> ... still continue to tell them the solutions they are supposed to deliver – nearly always in the form of a roadmap of features and projects with expected release dates.
This has always been my experience with OKRs. They were implemented by directionless companies with weak management as an attempt to bring structure, but the real reason there was no structure or coherence is that nobody in leadership agreed about what the company should do.
They ended up being such vague, arbitrary, and ambiguous goals, like "dominate this sector" or "become a leader in that vertical", or "hire x engineers by y time" that they were effectively meaningless. What does dominate mean? What are these new engineers going to do once they're here? Nobody had answers to these questions, yet achieving the OKRs was paramount.
I'm sure there are examples where they work well, but I suspect this author is onto something and the companies that use them successfully would be well managed with or without them.
This has always been my experience with OKRs. They were implemented by directionless companies with weak management as an attempt to bring structure, but the real reason there was no structure or coherence is that nobody in leadership agreed about what the company should do.
They ended up being such vague, arbitrary, and ambiguous goals, like "dominate this sector" or "become a leader in that vertical", or "hire x engineers by y time" that they were effectively meaningless. What does dominate mean? What are these new engineers going to do once they're here? Nobody had answers to these questions, yet achieving the OKRs was paramount.
I'm sure there are examples where they work well, but I suspect this author is onto something and the companies that use them successfully would be well managed with or without them.