[dood]

OKRs sound like a reasonable idea, but in my experience appear to be prohibitively difficult to implement successfully, imposing a considerable burden across the organization which isn't at all commensurate with the value they deliver.

I've seen them done in a few places, each time they tend to be delivered late and/or be constantly shifting, are constantly in conflict with important but unstated objectives, are often hard to measure and inevitably used to judge performance despite protestations to the contrary and so are subject to gaming, are bad for morale, and for all those downsides seem to have somewhat limited effects on output.

The primary benefits are aligning people, giving people clear goals to focus on, and giving people a justification for not doing unnecessary work. All of those things could be achieved at far lower implementation cost by ditching the key results and just establishing clear goals at the top and allowing them to semi-formally cascade with some kind of regular but very lightweight process.