I've fallen out of love with OKRs

I have a confession to make, one that's especially hard to say during this season of goal setting: I've fallen out of love with OKRs.

I know, I know... I've loved them for so long. And we accomplished so much together. I' not sure how I'm going to dig out of this hole. ?? Unfortunately, I've seen how easily they underperform expectations.

I hopefully have some credibility. I've run OKRs for years at-scale. I've read all of the books. And blog posts. I was the OKR champion.

Here are 7 challenges I've run into over the years:

1. OKRs are too easy to write poorly (or are hard to write well).

For example, I was reviewing some with a CEO recently. All of the key results for all of the objectives were 100% focused around outcome metrics. This seems good at first. But there was no indication of what work the team and company would actually do to achieve them.

When I asked about this, it was assumed the team below would come up with the work and cascade it through their OKRs. Which of course they can. Sounds like great delegation. But they hadn't yet, so it was unclear how to best move forward.

The sequencing was tricky and, in the meantime, the leadership team was lacking alignment on what work was most important and who was going to do what part of it. This made planning, both operational and financial, difficult.

2. OKRs can confuse on whether they are aspirational or committed.

Are we supposed to shoot for the stars and land on the moon? There is a lot of discussion about and merit to this. It causes us to try new things, think bigger, get out of the iterative mindset.

Or, is this an OKR we must achieve no matter what? Is it integral to the financial plan? Should we be raising flags the moment it falls off-track, or be happy with directional progress?

Are all objectives aspirational? Or some aspirational some committed? Do we need to indicate it somewhere?

3. OKRs don't clarify ownership and cross functional collaboration by default.

Who owns this objective? What about this key result vs that key result?

I've seen teams add this manually, noting the specific person who owns a specific key result or objective. Or they tie objectives and key results between people and departments in other software.

But ownership is often done parenthetically or ad-hoc at best, or is missing altogether at worst.

4. OKRs don't offer a single view to see progress on the most important work.

Many times one OKR will point to another person's or department's OKR. This is fine except now I have to look in several places to know how something is going.

An important initiative might encompass several department's OKRs and there isn't an easy way to see the related OKRs at once and together.

5. OKRs don't indicate completion progress % by default.

This gets into scoring(scale is from 0 [red bad] - to 1.0 [green good]). Many teams don't do it, at least not regularly. And the ones who do still face challenges.

For example, if an OKR is 25% complete and everything is going great, is it .25/red, even though it's on-track? Or is it 1.0/green even though its only 25% complete? It feels unnatural, like we're missing a dimension of status or completion.

6. OKRs don't include deadlines by default.

There is an assumed deadline for the end-of-period, e.g. these are all "Q1 OKRs." But we all know about assumptions.

Well-written key results are supposed to include dates, e.g. "Launch X by Feb 15, 2024."

Most don't. And for the ones that do, there is no easy way to collate all target dates and see how we're doing against them. This makes it difficult for a team to manage against deadlines as well as coordinate and prioritize work.

7. OKRs don't easily roll over between time periods.

It feels like OKRs either have to be 100% completed in this quarter, or they have to be rewritten in order to be relevant in the next quarter.

This isn't always the case. Yes, you can roll them over intact. But most don't.

This revising can make it difficult to understand clear start and stop points, and if we are being effective or should investigate deeper execution issues.

What to do?

Ok, enough about my hiccups with OKRs. And if you're running them, great, maybe this list will help you avoid some common pitfalls.

But let's look at an alternative we used at Salesloft for years before OKRs. It's a tool that most companies already have in their toolbox: Projects and metrics.

We, the leadership team, guided by our vision, monitor our key metrics and manage a portfolio of strategic projects in order to drive business results.

Projects

Project management is a well-worn path that includes established best practices:

• Projects have clear ownership by default, including approval expectations (e.g. RASCI)
• Projects have success criteria by default (e.g., goal or outcome-based results)
• Projects include timelines by default (e.g. start and end dates)
• Projects have status (not-started, on-track, off-track, on hold, completed, etc)
• Project updates have % completed progress
• Projects outline who will do what work, whether it is cross functional or not
• Projects don't need to be refreshed when a time period rolls over. The project is done when its done. And when it is, we reflect on how it went against its success criteria and hopefully celebrate. And if the outcome was not what we hoped, at least the team is proud of the attempt (they made a plan and executed it) and can iterate on it to produce better results next time.
• Finally, you can start a project at any time, including the middle of a cycle. The business context trumps specific cycles.

We still keep our rhythm of reviewing, planning, aligning and committing every quarter and year. But instead of drafting OKRs from scratch, we 1) celebrated projects that were completed, 2) reviewed in-progress projects (asked if any need more focus/support or should be stopped), 3) debate as a team priorities for the coming quarter and what projects need to be added and who owns them.

Metrics

I've written about metrics before. Metrics, especially when monitored weekly, are the mirror that tell us how the system is doing and if we need to adjust or not.

We expect projects to move the needle on metrics. And even after a project is over, we will probably still monitor that metric.

So there's my confession. If you love OKRs, rock on. If not, maybe you can learn from my pitfalls or try something new, like managing a portfolio of projects as you monitor your key metrics. I've seen this help teams get aligned and drive dramatic results together.

Onward and upward!