OKRs

“And so that was when I kind of deprecated it on, you know, and said, I just want to understand, like, your headline, like, what are you trying to do, like, philosophically? And just, like, don't stress about whether you can measure it or not. I just want to un…”

“I think that like, for me, there are three things that really matter about like a good OKR. And One is legibility. Like, people look at it and understand What it is, and like, it's not some, like, weird, obfuscated metric that doesn't mean anything to any work…”

“And if you don't understand how to move a particular metric, then the right goal is to set a goal to increase your understanding, not to move that metric.”

“People read, measure what matters. They get their panties in a bunch. They get really excited. They're just going to do OKRs for everybody. But they didn't really read the whole thing. You kind of skimmed it, and you don't really understand how it works, and s…”

“Make sure your grading is secondary to retrospective, is the biggest thing I would say, because that's what's going to be valuable, and you could spend so many hours trying to come up with some fake measurement system That never is quite accurate and just wast…”

“We have the CPO Figma on this podcast, and he told the story of how they moved away from OKRs at one point, because they found themselves sitting in these meetings, reviewing these like large spreadsheets of hundreds of tasks that were basically just like task…”

“I like three. I think about it as triangulating, you know, I always like something that's like really hardcore numbers. I like something that's a little squishier, you know, like quality, you know, make sure you don't forget about it. And I usually like someth…”

“Because an OKR focuses you for one quarter, and at the end of the quarter, you grade your OKRs. How well did we do? What got in our way? It creates this learning cycle. So then you can take that information and say, next quarter, what should we try next? And I…”

“Google, even as a huge company, everybody's OKRs and their weekly updates are on their intranet and you can look stuff up.”

“What am I doing this week to get closer to our goals? If you could answer that question, like you could give up all the OKR stuff, but if you just ask the question, what are we doing this week to get closer to our strategic goals, our longer term goals? That i…”

“I say OKRs are more of a vitamin. They're not a medicine. So if you take OKRs and you're like, oh, this will fix everything that's wrong with you. No, that's not going to happen. It's just going to reveal everything that's wrong with your company.”

“I think everything can be measured to a certain degree. Not precisely necessarily, but you can get enough of a swag to be useful.”

“I've actually been running my life for the last eight, 10 years on OKRs as well, because I'm ADHD and I'm all over the place. And so looking at my OKRs every single Monday and say, well, you know, am I going to work on a book? Am I going to work on my teaching…”

“The main benefit is that there's a lot of concrete action through a OKR that you don't always get from strategy. Strategy tends to be a little longer, a little more muji-muji, and then when you get the OKR, you say, this quarter is what we're actually going to…”

“What you should do is just, you know, give my book to your best team and say, we're thinking about OKRs. Can you guys see if it works? And then three months later, check in with them. And what did you figure out, guys? Okay. Because the best team always wants …”

“A good goal is one that makes you feel somewhat uncomfortable, but not doomed.”

“Well, it's the same thing in these weekly meetings. You're practicing retrieving what your OKRs are. And after a while, they're just in that long-term memory, and you don't have to struggle to think about them, and you've got them, and anytime you make a decis…”

“Early on, we were doing OKRs on a quarterly basis. And I would say more recently, we've actually evolved to six month KRs. And what we found was that You know, six months was the right cadence in terms of giving enough time for teams to basically push forward …”

“And so you see people sandbagging, you see people, you know, being hesitant to put in numbers until like the very last second until they're like super, super confident. And that results in ultimately like a failure to, for your company to like innovate and mov…”

“We moved from like quarterly, very expensive quarterly planning, which took one month every three months. So basically, 33% of the time was planning to a biannual one pager on these are the company priorities. And it's much more smooth and much faster.”

“I stay away from them from a product perspective, because again, I want to focus on velocity, which is just output, which is your roadmap. But they could, they're pretty strong at more of the cross-functional side of things as well as the financial side of thi…”

“These are the maximum four key results and the one or two objectives you guys need to work on teams cannot deliver on more than that.”

“Building your entire metrics trees, maybe overkill doing heavy weighted OKRs, maybe overkill for early stage companies even don't know how they create value. So they need to iterate and their goals is really to find product market fit”

“The first that I end up seeing a lot is just this idea that like, okay, ours are not actually strategy. So, you know, I think the way that, that we plan and the way that our customers plan, the kind of key point is it's critical to disconnect like strategy dis…”

“I think most people would be better served Just working in product visuals saying, ooh, how might we want the product or the user to experience the product a year from now and giving that to the team? That is way more meaningful, I think, for folks, those visu…”

“OKRs will not work. Why not? So fundamentally, OKRs are a way to think about objectives and key results. But the fundamental assumption here is that it is solving for a kind of user and that kind of user you can divide and conquer, and of course there will be …”

“We don't have financial goals. We don't have OKRs or KPIs. I don't have revenue targets. I don't have growth targets in terms of the number of customers we need to pick up this year versus last year. I don't look at any of those things.”

“I never asked for research teams to have their own separate OKRs. I said two things. Number one, what's the team's OKR? Like, shouldn't the PMs, the engineers, the designers, and the research, everybody should have the same set of metrics for success, right? B…”

“I actually don't think open AI is like a big OKR company. Like, I don't think teams do OKRs today”

“Generally, the things we want to do, these Project A things, they're big, they're not easy to start, they're slow to create dopamine hits, they're non-urgent, like boss is not asking for them if you have a boss, and generally the tasks and activities that stan…”

“If you have a boss and a boss's boss's boss that you Have great insight about what, if you had a window of time, would be the highest leverage thing for you to do, and it might not show up on your OKRs, it might not be on your boss's radar, your boss's boss's …”

“We rant against KPIs are basically banned as a, and OKRs are banned and all that.”

“At the end of the day, what happens is they kind of invent for themselves the understanding that they need to have process, hierarchy, roles and responsibilities, goals, OKRs, whatever it is. And I think it's helpful sometimes to go through that, that, that fi…”

“The whole OKR determination and planning process took longer than it would take us to pick a goal and then execute it on it and finish it.”

“Whether you're doing OKRs or KPIs or Northstar metrics, whatever framework you're ostensibly using, if you use it well, it looks like that.”

“I think it's the best book about OKRs.”

“One why statement and or one mathematical operator is usually the way I think about it.”

“You've actually spent so much time and energy being really clever and cascading these things into these intermediate steps that each step has incurred more and more risk that we might not achieve that impact we seek to drive.”