A while back I did build a free & privacy friendly hillchart webapp. (No login)
Might come handy when you wanna try out that approach https://www.hillchart.co/
Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#12I really don’t understand people who are interested in things like OKRs.
Ever hear someone complain about big company bureaucracy? The bigger an organization gets, the more impossible it gets to manage it and keep people aligned towards effective and compounding goals. OKRs promise to help improve that impossible process. I'm not surprised at all that people are interested.
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#13Sure, OKR's can help keep multiple teams aligned on business and product goals. And that's an advantage that's too big to ignore. But the problem with OKR's is too often, they're handed down by well meaning people multiple levels removed from the day to day software development work. There can be a lack of ground truth. But too often they miss the bottom-up intelligence, creativity, and engineering needs that comes f…
The biggest problem I've seen with OKRs as an engineer is that the objectives are business goals the engineering team has little or no ability to influence. Like, an objective of "onboard 5 new large customers" makes sense for the business, and the engineering team could definitely screw it up by, say, building a system that can't scale that high. But when the sales team only closes 3 new deals, the engineering team fails its OKRs no matter how good a job everyone did. I've seen this be quite demoralizing, especially when meeting OKRs is tied to bonuses.
The second-biggest problem is that the time horizons of OKRs are often longer than the interval between pivots that cause the old OKRs to no longer make sense.
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#14we must imagine Sisyphus happy...
Ask and you shall receive https://twitter.com/UubzU/status/1729317510401425919
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#15I really don’t understand people who are interested in things like OKRs.
Ever hear someone complain about big company bureaucracy? The bigger an organization gets, the more impossible it gets to manage it and keep people aligned towards effective and compounding goals. OKRs promise to help improve that impossible process. I'm not surprised at all that people are interested.
OKRs can in theory make sense but they create a new kind of tension. Because they compete with the BAU work, the niggly things that come up mid quarter that you need to get done. Individuals need to resolve the dilemma, do what has to be done, or do what makes me look good.
I think a new thing is needed at least for smaller teams. Something like adaptive goals. Roadmap a year, vaguely and plan the next 6 weeks. Measure stuff where it makes sense but not everything needs a measure (or things that don’t might be 0 or 1). Plan based on velocity that takes into account that you wont have planned everything.
Measures are useful but also bullshit. There is no correlation between the measure and business success without intelligence. Even revenue is not a measure of success (I could sell half price bitcoins and have a lot of revenue!)
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#16I can't help feel infantilized by these games. It doesn't make unwanted things easier to swallow, quite the opposite.
"Here comes the airplane!" is a little game that I like to play with PMs so they get to enjoy me punching them in the face. Aren't we all having fun now, how wonderful!
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#17A while back I did build a free & privacy friendly hillchart webapp. (No login) Might come handy when you wanna try out that approach https://www.hillchart.co/
Nice but doings something weird to internet history.
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#18At a certain scale you don't need to make OKRs fun and playful - there are enough VPs that all the OKRs read like an episode of Silicon Valley.
If you're big enough to have company level OKRs that were written solely by folks that haven't opened a text editor in 10 years simply get out the popcorn and a can of beer. There are going to be some hilarious ones in there.
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#19When ive been introduced to okr Ive really liked this concept to the point that i started to use them in my private life But on the other hand i dont fully like them in my work life First my job forces OKRs amount and treats them equally So OKR like completing half day training and sharing the learnings has the same value as multi month engineering effort.
I think that completing a training or sharing the results are, technically speaking, deliverables not results; that's why that doesn't work as a OKR. OKR would ask for the measurable impact that completing those things has on business behavior (user-facing KPIs, or internal productivity / value measures). My only encounter with OKRs sucked badly, and mismatches like that were one of the reasons.
We take trainings under
Some technical skills increase or personal development objective
And that completion of training or certs is what is measured
Re: Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
#20I really don’t understand people who are interested in things like OKRs.
OKRs are a goal setting framework for non-trivial 3-12 month goals.
Some people are self motivated and well organized, are great at communicating progress proactively to other stakeholders, an understand the idea of cross departmental alignment. OKRs will not help them.
For everyone else, OKRs are a tool that can help accomplish those things.
PS I actually like OKRs and after a lot of effort, learned how to make them useful. I did not get it at first either.