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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

#121

Post by packetlost »

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 have a handful of truly wonderful products, but for everything good you just listed, there's at least 2-3 things that have been shuttered because they were poorly executed, or are currently struggling (Google Cloud). Android is hardly a product either, the Pixel 4 is a product, but Android is an avenue to sell apps on their app store and integrate their data gathering services for targeted advertising, and they didn't even build it. Google didn't build YouTube, it was already the largest video sharing platform in the world when they bought it. Analytics is probably good, I haven't used it.

> gmail is the best

That's a very subjective statement. I don't think gmail is the best webmail out there, but it's certainly one of them. It's also one of the oldest. It also adds the contents of all your emails to their profiling service.

I stand by my statement that Google is terrible at building products, they've only built half of the things you listed and bought the rest. One of them could barely be counted as a success (Cloud), and another isn't a product (Android)

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#122

Post by TuringNYC »

quanticle wrote: post #102
badestrand wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Android wasn't built by Google. It was the result of an acquisition. Same with YouTube. Same with Google Earth. Heck, even Google Docs was the result of them acquiring Writely. Maybe it's more accurate to say that Google are one of the best companies in the world at buying products.

Buying a company and making it successful is a huge tasks that is often bungled by many companies. Look at the graveyard of M&A by Yahoo. Now contrast that to Google's spectacular M&A record -- YouTube, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, etc.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#123

Post by TuringNYC »

quanticle wrote: post #108
summerlight wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, except one counterfactual scenario: Andy Rubin actually tried to sell Android to Samsung. Let's assume the deal was made; do you really think Android would grow into this dominant position at Samsung's hands? I know Samsung very well and I am 99.9% sure that it will be a miserable failure. All those acquired products were nearly non-existent compared to post-Google era. The founders may deserve some credits, bu…

You're assuming that those products weren't capable of reaching scale without Google's intervention. By that logic, Bill Gates should have sold Microsoft to IBM, because that is the only way Windows would have ever reached scale.

I'd argue that indeed, many of these acquired companies could not reach scale w/o Google. Consider Youtube which was burning millions on hosting and always on the verge of bankruptcy if they couldnt raise more funding.

Add in a company that can fund operations, provide user flow, provide a pool of advertisers, real compensation to engineers, and you have a real success.

I give Google a lot of kudos on this.

Do we really want another SUN Microsystems happenning?

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#124

Post by TuringNYC »

asa4akj wrote: post #101
badestrand wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 android and earth are acquisitions, Cloud is nothing compared to its competition, GMail is almost 2 decades old. In the last decade, I can't remember a single innovative google original product, or some copy-cat product that is better than the competition

Borg/Kubernetes?

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#125

Post by geebee »

I personally like OKRs, as I find them a valuable counterbalance to 1) daily standup, which can promote short term thinking, and 2) yearly "goals" in performance reviews, which, when evaluated in a binary way as completed/not completed, can deter people from taking on more ambitious and ambiguous tasks.

My big worry about OKRs is that they will descend into the same shitstorm that ruined SCRUM. Daily standups were never intended to turn into a daily opportunity for micromanagement and application of deadline pressure, but this is exactly what they became. And I can't say it was an external corruption of the process - the dangers are inherent to the technique. I always felt that saying standup and scrum are good, you just have to be careful someone external to the process doesn't corrupt it don't turn into micromanagement is like saying nitroglycerine is good, you just have to be careful some chemical reaction external to the process doesn't cause it to suddenly and unpredictably combust. The instability is inherent to the substance.

There was also a mini (or not so mini) industry of industry consultants helping people "do agile", that elevated "processes and tools" over "individuals and interactions", kind of how the 10 animal commandments in animal farm ended amended to mean the opposite of how they were written down.

I see a danger in point in OKRs, in that they're a great way for a manager to turn a casual projection into a committed estimate. I see the inversion of "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" all over again here. The developer (or employee) is lulled into a belief that we're all friends and can trust each other, the "customer" (or client or boss) is lawyering up with a contract, and when time comes, the developer's feet will be held to the fire with firm commitments, and subjected to daily deadline pressure and micromanagement (because agile).

All I'm sayin' is, this could go sideways. But then again, so can any job.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#126

Post by the_other »

xtracto wrote: post #76
crooked-v wrote: post #22

My only experience with OKRs has been having to do more OKR-management homework separate from the actual work I do, which is the same 'coding stuff off the product roadmap supplied by a different department' as always.

That's why as a manager I always set my teams okrs to be aligned with whatever crap business is going to place in the scrum stories. I've seen tech OKRs that are things like "reduce tech debt" or "decrease loading time" or "reduce downtime" but without hard tangible stories in sprints, it's just wishful thinking.

