I think of "OKRs" as just a fancy name for two things:
(1) What are you going to do in the next quarter/year/etc? i.e. what are you & your team's "objectives"
(2) How are you going to achieve that? i.e. what are the "key results" you're going to hit to achieve your objective.
I hope most people will agree that, in an organization, having an understanding - and agreement - of what each team plans to work on, along with the trust that they have reasonably well-thought steps on how to achieve that objective, is incredibly helpful.
The problem is, as with "Agile", "TDD", etc, people will run with this and lose track of what the actual end-goal is, i.e. to build things that matter while ensuring coordination between teams. So, you will see things that don't make much sense, like OKRs for individual contributors, OKRs that change monthly, objectives that aren't necessarily right for the company, key results that don't really tie into the objective, etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is. At a previous gig, I tried asking management plainly to state publicly what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, and no one did it. Then I tried, let's do OKRs "just like Google" and everyone jumped on, even though IMO it's the same thing...
I hope most people will agree that, in an organization, having an understanding - and agreement - of what each team plans to work on, along with the trust that they have reasonably well-thought steps on how to achieve that objective, is incredibly helpful.
The problem is, as with "Agile", "TDD", etc, people will run with this and lose track of what the actual end-goal is, i.e. to build things that matter while ensuring coordination between teams. So, you will see things that don't make much sense, like OKRs for individual contributors, OKRs that change monthly, objectives that aren't necessarily right for the company, key results that don't really tie into the objective, etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is. At a previous gig, I tried asking management plainly to state publicly what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, and no one did it. Then I tried, let's do OKRs "just like Google" and everyone jumped on, even though IMO it's the same thing...