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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

#91

Post by Marazan »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #82
Marazan wrote: post #81

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.

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 oth…

In my experience that still just pushes off the problem one layer. Now you've defined who the team can and can't interact with to an even greater degree than not having anything and it totally kills 'spontaneous' collaboration.

I am absolutely no rejecting the notion that maybe my company is very bad at doing OKRs but for me they have always resulted in "working to the metric" and have totally inhibit team autonomy - you become ruler by the KRs.

EDIT: the first time my company tried OKRs a company culture of collaboration and experimentation was brought to a shuddering halt as everyone stopped trying to do what was best for the business and started trying to hit their OKRs instead.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#92

Post by daveungerer »

It feels like OP has made a bit of a straw man out of OKRs. More charitably, perhaps we did not get our information from the same place - all I know about OKRs is from reading "Measure What Matters" and implementing it in my own company. Reading this article makes me feel like someone took an incredibly simple idea and decided that what it needs is more complication.

From TFA: "most companies are not set up to effectively apply this technique". Yes. And if you read the above book, you'll learn that this is sort of the point. You WILL fail at your first few OKR cycles, but you're supposed to use those experiences to change your company into one that CAN set and achieve objectives.

If you think your company is one where OKRs won't work, all the more reason to do them.

OKRs are about creating and communicating strategic short-term objectives across the company, so they remain top of mind. And that's 80% of what you need to know! The objections to OKRs mentioned in the article don't make sense to me, because it seems to follow a different definition of what OKRs are.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#93

Post by tempodox »

djohnston wrote: post #27
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…

It's like the Martin Fowler of business organization

I had the same thought. What good is the nicest theory when all the practical implementations you can find basically abuse the name for something that is quite the opposite?

https://martinfowler.com/articles/agile-aus-2018.html

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#94

Post by Mindwipe »

badestrand wrote: post #87
packetlost wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

They haven't developed one for quite a while now.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#95

Post by Mindwipe »

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…

> basically be the one place you could do everything you want to do on the internet (except porn).

Shame, because that was the one thing they were quite good at at the time.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#96

Post by Mindwipe »

Good piece

I worked at a company that used OKRs but the teams weren't set up in a way that people had responsibility for the things that their OKRs wanted them to do, and it produced very little (thankfully the teams were generally good and it wasn't a disaster, but it was a waste of effort).

If the OKRs aren't embedded into the sales teams as well (which basically means you can't have separate sales teams) then it likely fails.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#97

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Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#98

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Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#100

Post by trwhite »

My CEO tried to explain to me that the "key result" part of OKRs didn't need to be measurable and then cited my colleague's as better examples despite none of them having written anything that could be used to hold them accountable. When I ask him if he's read High Output Management he just says "It's on my reading list". I'm leaving soon.
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