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OKRs will never be enough

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Re: OKRs will never be enough

#41

Post by crazygringo »

mattbuilds wrote: post #10

All these frameworks for managing people matter much less than creating a team of quality people. Think of it like sports. Sure a good manager or coach can get the most of the players on the team. They might even add tactics and play above their level. But when it comes down to it, what matters the most in the skill set of the players. The best coaching in the world isn’t going to help me and my friends beat a pro sp…

I deeply disagree.

If you have a team of quality people but they're all running around in their own direction doing their uncoordinated thing, they add up to basically zero. While if they're all working towards the same thing in the same direction, their efforts reinforce each other so the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

The expertise of people on a team provides a ceiling for what they can accomplish, that's true. And so you need to make sure that if you've got a task to achieve by a certain date, that it's below their ceiling. The best manager can't raise that ceiling.

But you still absolutely need to manage them in order for them to get anywhere even close to that ceiling. And to go back to your sports metaphor, when an amazing coach replaces a terrible one on a sports team, it's astonishing the difference it makes -- you almost can't believe it's the same team. It's astonishing what happens when a sports team plays "as one" instead of each player doing their own thing no matter how great they are. But that simply doesn't happen organically. It requires a coach, the same as a great team of employees doesn't get there without a great manager.

So ultimately it's not that either matters more than the other. You need both individual expertise and management. Think of the total resulting effectiveness as a multiplication of those two values.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#42

Post by mejutoco »

From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR)

> Key results should be measurable, either on a 0–100% scale or with any numerical value (e.g. count, dollar amount, or percentage) that can be used by planners and decision makers to determine whether those involved in working towards the key result have been successful. There should be no opportunity for "grey area" when defining a key result.

In a lot of places that use "OKRs" the metric is something non-specific, like "get more users" or "have a great UX". This means your bonus now depends on politics, instead of a defined metric of success. When the metrics are clearly defined, work can be a pleasure.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#43

Post by LambdaComplex »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #39
LambdaComplex wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scrum/agile is exactly the same thing. The stricter and more documented the process The Agile manifesto specifically says "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." If teams are forced to work in a certain way (e.g. scrum) then your organization isn't actually doing Agile.

I’ll make sure to pull that one out next time someone tells me we have to implement agile in our origination. Ideally we could avoid making any changes at all.

The problem is that most management probably doesn't actually want Agile.

The goal of Agile is building the right thing for the customer, which is done by having the people who do the work talk to the customer (frequently!) to see what their needs are and how their needs are being met by what they have already.

The problem here is that this turns the organization from top-down to bottom-up. Those at the top of the company are now servant leaders who support those at the bottom, as opposed to people who give orders and tell those at the bottom what to do.

The real problem with Agile is that managers are rarely willing to give up that power.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#44

Post by TideAd »

Keyframe wrote: post #14
derefr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is almost always the people who "just talk" (managers) that are being measured by OKRs, though. It's just that these managers often respond by relaying their OKRs to their teams and making them constantly-aware-of and responsible-for achieving them, rather than having the OKR be something private to the executive level that informs the manager's decisions , while they continue to run the team the way they would wi…

You’d probably be faced with ‘but why are we doing this?’ from the levels ‘below’. Damn if you do, damn if you don’t.

Yeah, personally I like to know what the team & I are being evaluated on.

I've been in the opposite situation, where there are priorities and goals that aren't communicated to me until way too late, and I ended up wasting a lot of time on stuff that didn't matter.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#45

Post by pcurve »

hammock wrote: post #4

The people upvoting this blog can’t have read it, since an HN audience would not possibly think the solution to OKRs is to supplement them with a reductionist income statement and traffic light scorecards

The article feels rather incomplete too. I wish the author made it more in-depth and provided more specific examples.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#46

Post by loeg »

mejutoco wrote: post #42

From wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR ) > Key results should be measurable, either on a 0–100% scale or with any numerical value (e.g. count, dollar amount, or percentage) that can be used by planners and decision makers to determine whether those involved in working towards the key result have been successful. There should be no opportunity for "grey area" when defining a key result. In a lot of places…

> This means your bonus now depends on politics, instead of a defined metric of success.

The process of defining a concrete metric in advance is just front-loading that politics process to the planning stage instead of at the back end. (Which may be better! But it doesn't eliminate politics.)

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#48

Post by [deleted] »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #28
zemvpferreira wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience you have it right but backwards: These frameworks exist to help management manage teams without quality people. Scrum/agile is exactly the same thing. The stricter and more documented the process, the more fungible actual team-members are. That's important in places like bodyshops and non-software business where no self-respecting engineer with options would want to work, and places where monotonous…

> Scrum/agile is exactly the same thing. The stricter and more documented the process The Agile manifesto specifically says "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." If teams are forced to work in a certain way (e.g. scrum) then your organization isn't actually doing Agile.

[deleted]

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#49

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

javaunsafe2019 wrote: post #29
seanhandley wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers are accountable for seeing this is done, but the whole team should be co-responsible for setting goals. I worked as a software engineer for 12 years before becoming a manager and I can promise you that a team works better when everyone has input on what goals the team commits to and how the team plans to achieve those goals. You never never never NEVER want to work on a team where your manager decides all of…

I did understand the comment differently. More that at some level OKRs are not important and the decision that a product/module is needed is everything a good working development team needs to do it’s job. That has nothing to do about the creation of tickets imo. Ofc the team will find a way to organise ITS OWN WORK.

Exactly. Thanks for this.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#50

Post by dumbotron »

kenjackson wrote: post #2

The business scorecard just seems like it is measuring a set of key results. If it’s a KPI the team is trying to achieve then how is that different than a key result?

There isn't a practical difference between PIs and KRs other than that KRs might be more vague or binary and PIs more like a gauge. It's just semantics around framing goal-setting.
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