There’s a special kind of sigh that comes out when someone says, “We’re rolling out OKRs.”
It’s not quite despair. Not quite sarcasm. It’s the sigh of someone who’s seen this play before—probably in Q1 of last year, and Q3 of the year before that. The costumes are different, but the script is the same.
Let’s get this out of the way: OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—can be useful. They’re not inherently evil. But like many good ideas, they tend to die in the wild. Not because the framework is flawed, but because the way most companies implement them is.
If you’ve ever sat through a two-hour Zoom session where fifteen vaguely worded “objectives” were matched to thirty-nine “key results” and a cascade diagram straight out of Dante’s Inferno, you know exactly what I mean.
What OKRs Are Supposed to Do
OKRs were born in the idealistic glow of Silicon Valley productivity: invented at Intel, popularized at Google, and evangelized by every middle manager who’s ever read a slide deck titled “Driving Impact at Scale.”
In theory, they help teams:
- Align to company goals
- Focus on what matters
- Measure progress
- Stretch beyond business-as-usual
A simple example:
Objective: Improve site performance
Key Results:
- Reduce P95 response time from 600ms to 300ms
- Drop error rate below 0.1%
- Migrate 80% of traffic to new CDN
Clear. Measurable. Ambitious. In a vacuum, beautiful.
But we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in organizations.
What OKRs Actually Do in Practice
Most OKRs don’t sound like the example above. They sound like this:
Objective: Be a best-in-class provider of scalable excellence
Key Results:
- Deliver roadmap items on time
- Increase internal stakeholder satisfaction
- Ensure systems are future-proofed
…whatever that means.
And instead of 2–3 focused goals, we get a buffet of obligation:
“Here are your 15 OKRs for Q2. Some are team goals. Some are department goals. Some are things your boss committed to without telling you.”
Even better, they “cascade.”
The Madness of Cascading OKRs
This is where the fun begins.
In theory, cascading OKRs means aligning levels: execs set big-picture goals, and teams derive supporting objectives and results. In reality, it’s a multi-tiered blame pyramid.
The VP says:
Objective: Expand market share in Asia-Pacific
Team is told:
KR: “Ensure 99.999% uptime and double deployment frequency”
Somehow, everyone is responsible for everything, but no one owns the problem. You’re “aligned,” but not empowered. You’re “accountable,” but not consulted.
And if a single line on your team’s dashboard drops by 0.2%, you’re off track—even if it had nothing to do with your actual work.
OKR Theater: A Greatest Hits Collection
If your company “does” OKRs, you’ve probably seen one or more of the following greatest hits:
- The Sandbag Shuffle – Set easily achievable KRs so you can hit 1.0 and look good.
- The Metric Mirage – Pick whatever numbers are easiest to extract from Google Analytics, even if they don’t measure anything meaningful.
- The Q3 Pivot – Halfway through the quarter, everything changes—but the OKRs don’t.
- The Retro Rewrite – Rewrite your KRs after the fact to match what actually happened. (Shh, it’s “agile.”)
- The “Stretch Goal” That Was a Job Posting – A KR so unrealistic, it’s clearly HR’s problem, not yours.
We’ve all played the game. Some of us have built entire Confluence pages about it.
Why OKRs Fail (And Sometimes Work)
Here’s the hard truth: OKRs don’t fail because developers are bad at planning. They fail because organizations treat them as either a compliance task or a proxy for management.
- Too many goals → No priorities.
- Vague objectives → Misinterpretation.
- Metrics without meaning → Gaming the system.
- Top-down imposition → No buy-in.
But when they do work, it’s usually because of:
- Focus – Teams pick 1–2 things that really matter.
- Clarity – Objectives are human-readable; KRs are specific and outcome-driven.
- Autonomy – Teams get to choose how they support higher goals.
- Conversation – OKRs trigger alignment talks, not just checkboxes.
Think of OKRs as a lens, not a leash.
A Senior Dev’s Survival Guide to OKRs
If you’re a developer—or a team lead stuck in the middle—here’s how to make OKRs less awful, and maybe even useful:
1. Cut ruthlessly
Push for 2–3 OKRs at most. One great objective beats seven mediocre ones.
2. Fight for clarity
If a KR isn’t measurable, it’s just a wish. Rewrite until it’s clear. Ask, “How would I know this happened?”
3. Push back on cascading nonsense
Just because the VP has a goal doesn’t mean you can reverse-engineer a meaningful KR from it. It’s OK to say, “This isn’t actionable at our level.”
4. Include learning goals
Not everything needs a number. Try KRs like:
- Conduct 3 performance investigations and document findings
- Prototype 2 alternate solutions to our scaling bottleneck
Learning is a valid result—especially when dealing with legacy systems or innovation work.
5. Use them as conversation starters
Don’t just submit your OKRs and forget them. Use them to steer sprint goals, raise blockers, and prioritize work that actually matters.
So… Should We Abandon OKRs?
Not necessarily. But we should stop pretending they work by default.
If your OKR process takes more time than the work it’s meant to focus, something’s wrong. If your key results are just task lists with numbers tacked on, they’re not OKRs—they’re metrics in a trench coat.
The best use of OKRs I’ve seen?
A single Notion page. One objective. Three key results. Updated fortnightly. Referenced during planning. Forgotten once delivered.
No ceremony. Just clarity.
Final Thought
OKRs can be a flashlight or a fog machine. Done well, they help teams stay aligned and ship meaningfully. Done poorly, they’re just another checkbox in the corporate productivity LARP.
So next quarter, when the decks start flying and the stretch goals start stretching—take a breath.
Write one good OKR.
Make it count.
Ignore the rest.