[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.