Oh boy — where to even begin with this one? In my experience, I have noticed a simply unexplainable obsession with the Objective Key Result (OKR) framework across multiple companies. I was there when it was brought to Facebook, and when I joined Zillow, it was allegedly being used across the company. In both cases, what happened was not clarity, prioritization, and purpose — benefits regularly attributed to OKRs — but instead wasted effort, ambiguity, and a laundry list of priorities.
This is a long post, so I’ll give a summary in the form of a question: why are we still, in 2025, obsessed with a framework created 50 years ago at a now failing company? I have seen obsession with this framework violate my favorite principle from the Agile Manifesto, written about 30 years after the creation of the OKR framework: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”
Before diving in, let me share my biggest gripe of OKRs that Marty Cagan, creator of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) and a product influencer worth listening to, summarized so well recently in an onsite visit to Zillow Group: “do OKRs or a roadmap, but not both.” Typically I see OKRs being done in addition to a roadmap, where people say KRs must be tied to the business. For example, a Key Result to increase adoption from 1% of a customer base to 2% with a long-running Objective like “be the best platform at ____”, where ____ is your company’s industry.1
The problem with this OKR template is that it simply isn’t helpful. All for-profit companies in the US must legally maximize value to shareholders. It does not tie into 
strategy or how you win. In addition, there are lots of things one can do to increase adoption! Thus, a laundry list of projects are born all outside of the OKR framework, which ironically means you are using OKRs yet completely violating the OKR framework 🙃.
But Straker — what if we follow Marty’s advice and do OKRs instead of roadmaps?
This is better, as at least now you likely only have one bad process instead of two 🫠; I have already shared my issues with any fixed-time roadmap exercise and what to do instead.
No no — we regularly score our KRs and update them on a frequent basis, such as monthly!
Now we’re talking. This means you’re not afraid of “ship it” KRs, as this is expected in the OKR framework — more on this below. Sadly, I have never seen this critical component to proper OKR use be done. If you’re doing this, you’re in the top 10%. But are you in the top 1%? Are you OK with significant change two weeks after publicly publishing your OKRs to your company? You better be; as this is not a hypothetical scenario.
To use a recent personal example, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) changed the Clear Cooperation Policy (CCP) on March 25th this year. On April 10th — two weeks later — Zillow announced their Listing Access Standards. If we were stuck in a fixed-cycle waterfall plan, like OKRs encourage, our strategic pivot would not have been possible.2
This is why it’s important to ditch the bullshit; nobody cares about your precious framework. Besides, the best companies are finally learning Goodhart’s Law is real and ditching their obsession with metrics and learning the hidden cost of process. If you do OKRs, treat them like they’re meant to be treated: a lightweight process that you adapt to the modern day.
With this backdrop, I now need to take a step back. Let me dive in and explain OKRs, what they are meant to be, why you shouldn’t waste your time on them, but if you have to, how to make them less bad 😅. Buckle up, as like most of my posts, this isn’t a short read. As always, context matters, and we will start at the beginning…
Where to Start: With the Creator
If you are just learning about OKRs, there is one source and one source only of where to start: Measure What Matters by John Doerr. To leaders asking for OKRs who haven’t read this first, please go read this right fucking now. You really only need to read the first third of it; it should only take a couple of hours.
I don’t care what your experience is with OKRs elsewhere; unless it was with Google or Intel, they were wrong. How do I know they were wrong? Because they are always wrong. For example, this post in the TL;DR Product newsletter? Dead. Fucking. Wrong.3 Wait — this author worked at Google? Damnit! Now even if you worked where OKRs are from, you still can’t be trusted 🤯 .
But if you’re reading this because you have to do OKRs as mandated by leadership, read Measure What Matters. Or if you’re a leader considering implementation of OKRs, read Measure What Matters and then start asking for OKRs (or don’t, because you realize you don’t actually want them anymore now that you know what they are 😜). Either way, you’re #1 takeaway from this post is to read Measure What Matters to avoid a (long) game of telephone. Like strategy, there are more bad examples of OKRs in the wild than there are good ones!
Why do we have to read this book? Did John Doerr invent OKRs? No, John didn’t invent OKRs; his boss, Gróf András István (later known as Andy Grove) invented them at Intel. John is simply the man who spread the word about OKRs as a consultant, investor, and later, author of Measure What Matters.
