[richliss]

OKRs are another victim of semantic diffusion by consultants and others cutting corners and missing the philosophy of them.

Done properly they should be the equivalent of "we're gonna slam dunk this thing we think is important to do by smashing these X and Y targets" so everyone high fives and is super pumped and energised making it happen.

Now they've turned into "you should do this because we tell you to and we will track you as you do it" and so everyone feels like they have no autonomy.

[PaulHoule]

My take is the opposite, I’ve been asked to make up 20 OKRs for myself (the only real corporate “goal” is “make 20 OKRs”. If I had a small number of goals that were clearly linked to the business that would be one thing, but with a large number of bullshit goals many of them would fall by the wayside, particularly when “drop everything for customer X” was a common occurrence.

I didn’t really mind the “drop everything” bit, we were looking for product-market fit after all, but when performance reviews come around and I killed 3 of those goals, sofa kind did 7 and spaced 10 it’s a situation where narcissists will convince management is half full and that mine is half empty.

[spittet]

I hear you. I think OKRs suffer from having a lot of literature covering the surface (benefits of OKRs, general definitions, success stories...) but not a lot of content providing a prescriptive approach.

To me it feels a bit like structuring a JS/TS app. You've got powerful tools, but it can quickly become a mess without a good structure around it.

My general recommendation: no one should have more than 7 KRs to track on a weekly basis. And an OKR plan should be a 3x4 matrix: 3 Objectives and 4 KRs/Objective.