[twayt]

I’ve seen this in many companies other than Google and shockingly even at startups.

If setting an OKR is meant to focus the team and maximize effort towards solving those problems, this approach is counterproductive because it completely fails to measure the effort exerted towards a goal.

You could have a 1.0 OKR and you could have 2 cases. 1. Set it too easy, didn’t have to do much to achieve it 2. Set a hard goal and produce a Herculean effort to achieve it

The latter case isn’t accounted for. It’s is glaringly obvious but the dull manager types don’t seem to want to acknowledge the difference or the fact that the latter behavior, if incentivized, leads to better and more predictable outcomes.

Instead, the effort is met with a blanket: “Too easy, didn’t set a hard enough goal”.

This incentivizes people to set easier goals that they can meet comfortably and slack of 20% of the time so that it doesn’t look like the goal they set was too easy.