OKRs

“Three of them. One, grow revenues. Two, deliver more value to customers. Three, build a great team. A couple of undistracted, sorry, a couple of distracted, highly unfocused quarters later, we realized that those three OKRs could be universally applied to any …”

“If you're doing it right, then on average, you're averaging about 70% accomplishment as a company. And if you're getting close to a hundred, it means that you're really sandbagging and that you're not setting aggressive enough goals.”

“Google has one really famous thing about OKRs is that you're expected to only hit 70% of your OKRs, which in the early days was really helpful. It was really a symbol of think big. In the later days, it became a passive-aggressive way to avoid commitment.”

“Make sure you set OKRs, make sure you execute well and success will be yours. No, that is not how anything works in the real world. Right? That is actually the operator speaking when that operator has taken a product from say, 20 to 60, or 60 to a hundred, and…”

“At some point we thought, oh, we need, like, OKRs and systems because some, an investor told me once that that's the way companies do it. We tried and I was like, this is no. Why? This is the worst thing you can do right now. It's like, you don't need this.”

“The whole point of strategy is to say no to most things and focus in on a small number of really high leverage things. Like you have to make that bet. When you see companies with nine company level OKRs at the top level or whatever, right? They're just trying …”

“The reason why I don't like The framework is that it doesn't actually talk about strategy. It just gives a goal and then it just tells the team like, go hit this goal, but there's no thinking on the exec level about like how we can actually achieve that goal a…”

“OKRs were built for manufacturing. We don't manufacture software.”

“So the OKR stuff, like putting OKRs in a business way too early is totally wrong. Putting revenue metrics on a company before they've achieved product market fit, totally wrong.”

“He was saying, why were they lifted from the manufacturing industry and plopped down into the software world? And I would very much agree with that.”

“The more nuanced answer is you earn the right to set OKRs on longer time horizons by proving you can execute on shorter time horizons.”