My work does not reduce to measurable outcomes. Much of what I accomplish as an engineer and as a developer advocate amounts to creating conditions th

OKRs for Evil and Good

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2024-12-23 04:00:04

My work does not reduce to measurable outcomes. Much of what I accomplish as an engineer and as a developer advocate amounts to creating conditions that make it more likely for the company to succeed. I resist and resent most metrics, yet I don’t mind OKRs the way Honeycomb does them.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) were popularized by Google, and many companies use them for evil. If meeting the numbers in the Key Results determines whether we get a raise or get fired, then we skip the Objective and completely ignore externalities (effects on the world outside the system or beyond the timeframe).

OKRs consist of an Objective in words: what are we trying to accomplish? and 2-4 measurable Key Results: how will we know that we succeeded?

OKRs are quarterly. Teams have about three OKRs for a quarter, then evaluate them at the end of those three months. Did we hit our Key Results? Did we meet the objective? Usually people stop at the first question.

Asked to increase purchases from Alexa, as measured by the percent of people who say ‘Buy it now’ after asking for an item, a team might study what factors affect customers’ likelihood to say these magic words. Perhaps they notice that when Alexa says “with delivery by today,” more people say ‘Buy it now.’ Perhaps the team can decrease the response time and get more magic words by defaulting to “with delivery by today” on all items.

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