I'll add to this thread that I was largely against OKRs, having seen them implemented in the style of "we need a quantitative measurement for success so let's make something up hastily", only to fall prey to Goodhart's Law[1].
But John Doerr's book introduced me to the bridge of concepts that I was not seeing: in a healthy setup, we are first and foremost focused on a qualitative objectives and THEN we attempt to model that fuzzy feeling with a quantitative measure (the "key result") that should reflect success. It takes several iterations in order to come up with a matching measurement, and even then we need to constantly re-evaluate whether the measurement is appropriate or if is devolving into a numbers game devoid of true objective.
In other words the full acronym is OAMBKY, or "Objectives, AS MEASURED BY Key Results". But that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.
So in that light, OKRs are a useful tool IF AND ONLY IF leadership—as well as the whole team—are focused on the philosophical, qualitative goal and are all aware that the measurement is only an imperfect proxy that is contantly re-evaluated to help us better assess the goal; not a goal unto itself. But that takes real leadership to drive that message (as well as avoiding setting up misguided incentives).
[1] When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
But John Doerr's book introduced me to the bridge of concepts that I was not seeing: in a healthy setup, we are first and foremost focused on a qualitative objectives and THEN we attempt to model that fuzzy feeling with a quantitative measure (the "key result") that should reflect success. It takes several iterations in order to come up with a matching measurement, and even then we need to constantly re-evaluate whether the measurement is appropriate or if is devolving into a numbers game devoid of true objective.
In other words the full acronym is OAMBKY, or "Objectives, AS MEASURED BY Key Results". But that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.
So in that light, OKRs are a useful tool IF AND ONLY IF leadership—as well as the whole team—are focused on the philosophical, qualitative goal and are all aware that the measurement is only an imperfect proxy that is contantly re-evaluated to help us better assess the goal; not a goal unto itself. But that takes real leadership to drive that message (as well as avoiding setting up misguided incentives).
[1] When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.