This put my thoughts on OKRs into words better than I ever could. At my last two companies, I've been beating the drum that the closer to an individual level you get the less useful OKRs are. The backward process of, "we know what we are going to do, how to we make it fit the OKR formula" drives me insane.
Personally, I actually like OKRs at the organization or large sub org level. I think they are great at getting everyone moving in the same direction and letting everyone know what matters. My problem is that as you drill down into an organization you need to switch from the "Why are we doing this?" and "What are we measuring?" questions and instead as "Exactly how are we going to do this?" which doesn't really fit into the ORK structure. Personally, I find that once you get down to a group of about five people or less, creating a list of tasks is far more affective than OKRs.
Exactly. Individuals are far away from the actual organization goals. In my yearly review I have to categorize my achievements by stuff like "Supporting growth", "Fueling worldwide expansion", "Increasing customer satisfaction" and so on. I am very far away from any of these so either I indirectly support all of them or you could also say I support none of them.
Just filling this out makes it clear that most of the company is about bullshitting each other.
This sums it up well. If all your achievements, with the exception things like professional growth, was not directly derived from these high level OKRs then middle management has failed in the assignment of work.
The hilarious thing where I work is at the end of each week I have to manually enter the hours I worked and I have N charge numbers to split up those hours. If you read the line item for each charge number it's basically a synopsis of one or more OKRs.
All this to say, from an engineer's point of view it seems with just a few tweaks in JIRA and Gitlab, review input could be created by running a report on commit history over the date range the review covers.
Having worked with hundreds of companies on their OKRs at Weekdone, I've seen many hack OKRs on individual level and use them "wrong" by having the KRs as milestones, tasks and projects. Yes, absolutely illegal by some leading OKR consultants and thinkers. But works like magic to keep goals in front of people.
Having the choice of having a developer or designer a visionary KR of improving x or y by z% vs getting a project, milestone or task done, in many cases the latter keeps them focused vs them rolling their ideas on the % KR.
Personally, I actually like OKRs at the organization or large sub org level. I think they are great at getting everyone moving in the same direction and letting everyone know what matters. My problem is that as you drill down into an organization you need to switch from the "Why are we doing this?" and "What are we measuring?" questions and instead as "Exactly how are we going to do this?" which doesn't really fit into the ORK structure. Personally, I find that once you get down to a group of about five people or less, creating a list of tasks is far more affective than OKRs.