OKRs: Objectives, Key Results, and Corporate Cosplay

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. ...

May 22, 2025 · 5 min · The Cynical Developer

Scrum Helped. Then It Got in the Way.

Scrum helped leave waterfall behind. Then it got in the way. It’s 9:57 a.m. and I’m watching someone update a Jira ticket to “In Progress” so they have something to say in the stand-up at 10:00. Welcome to Scrum in the enterprise: a play we all agreed to star in, long after the plot stopped making sense. I’m not here to burn Scrum to the ground. It served its purpose—just not the one it thinks it did. It helped kill off waterfall. It gave developers permission to talk to stakeholders more than once a year. And it introduced the radical idea that shipping working software might be more useful than delivering a 40-page Gantt chart with a straight face. ...

May 22, 2025 · 4 min · The Cynical Developer