So, who was Andy Grove? Grove was Intel’s third employee who eventually became the third CEO, succeeding Gordon Moore.4 Grove met Moore and Robert Noyce5 (the co-founders of Intel) at Fairchild Semiconductors (which Noyce also co-founded). What is relevant here is we are talking about two of the most critical individuals to create the PC revolution as the co-founders of Intel. And Grove was the one who ran operations for them, with OKRs as his alleged superpower.
And Measure What Matters shows off the power of OKRs? Well, you see, uh, no 🙃. Let’s dive into it!
Defining OKRs: In Doerr’s Words
Before I can dive into case studies of OKRs, I first need to explain what they are! To avoid the game of telephone I warned about above, let’s just quote John Doerr directly when he pitched OKRs to early Google for use:
“[OKRs are] a management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.”
An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking— and fuzzy execution.
KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”) You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, we declare the key result fulfilled or not. Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)
My objective that day, I told the band of young Googlers, was to build a planning model for their company, as measured by three key results:
KR #1: I would finish my presentation on time.
KR #2: We’d create a sample set of quarterly Google OKRs.
KR #3: I’d gain management agreement for a three-month OKR trial.
Sounds simple, right? That’s what I felt the first time I read this! My bias against OKRs comes not from this text, but how I see OKRs (mis)used and the empirical results of case studies over time. At the same time, John’s obsession with Andy, who he calls “the greatest manager of his or any era,” leads him to ignore the issues with the examples given in the book of his leadership.6
We’ll address all of these issues in this post, but for now, let’s take OKRs at face value from this definition.
Let me emphasize one point from the quote above that I have never seen done correctly in the wild:
At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, we declare the key result fulfilled or not. Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)
What’s tough about this is there is an inherent contradiction in these words. Objectives can live for over a year, but KRs typically over a shorter time period, such as a quarter. So if you achieve all of your quarter’s KRs and the Objective isn’t achieved, was it a bad OKR? You can say no, as there are new KRs next quarter, but what are all of the KRs needed to achieve the Objective? Do we know this at the time of definition? This one has an easy answer:
So, how can we avoid a “poorly designed” OKR, by definition? 🙃 You don’t; you just ignore this part of OKR’s definition. You have a challenging Objective, usually requiring 1+ years to attain, and then you revamp your KRs regularly. This isn’t terrible, as it fits inline with agile thinking, but it’s important to realize this was unintentional given OKRs were invented over 30 years before the agile movement.
So, what’s the issue, exactly? The main issue I see is folk taking abstract KRs, effectively making them their L1/L2 metric goals. While this sounds nice in theory, it completely violates the intent of KRs: “benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective.” L1/L2 metrics are great, but they don’t say how you’re getting there. They also rarely experience linear growth, yet OKRs are time-bound in a consistent, repeating time period. Have a new goal that is going to take investment to even enable a single user to leverage as a feature? Because you likely do, and an L1/L2 metric goal in 90 days just isn’t viable. It leads to a square peg, round hole scenario; the scenario I have seen play out multiple times over multiple companies.
But let’s again take a step back: why do OKRs? What problem are they trying to solve?
OKR Superpowers (“Allegedly”)
In John Doerr’s own words, OKRs deliver the following superpowers:
Superpower #1 — Focus and Commit to Priorities: High-performance organizations home in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter. OKRs impel leaders to make hard choices. They’re a precision communication tool for departments, teams, and individual contributors. By dispelling confusion, OKRs give us the focus needed to win.
Superpower #2 — Align and Connect for Teamwork: With OKR transparency, everyone’s goals— from the CEO down — are openly shared. Individuals link their objectives to the company’s game plan, identify cross-dependencies, and coordinate with other teams. By connecting each contributor to the organization’s success, top-down alignment brings meaning to work. By deepening people’s sense of ownership, bottom-up OKRs foster engagement and innovation.
Superpower #3 — Track for Accountability: OKRs are driven by data. They are animated by periodic check-ins, objective grading, and continuous reassessment — all in a spirit of no-judgment accountability. An endangered key result triggers action to get it back on track, or to revise or replace it if warranted.
Superpower #4 — Stretch for Amazing: OKRs motivate us to excel by doing more than we’d thought possible. By testing our limits and affording the freedom to fail, they release our most creative, ambitious selves.
Again, when I read this, I don’t see issues! But I need to emphasize Superpower #2 — Align and Connect for Teamwork. Go reread that one; I’ll wait. There are important nuggets in here that I have never seen followed in OKR implementation.
First and foremost, OKRs are tied to individuals. This is how they were designed to be used! Yet for some reason, I have only seen OKRs tied to groups of individuals, such as flowing from company → organization → team. OKRs were invented in the 1970s before the PC existed. Company scale was simply not the same as it is today, 50+ years later. It is natural that folk have tried to adapt OKRs into the modern world, but it is worth understanding this change and where it breaks down.
