Not sure what you mean by "fine", but OKRs in most cases can't work, because a key result means a number, and numbers can be gamed.
1. Frequently you can't know ahead of time what is a good number to have. You can only pretend to know what is a good number, and people do pretend as if it can be done and everyone plays along with this bs.
2. You can get to that number in multitude of different ways, in many cases by not actually making the product better.
3. You might in the middle of progress realise that the path should be completely different, but now you are tied to that OKR.
They just don't make any sense at all, and at best they can take focus away from what should intuitively matter. "I know I should do X to actually benefit the product, but I do Y because this is what gets us to the Key Result.".
OKRs can be actively harmful because they take focus away from what matters, and you can't put a single number on those things.
OKRs when planning also focus you to plan poorly, again instead of figuring out how to conceptually make the product better, you set those arbitrary metric restrictions which can only stray you away from what you should actually plan to do.
That sounds to me like you haven't worked in a place that does OKRs right. The overriding thought should be "They are more like guidelines, anyway". Where I worked it was common for every single OKR to have a low completion score, and nobody batted an eye. Directions change, priorities change etc. The OKRs were still useful, to keep track of what everybody was doing.
But then they do performance reviews and ask to relate the stories to these OKRs.
Is that my bad luck with the corp then?
Because it's a combination hundreds or thousands of people incorporating this system. Are they all incompetent, or does this company in particular have incompetent people?
Performance reviews should be kept separate from OKRs. I view these two concepts as follows:
1. Performance reviews or performance management are tied zo an individual, their role and their career.
2. OKRs are Independent of the individual as they are driven by the company’s strategic and operational goals. While every KR is owned by an individual, this individual is responsible only for managing the measurement, coordinating collaboration and escalating to superior Objective or Key Result owners as soon as the Key Result is no longer on track.
This implies that if you were replaced by someone else, they would inherit your OKRs but not your performance management including your performance reviews, personal development goals and career aspirations.
One way to do this is by rating performance based on both contributions to OKRs owned by the individual as well as those of others and rating performance as high only if both are exceptional.
They're also a bit of an antipattern - agile is about learning and responding on the fly. Add an OKR and you immediately distort that and it turns out your agile methodology is just a couple of small waterfalls in a trench coat.
The only problem with "Measure what matters" is that if what matters is complex enough, it can't be measured. So the title could be reworded into "Fit a cube through a spherical hole" - assuming the diameter of the whole is same as cube's width of course.
You can measure very specific and repetitive things, e.g. some sports statistics, but even in sports it becomes obvious you can't put a number on everything.
A single number just can't represent the result of something that matters. It's like trying to hash a part of what matters and then trying to see if the hash generated is higher or lower.
OKRs do not at all need to be one dimensional, the KR could be several measurements and also need not be quantitively determined.
There is no way something that matters cannot be somehow "measured", otherwise how would anyone detect the thing in the first place? Or am I misunderstanding you and this is about things that matter but are not known to matter?
Things matter, and you can prove them mattering afterwards, but you can't set a metric/numeric as a goal and then expect it to be a good or productive goal.
I didn't think of it at first, but actually that's Goodhart's law.
> A single number just can't represent the result of something that matters
I just fundamentally disagree with this. One of the most famous examples is the youtube team working towards a billion watch-hours in a day. Does that not matter to youtube?
And if it's impossible for something that matters to be represented by a number, what does matter? I'd love to hear examples of what matters in your companies
Watch-hours obviously matter, but so do other things like "are the best up & coming creators using us?" The danger is the tendency to focus on boosting measurable things at the expense of nonmeasurables.
Often the nonmeasurables eventually show up as measurables, but after too long a time delay to fix mistakes. So you could alienate creators while juicing the current numbers, and find a few years later that all the good content has gone elsewhere.
The above didn't happen at YouTube, but it's the sort of thing that can happen. An example of something that did happen: Facebook found that rage-bait political news created a lot of clicks, but led to people getting fed up and leaving the platform after a while. By the time that was reflected in the traffic stats, it was too late to get them back. But fed-upness wasn't something they could easily measure, so it got ignored.
That's a really good example you just brought up, because if your goal is to get billion watch hours a day:
1. Why are you doing this? Is it to get more ad revenue?
2. Considering this metric, how do you know that the extra hours you are getting is the kind of traffic that brings ad revenue? Maybe it's children or folks from poor country. Maybe it's actually costing more than it was previously.
3. Maybe you are getting the same people to watch more, but it won't make them pay more. You are just increasing your server costs. And making those people addicted to your platform.
4. Maybe the algorithm that you produce is actively harmful to people by making them take too much screen-time leading to potential regulations from the government.
5. Maybe the content you provide is of really low value, and in the long run will make your audience really low value.
6. Maybe you just pay too much for that extra traffic, so it's not worth it.
Very simple example when doing ads. If my goal is to get 200% more clicks, and I have been so far advertising in US only, I'll just now make the destination to be India instead. I will get tons more clicks, but I will get less payments than before.
> And if it's impossible for something that matters to be represented by a number, what does matter? I'd love to hear examples of what matters in your companies
If you want a number, profit obviously matters, but everything below that, can mostly be intuitive unless it obviously fits some sort of numerical idea. In such case building a great product matters, but it's much more difficult to measure what makes a great product, so you need this intuitive discussion and people who have great intuition for building a good product. Profit will follow performing this strategy.
You should measure, monitor, use data to be informed and analyze results, but you should not have these as primary goals to strive for. You should use this data to improve your intuition.
So to describe the process. We would first brainstorm that watch hours is something we want to potentially be our OKR?
And then we brainstorm all the constraints and potential pitfalls and finally we think what the reasonable amount of watch hours is based on those constraints?
E.g. we first run by the constraints that these watch hours must still keep the same base level of ad revenue per watch hour, demographics proportions must stay similar, etc?
I do feel however despite that there will be quite many different ways to game this number that you couldn't think of before hand. And there's also a spectrum of "level of gaming". There's a spectrum of non obvious gaming to very obvious. So whoever is striving towards that goal will still be incentivised to find the level of gaming that is not obvious enough for everyone, but might still be fundamentally not good.
So then you have to spend a lot of your time to make sure this OKR couldn't be gamed, but you still probably won't be able to stop it from being gamed even if you spend very, very much time on preventing it.
No, we would figure out what we actually want to achieve (objective) and then (perhaps) arrive at that watch hours might be a useful way to measure our movement towards our objective.
If it is too much likely to be gamed than perhaps it is not a good metric or it needs other metrics alongside. If everything we can think of in terms of measuring if we get to our objective is too easily/too much game-able, then perhaps the objective needs revisiting.
Having things gamed to the extreme is also not such a big issue usually because in the end you also watch things like profit. During the ZIRP frenzy that got a bit forgotten in some places, so gaming was perhaps more of an issue. You can also switch objectives and measures if they turn out to be wrong/not useful.
> it just means you think you are smarter than person who decided on Y, which may be true or maybe not true regardless of OKR process.
The whole premise of deciding on Y or the methodology how it was decided was invalid in the first place.
> there are many business decisions based on educated guesses, not just OKRs.
Yes, but you can present ideas much better with simple words than forced numbers. You should take educated guesses, but you shouldn't force things into some sort of measurable numbers, unless they specifically make sense in that context.
Essentially goals and tasks should be what they are, specific to those goals and tasks and not forced into some specific format of a measurable number.