> That's why as a manager I always set my teams okrs to be aligned with whatever crap business is going to place in the scrum stories

How could it be any other way (and work)?

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#127

Post by the_other »

scaryclam wrote: post #14
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, 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…

This has flicked a lightbulb on for me.

If your teams are fairly self-organising, if you are small-a agile and building your process as you discover more, you can plan in things like “dev A will spend 50% of this sprint learning dev-ops, without doing feature work or tech debt; and 10% shadowing dev B who already does Ops”.

That seems actionable, and measurable. Over two or three sprints/iterations/retrospectives, you’ll probably be able to measure the impact of the training (more successful releases, higher uptime, or more story points covered because ops is less a bottleneck etc).

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#128

Post by User23 »

summerlight wrote: post #78
User23 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well here’s one example: https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/inde... . Another is the frat boy hazing code review culture. Heck there are plenty of noogler’s first code review memegens floating around. It’s totally not bullying it’s just joking right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873418 The author of that article completely confused about the goal of protobuf. Read this rebuttal comment, written by the previous owner.

Thanks for the link. It's quite a weak rebuttal however. For example "this inability to distinguish between unset and default values is a nightmare" is ignored. And, to me, "If it were possible to restrict protobuffer usage to network-boundaries I wouldn’t be nearly as hard on it as a technology" is the most damning criticism and that's also ignored. The so-called rebuttal basically amounts to "we're using it to make oodles of money in the ads pipeline so it must be good software engineering." The claim about success in the market is completely true, but it's also not a rebuttal to the claim that the designers of protobufs are apparently ignorant of current computing theory and just patched together an ad hoc mess. Nobody capable of observation disputes that the standard substandard quality of most professionally written software is no impediment to success in the marketplace, there are too many examples to claim otherwise.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#129

Post by jacques_chester »

jldugger wrote: post #65
jacques_chester wrote: post #42

I really ought to read an OKR book, because the telephone-game version I hear about seems problematic. For example, Austin's Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations [0] gives a helpful 3-party model for understanding how simplistic measurement-by-numbers goes awry. He starts with a Principal-Agent and then adds a Customer as the 3rd party; the net effect is that as a Principal becomes more and more energe…

> Put briefly: give a rational agent more than one thing to do, and they will only do the most profitable thing for them to do. To avoid this problem you need perfectly equal compensation of their alternatives, but that's flawed too, because you rarely want an agent to divide their time exactly into equal shares. I would argue the system is working as intended. Contrary to your assertions, you don't want employees sp…

> Contrary to your assertions, you don't want employees spreading effort like peanut butter, you want to focus them on executing one or two things quickly and getting value out of that quickly.

That's not quite what I was driving at. Optimisation is made on the measurement. Measurement is only necessary because the Agent is not perfectly observable, there is an information asymmetry between Principal and Agent.

That's why Austin's model is so helpful. There are many things that must be done in order to best satisfy the Customer. Some of those are measurable, some are less measurable. But a rational Agent looks at any basket of measurements and will optimise for one of them: the one that pays best.

It's not enough to say "just this one feature and no peanut butter please". You have to define what the one feature is. You have to provide an exact measure for it. Agents can then either optimise honestly, or they can go further and optimise fraudulently. If honestly, the Principal realises that they actually need a basket of values to be optimised. But then they need to apply equal compensation, because the Agent will simply ignore any measurement that doesn't maximise their results.

I believe measurement is useful. But I also believe that connecting it to even the whiff of reward or punishment is beyond merely futile and well into being destructive.

Re: Why OKRs might not work at your company

#130

Post by quadrifoliate »

daveungerer wrote: post #116
quadrifoliate wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I know this is HN and you could totally be Drew Houston; but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your company has fewer than 500 employees. The problems the OP is describing are,…

Nowhere in the book is it pitched as a tool you roll out to a bunch of MBAs and hope that good things happen - it's never about out-of-touch managers demanding results. If someone cascades objectives without also cascading planning and estimation, are they not simply a bad manager? What the book DOES say is that you should not create such a fear of failure that no-one will set stretch goals, and that OKR results shou…

> If an organisation doesn't get that right, are they doing OKRs?

I mean, this is kind of what the article is saying; just along a different dimension.

> Perhaps I just fell for John Doerr's elaborately constructed fantasy that he uses to sell books.

A lottery winner can write a book about their excellent saving habits and how they helped a lot. If you follow their advice, you may do quite well, and gain some wealth!

But the advice can also be largely unrelated to why they are wealthy; and people hoping to be multi-millionaires as a result of those habits might be disappointed. This does not mean that the lottery-winner's advice about being frugal and saving money is inherently bad. Go ahead and save, by all means.

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