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OKRs will never be enough

edge.ceo

51–60 of 100 posts

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#51
The problem with all of these performance management frameworks is the same.

You start with objectives that make sense and are aligned to the organization's mission.

Then you come up with metrics that attempt to measure how successfully those objectives are being realized.

Then you tie manager and executive compensation to those metrics.

Finally everyone proceeds to game the metrics, often in ways that completely contravene the original objectives, in order to maximize their bonuses.

Rinse and repeat.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#52

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…

Getting the right people on the bus is only one component. See Jim Collins' map for the others.

https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts.html

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#53
post #13

I don't care what managers do as long as it's managers doing their own fucking jobs instead of forcing it on everyone below them. Individual engineers shouldn't have to plan objectives, their own or otherwise. That's literally what management is for in the first place.

I find the same people who think its never worth planning anything are the ones who spend all their time making worthless crap and never get anything done because they think having a goal is beneath them.

I'm an architect (software, not houses). There's a gigantic fucking chasm of difference between architectural design planning and OKRs.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Management doesn't care if it's agile or not - they want something that works and delivers economic value for customers and will help them continue to innovate and deliver EVA for them in the future. One huge problem is that a lot of times, what people think is what the customer wants isn't what they want or need. One way that happens is sales brings asks (in the form of solutions often) to product and it goes downhill from there. Obviously, the people doing the work aren't talking with customers in that case, but it's tough to talk to customers in an enterprise environment. If you're doing something for a small external client or an internal team it's fine.

In addition, customers aren't a monolith. When you reach sufficient size, you have competing priorities for customer needs and even some asks that work for one customer but break some sort of process for another. They can be mutually exclusive. This is also heavily predicated on the customer even knowing what they want. Everyone knows the famous Ford quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Agile is great but scaling it can be rough dependent on a lot of variables, so reducing it down to management probably doesn't like Agile due to inability to give up power (to me at least) is a bit too simple.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#55
post #5

I am so happy to work in a company that does not work with this business voodoo (and still delivers great results). All goal frameworks I have worked in, OKRs included, were a colossal waste of time.

The blog nicely states that OKRs are just a part of a solution. I've seen when OKRs actually worked, and the emphasis was put on the objectives part and later the indicators produced a set of initiatives. Unfortunately, I've also seen really stupid low level "OKRs" (like unit test coverage) absolutely detached from bussines goals and the whole process was just a cargo cult managment.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#57
post #45
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.

ChatGPT can help you

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#58

The problem with all of these performance management frameworks is the same. You start with objectives that make sense and are aligned to the organization's mission. Then you come up with metrics that attempt to measure how successfully those objectives are being realized. Then you tie manager and executive compensation to those metrics. Finally everyone proceeds to game the metrics, often in ways that completely con…

Another serious problem with these, at least to me, is that an employee's performance within these frameworks is often graded against an ideal implementaion and not the actual implementation.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#59
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

Yeah, it's too bad the author didn't choose the title "OKRs don't work for Sales targets" or "You need Sales KPIs separate from (Engineering) OKRs". We would have gotten different discussion.

Re: OKRs will never be enough

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Management doesn't care if it's agile or not - they want something that works and delivers economic value for customers and will help them continue to innovate and deliver EVA for them in the future. One huge problem is that a lot of times, what people think is what the customer wants isn't what they want or need. One way that happens is sales brings asks (in the form of solutions often) to product and it goes downhi…

"Management [...] wants something that works and delivers economic value for customers and will help them continue to innovate and deliver EVA for them in the future."

You're confusing "owner" with "manager". Most managers just want to get promoted, which usually means increasing their HC/budget, making sure credit for a project's success is their's, failures are blamed on others, getting trendy internal projects, doing endless re-orgs (knowing they'll move on before any true costs/benefits are realized), etc. "Economic value for customers" is an afterthought at best.

(Speaking as a former very-large-company manager.)

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