I can't say the same for OKRs because I joined and it was already in place pretty effectively, but I imagine it to be similar.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#55

Post by rahimnathwani »

akmarinov wrote: post #7

One 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"

The 'ing' at the end of the verb suggests that this is an activity, rather than an objective nor a key result.

If your company is using the term "OKRs" to refer to things that aren't OKRs, then perhaps they could use some help from someone who has used OKRs successfully elsewhere.

The same thing could happen with any new way of working. Imagine a company where no one has used TDD before. Some leaders decide everything must use TDD from now on. People try to work in this new way but, lacking experience and role models, they write their tests at the wrong level of abstraction and end up constraining future refactoring instead of enabling it. Would such an experience mean that TDD is bad or useless?

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#57

Post by cortesoft »

toast0 wrote: post #47
cortesoft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't the other companies that were those things succeed then? (Yahoo, Altavista, etc)?

I worked at Yahoo from 2004-2011. This is my opinion only. Yahoo was doing pretty well at times during that period. Certainly, Google had better revenue numbers and better margins, but Yahoo was still making tons of money, just not as much. Leadership had a tough time explaining what Yahoo did; although, they had a clear goal in 2004 era onboarding --- be in the top 3 of all internet verticals either through owned an…

Wouldn't your comment suggest that management DOES matter then? The person I replied to says that google has terrible management but is successful because of their starting position. As you have pointed out, bad decisions by management can lead to a company's downfall.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#58

Post by cortesoft »

staticassertion wrote: post #43
cortesoft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't the other companies that were those things succeed then? (Yahoo, Altavista, etc)?

I don't know. I don't feel that I have to know to make the statement I made.

Your statement was the google was successful because of their starting position only, and that their bad management doesn't matter because they can't screw it up being in such a great position.

I think the existence of other companies that were in similar starting positions, and then subsequently failed, would prove that you need more than just that starting position to succeed.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#59

Post by jariel »

staticassertion wrote: post #33
sukilot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google seems terribly run, frankly. I wouldn't use them as an example of good process, organization, or really anything other than that being early to advertising and being the internet's front page for ~20 years is a great way to make money

I beleive G is 'well run' if you think of them as a 'whole' - even if it means 'poorly run' in many ways.

Search and AdWords are probably 'well run' by whatever measure. And they make money with radical surplus, kind of like pumping sweet Oil cheaply.

And like such places that have cheap oil, a lot of other things are dysfunctional.

We can look past some failures like 'Wave' as merely taking risk, which is fine. But strategic disasters like 'Google Plus' show an inability to do something coherently across business units.

YouTube, in many ways, has a really, really poor interface and some really bad and slow-moving features. But hey, it makes money.

I worked at a major handset maker that made money hand-over fist on devices, and it was laughable how dysfunctional some things were.

This is normal.

OKRs are probably a minor contribution to G's success, and maybe they help confirm G's unique 'culture' as much as anything, in that it's powerful to be able to say 'this is how we do things here', it's like a kind of 'internal branding'.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#60

Post by staticassertion »

mahmoudimus wrote: post #50
staticassertion wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that they're a fantastic engineering company. I don't know what Google is great at - a few things, which feel like they're successful almost because they're treated as separate from the rest of the organization. OKRs are one of many parts of that, in my opinion.

Google engineering is fantastic and respectable. What gives the impression that it is anything else other than excellent?

My personal opinion is that Google has some really strong engineers, and some pockets of engineering are truly exceptional. That is it.

The impression is based on lots of anecdotal experience. I know many people at Google, I use many Google products, I talk to other industry leaders about their impressions of Google.

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