[Renaud]

I liked the idea of Objectives and Key Results (OKR), a system that was started at IBM and brought over by John Doerr to Google and others[1]: short term goals alongside long term goals, set at the company level and the individual level, constant review and adjustment of the short term goals, disconnection of these metrics from employee bonus.

The idea is to get to you goals faster and re-evaluate them for relevance as you go along. Since they are not directly connected to pay there is less of a perverse effect where people are incentivised to work on improving their KPI at the expense of the rest.

[1]:"Measure what matters", by John Doerr

[Draiken]

Then people create objectives like:

O - Improve team efficiency

KR - Increase test coverage by X%

KR - Update at least Y outdated dependencies

Which are complete bullshit, easily gamed and don't actually make the company move forward or the team better.

But according to almost any OKR believer, these are great OKRs.

Making KRs measurable a lot of the times corrupts the OKR system. However if they aren't measurable, their value is sometimes questionable. Kind of a paradox.

Perhaps for huge corporations this kind of system is absolutely needed, but I'm experiencing this on a small company and it's honestly tiring and inefficient.

[pdimitar]

> The idea is to get to you goals faster and re-evaluate them for relevance as you go along.

I cannot see how this might be true in any situation except when your core product and efforts are always in one particular direction and a very particular area.

Many companies shift focus -- partially or completely -- as they grow, so I cannot see the wins in the quoted approach. You might gain a perfect understanding of an area and how a feedback loop improves productivity there but is that such an universal wisdom that it applies everywhere else you might go in the future?