Wait…yeah. I’ve been asked to help my team come up with OKRs. How do I do this given the tool was designed for individuals? That’s the rub for me about OKRs. In Doerr’s own words: “a decisive ingredient for OKR success: conviction and buy-in at the top.”7 I have yet to see leaders take personal and public goals for all at the company to see, but that is step 1 for OKR success.
Doerr also contradicts himself in the text of Superpower #2, defining this requirement and uses “top-down” and “bottom-up” at the same time. OKRs are not bottom-up. Individuals have freedom to set their own, but there is expectation that they “link their objectives to the company’s game plan.” They are clearly top-down, and there’s no reason to hide from that fact.
So…uh, what do I do to help my team come up with OKRs? You first say “what are the company OKRs?” If undefined, you stop until those exist. Then you continue down the chain until you’re up. If you are an organization doing OKRs (when the rest of the company isn’t), you can define the starting point. But you better have your top OKRs “linked to the company’s game plan” (which better be a real strategy 😉). If you don’t, you’re just going to sow confusion in your organization.
OKRs’ Sibling Nobody Talks about: CFRs
OKR definition is only the first third of the (relatively short) book; the second part is about changing your HR processes, such as pivoting away from annual reviews to CFRs (Conversation, Feedback, Recognition). Personal OKRs are meant to feed these HR processes, in turn, driving an outcome-driven culture at the company. In other words, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
If this sounds like my weekly summaries, well, you’d be right! I strongly agree with Grove and Doerr’s desire for a data-driven outcome focused culture. They even learned this from the best learning mechanism in the whole world: experience. Doerr referenced his previous company, Fairchild, where he’d first met Noyce and Moore and went on to blaze a trail in silicon wafer research. Fairchild was the industry’s gold standard, but it had one great flaw: a lack of “achievement orientation.”
“Expertise was very much valued there,” Andy explained. “That is why people got hired. That’s why people got promoted. Their effectiveness at translating that knowledge into actual results was kind of shrugged off.” At Intel, he went on, “we tend to be exactly the opposite. It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.”
You can see OKRs aren’t just about a process, but about defining a culture of “achievement orientation.” OKRs with CFRs power a flywheel-like mechanism to achieve this. Here’s the problem: no one, and I mean no one, mentions CFRs when they talk about OKRs. It’s like taking the handle of hammer but forgetting the hammerhead on top; it’s simply not an effective tool on its own!
Now, like most tools, it doesn’t matter if you specifically use CFRs or not. What matters is that you have the other half of the flywheel with more real-time performance feedback than annual reviews.
Why are OKRs so Popular?
When I first read Measure What Matters, I thought “this is too simple; I love it! It’s the process for anti-process people.” Little did I realize I am not the first to have this thought; I missed this quote on first read:
It was a “very, very simple system,” Grove said, knowing simplicity was catnip to an audience of engineers.
Due to their simplicity (and Doerr’s good writing), OKRs have spread from their founding at Intel to Google, Sun Microsystems, AOL, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Oracle, Slack, Spotify, Twitter, My Fitness Pal, Remind, Nuna, and more. Now, this list gets interesting, as there are some hits as well as misses in this list. There are so many misses, in fact, that there are some…interesting takes about OKRs’ purpose.
Going back to the source, it is not a stretch of the imagination to say that OKRs are a major contributor to the fall of Intel. Their cult-like use creates a focus on process over people, a complete violation of the definition of agile. And with the rise of mobile (which ARM won), PC gaming (which AMD won), and AI (which NVIDIA won), Intel went 0/3 on “the big things” of the past 25 years. It smells a lot like Kodak behavior when the iPhone came about; OKRs force focus on the important things from yesterday and block strategic shifts when when speed is critical.
Case Study: Operation Crush
We’re finally getting to the exciting stuff. Operation Crush was “the fight for survival by a young Intel Corporation” and gets its own dedicated chapter early in Measure What Matters to show off the power of OKRs.8 Except, for me, it has the complete opposite effect.
What was the Objective of Operation Crush? Well, it was in the name: crush Motorola. Or, more specifically
There’s only one company competing with us, and that’s Motorola. The 68000 is the competition. We have to kill Motorola, that’s the name of the game. We have to crush the f— king bastards. We’re gonna roll over Motorola and make sure they don’t come back again.
