OKRs seem a brilliant way to silo your teams and shut down any cross team collaboration.
OKRs become a shield to deflect any external request that doesn't precisely align with a measure.
Not a fan.
Why OKRs might not work at your company
81–90 of 140 posts
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#82OKRs seem a brilliant way to silo your teams and shut down any cross team collaboration. OKRs become a shield to deflect any external request that doesn't precisely align with a measure. Not a fan.
I'm certain you've got experience to back up this view of them, but you should consider that it's not a failure of OKRs, but of management setting OKRs, that what your teams OKRs weren't aligned with other teams. I've had similar experiences, but I've also had explicitly cross-team OKRs and OKRS that were broadly set on "Respond to needs of customer teams X, Y, and Z" that were among the most successful that I or others on my team picked up.
Collaboration should be a goal. A management structure that doesn't explicitly make it one is at fault, and they would have failed regardless of the organizational methodology they chose.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#83> Please upgrade to a supported browser to get a reCAPTCHA challenge. Why is this happening to me? I see this at the bottom of the page, and I’ve been seeing it more and more. I’m using the Duck Duck Go browser on iOS.
An educated guess: reCAPTCHA has become (partly) passive, using whatever tracking data Google has about your behaviour. So, if your browser blocks the tracking, it causes issues. I assume that's what the DDG browser is about.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#84OKRs are just a tool, but having been the founder of many startups, comes a moment when you need a tool to align your team towards a clear goal.
I understand most of the comments but as you grow your startup will come a time when it becomes useful when you have 70+ and even more thousands of employees. The bigger the company the harder it is to manage, google famously hated management and ended up with OKRs. My understanding from a couple of ex-googlers is that now most people are just gaming the system and aiming at a 0.7 score so I'm not sure if they are still as useful as they were at google.
OKRs / KPI etc are not magic, at the end of the day the article is right, the team is what matters, how teams align and communicate with each other is what OKRs can help with (I find them better than the old top down KPIs personally) I was asked by a startup to explain OKRs and I kept getting the CEO to ask me questions related to them not making sense (e.g some teams argued that goal X did not make sense to them etc...) For me this was not an issue with the OKRs per se, but OKRs helped to show very clearly that the organization was not well structured for the general goals, so worst case if OKRs don't work you should be able to tweak things and measure the impact (that's the all idea : measuring to improve)
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#85This 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…
Is Google success because it's a well run company in the first place? It's obviously not terrible (I'd personally love to work there) but life is a lot easier when you have the biggest cash cow ever plus a few smaller ones.
In general I'm skeptical whenever anyone wants to copy Google as their advantages and disadvantages are so far removed from a typical company and always were. I don't think they're a particularly good company to model for most companies.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#86We just started using them. We're a small org that's mostly experienced consultants and contractors. They're energetic, proactive and independent people. We've adopted OKRs to basically get everyone pulling in the same direction, but without being prescriptive about how the work gets done. I'll report back at the end of the quarter on how it's working out, if anyone's interested :)
I am totally interested! But how will you report back?
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#87Earlier 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.
This is objectively false as they have developed many of the most successful products on this planet. There are hundred of web mail products but gmail is the best. Google Maps is the best in class, other great products are Google Earth, Analytics, YouTube, Cloud, Android and many more.
Yes, you can find flaws in any of those but it's also hard to find better products in the same category. Google is not in any way "terrible at building products", they are one of the best companies in the whole world in building products.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#88I’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…
The last company I worked for had a problem with the service, it lost their clients money. Their solution was to make everyone in the management team read a 'business book' per week, and discuss it in weekly meetings.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is objectively false as they have developed many of the most successful products on this planet. There are hundred of web mail products but gmail is the best. Google Maps is the best in class, other great products are Google Earth, Analytics, YouTube, Cloud, Android and many more. Yes, you can find flaws in any of those but it's also hard to find better products in the same category. Google is not in any way "te…
Youtube and Android were acquired by Google, and there are definitely other products that are also the result of an acquisition.
Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is objectively false as they have developed many of the most successful products on this planet. There are hundred of web mail products but gmail is the best. Google Maps is the best in class, other great products are Google Earth, Analytics, YouTube, Cloud, Android and many more. Yes, you can find flaws in any of those but it's also hard to find better products in the same category. Google is not in any way "te…
Gmail is by far not the best mail system - in enterprise settings it's possible the worst actually. Its cluttered, threads are unreadable, tiny window by default to write a message... maybe it was hip 16 years ago, but that's past. Because of all these things I'm not even using it in private setting either.
YouTube is full with ads and fake comments including spam.
I agree with the parent post that Google products benefited most from being first or being acquisitions - it's like Microsoft early 2000s or so.