[BrianOnHN]

What size is your company/team?

Different strategies perform well depending on size. For example, most of the time I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team.

Have you identified KPIs? What are they?

"What's measured is managed," said Drucker. Personally, finding what exactly to measure is difficult. So don't be afraid to spend a lot of time figuring this out. When you do, all the other performance management strategies will somehow find a way to work towards your goals.

[tomxor]

> What size is your company/team? Different strategies perform well depending on size.

I can't emphasis how important this advice is in general - Use it to validate everything you read about, especially on HN.

If you work in a small organisation or team (the ones that don't make lots of noise) then most of the advice out there, from technology choices to management choices, are going to be biased against your size, some of those choices are the direct opposite depending on size.

[argiopetech]

Drucker never actually said that, though it's been attributed to him frequently. I found this blog interesting, and they link to the Drucker Institute if you'd like something more authoritative.

https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-gets-measur...

Similar quotes are often attributed to Deming. He never make this claim either.

[BrianOnHN]

I suppose I confused this with "Know Thy Time" in Effective Executive. Thanks for clarifying, I'm sure I've incorrectly made this attribution before.

Edit: typo

[irjustin]

> I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team

Can you explain this one a bit more? Are there specific pitfalls of the OKR system that don't work well for small teams?

Is it purely a size of the organization as a whole? i.e. If the whole company is <10 OKRs don't work. Or is it inclusive of team size? Any group/unit of <10 should not use OKRs, too single metric heavy.

[BrianOnHN]

For context, my understanding of OKRs is limited to the reading of "Measure what Matters."

In my understanding, OKRs are dependent on organizational clarity of the mission, vision, and metrics.

Now I'm sure there are plenty of teams that have matured in their space and have this organizational clarity.

But when I was referring to small teams, it was in the context of "we're small now, but if we make this work, we'll be bigger."

In the latter, decisions are going to be more bite-sized. And going through the OKR exercise could take as much time as the execution of the tasks.

Edit: in other words, OKRs are great for well-defined outcomes, where the time required is longer than what would be expected from an individual contributor during a week-long sprint.