[MatthewCampbell]

I generally agree with your original comment, and I think a lot about Schmidt's quote when operating in a startup context. You're right that it's ironic in the Google context. Search should absolutely go back to being measured on retention and they should disentangle from the revenue team. And I agree that the real death of Google was in the statistical game: 95% confidence in a microscopic metric improvement still lets through serious quality degradation 5% of the time. This gets to another important point: OKRs should be _big_ or they're not worth doing.

[marcinzm]

I think revenue or any other KPIs makes sense when it's easier to drive the KPI the "right" way versus the "wrong" way. As a business grows the low hanging fruit are used up and things start to shift to the "wrong" way being significantly easier. Moreover if the culture is about driving a KPI then, like any culture, it's very hard to shift it and no one wants to eat the political cost of trying to do so. I think executives often forget that people are clever and will game any metric if it's possible. I was at a company where there was a silent agreement across the EMs to over-level engineers. The pay was below competitors at the same level and set by HR but the promotion committees were not run by HR. Every new EM that joined was horrified at first at the competencies of their engineers, but then either learned to play the game or eventually got pushed out by their ever growing enemies.