Well, if that isn’t just fun. There’s nothing about improving the product experience for customers —
By the third quarter, they were on their way toward meeting one of the most daring objectives in the history of tech: two thousand “design wins,” the crucial agreements for clients to put the 8086 in their appliances and devices. By the end of that calendar year, they’d routed the enemy and won a resounding victory.
Not one Intel product was modified for Crush. But Grove and his executive team altered the terms of engagement. They revamped their marketing to play to the company’s strengths. They steered their customers to see the value of long-term systems and services versus short-term ease of use. They stopped selling to programmers and started selling to CEOs.
Well, is that not just inspiring? In 2025, that’s surely how you win and don’t invite anti-trust regulation into your front door — what’s that? Anti-trust is a big deal in 2025 and this is terrible advice (see: Google & Apple for examples)? Oh, yeah: this is a terrible case study from 46 years ago at the time of this writing. We have now gotten to my overall point about OKRs: they maybe made sense before I was born, but they stopped making sense long ago, let alone today.
John Doerr may have worked at Intel, but he was a salesperson (a darn good one). He was not a product person, or a design person, or an engineering person. Yet at the modern tech company, these are some of the most crucial fields leading organizations. A sales process from the 1970s just doesn’t belong in the conversation.
How to do OKRs Well
If you have to do OKRs, all hope is not lost. I started this document sharing they can be a simple tool to help achieve continuous planning, and I meant that! You might call this burying the lede, but I disagree. Without the context of what OKRs are and aren’t, well,
So, if you’re going to do OKRs, have this context and do them well!
- Have astrategy first for your OKRs to work backwards from.
- Beware making “business metric” KRs for products that haven’t launched yet. 0→1 success metrics tend to be abstractions that are not clear. Rather, it is OK to have a “ship it” KR, with the customer value expressed, and with a note that the KR is expected to evolve in the future to a business metric once the baseline is established.
- Have no more than 5 Objectives and 5 Key Results per Objective; three is the sweet spot. Less is more!
- Setup your process for sharing, updating, and scoring OKRs in advance of first announcing them.
- Define if your KRs are committed or aspirational in advance with expected scores of the KRs at the end of the time period.9
- Don’t include internal project names in OKRs; instead, tie the KR to the customer value that is being delivered by the project.
Appendix: Good External Resources
- OKRs are Bullshit
- Scarlet Ink’s The Hidden Cost of Process and KPIs Gone Wild: Cautionary Tales of Lost Customer Obsession
- John Cutler on OKRs’ limits
Footnotes
- Admittedly, this Objective is usually two to three times the amount of words to effectively say this. ↩︎
- Note that I am employed by Zillow and will not publicly comment further on NAR, CCP, ZLAS, or Compass. For a fun public source on this subject, head on over to Notorious Rob. He’s not always right — if he is you get your money back — but he’s a fun, engaging writer! ↩︎
- Observability into movable business metrics is important. However, OKRs are not about outcomes vs output like this article attests; in fact, they’re about both. Objectives are your outcomes, and KRs are your output (in service of the desired outcomes); see John Doerr’s own example in the next section. At the same time, they are not forced to be in a specific timeframe; just because they are “typically in a quarter” — the direct verbiage from Measure What Matters — doesn’t mean they have to be like this article attests. ↩︎
- Wait, like Moore’s Law, Moore? Yes, that Moore. ↩︎
- You know, just the founder of the integrated circuit; no big deal (NBD). ↩︎
- This is a direct quote from Measure What Matters. John worships Andy, to the point of using religious analogies. The full quote is even worse: “Andy Grove, the greatest manager of his or any era, ran the best-run company I had ever seen. Since joining Kleiner Perkins, the Menlo Park VC firm, I had proselytized Grove’s gospel far and wide, to fifty companies or more.” ↩︎
- Yes, this is another direct quote from Measure What Matters. No, it is not in the quoted text above. ↩︎
- Another Measure What Matters quote? You betcha. ↩︎
- Committed vs aspirational KRs comes from Google’s use of OKRs defined in Measure What Matters: “OKRs have two variants, and it is important to differentiate between them: Commitments are OKRs that we agree will be achieved, and we will be willing to adjust schedules and resources to ensure that they are delivered. The expected score for a committed OKR is 1.0; a score of less than 1.0 requires explanation for the miss, as it shows errors in planning and/ or execution. By contrast, aspirational OKRs express how we’d like the world to look, even though we have no clear idea how to get there and/ or the resources necessary to deliver the OKR. Aspirational OKRs have an expected average score of 0.7, with high variance.”
↩︎
2 Comments
Leave your reply.