The example argument is very weak, the fictional organization has a goal of "increasing revenues and profitability", isn't that a tautology? I mean are there any firms where that would not be the goal. Any reasonably competent leadership will go atleast a few levels deeper and have goals that have demonstrable product outcomes, which translate to increased profit or sales. At least that has been my experience. I'd like to understand if there are any orgs out there with such simplistic goals as stated in the article.
You’re joking right? I honestly can’t tell if you’re trying to be ironic or if your working experience is limited to some sort of management nirvana.
In case it’s worth stating, yes there are firms where these sort of simplistic impact statements make it into OKRs and leave much to the imagination about what real desirable outcomes are.
I don’t mean it negatively. My own experience is limited to firms with no commitment to stated goals, vague goals (grow and profit), and leadership that want to dictate outputs vs outcomes. So unfortunately through my eyes the parent read like satire.
I appreciate that you didn't mean it like that but it does read quite disrespectfully. That can happen sometimes though, unfortunately I know that all too well! I'm also a bit touchy of late as so many comments on HN lack basic respect, it's not people getting into an argument and getting too heated, it's the very first comment people reply with, so perhaps I'm overreacting.
I think it makes reading the chain easier, I had the exact same thought reading the message that was responded to. Knowing that the chain recognises this thought and tries to addresss it helps me absorb the rest of the discourse.
I think that’s fair enough too. I’m not saying it can’t be said, just that it looked more like a dismissive swipe to me but I acknowledge that mistakes can happen in both the writing and the reading of any comment. I’m happy being wrong about my first impression.
Eg. A company looking to divest certain products or divisions would not be looking to increase revenue. A company looking to improve margins by eliminating low margin or even money losing products may not seek to improve revenue for a certain year.
And the increasing profitability part should be pretty obvious. The vast majority of startups that make it to the HN pages don’t even attempt to make a profit, never mind increasing it.
I just increased my revenue by $10 but decreased my profitability by $5. Now pretend that $10 was spent on ineffective advertising and sales, so I actually gave it to Google and my sales guy Bob, and $5 is the price I charged you.
Understanding tradeoffs is very important. I've seen driving hard on OKR's that seem to make sense from a business perspective not take into account the level of support we need to give existing products.
Nice article. With a different name this might catch on.
Even without the association with a disorganised useless twat it doesn't even flow in ordinary conversation. "We're going to do a Boris today". What does that mean, fuck up the future of the company?
>I call this tradeoff-oriented process Boris. The name I have given to this process has no connection with politicians who seem not to understand that any action taken entails tradeoffs which must be accepted.
Although I think they protest too much.
Anyway what's wrong with Boris.
Would it make you feel better if it was an awkward acronym BORRYYS.
Or do we need a catchy name that can then become a verb so we all feel hip and with it when we're 'Avalanching' or whatever.
"Boris is a one-day small-group workshop for all key decisionmaking stakeholders in an organization. "
Devs: Oh god... they are workshopping again.. what overpaid consultant they brought this time? SaFE? Sigma Six? ... Boris? wtf is that? nvm, we'll need to build it just the same.
I understand your sentiment, but I don’t agree that these workshops are of no consequence for the engineers who “do the real job”. These meetings will decide how many servers you’ll be able to rent and what headcount will you get.
I like any article that asks business people to put more emphasis on the ...in exchange for what? part of decision-making. That's something I have to repeat often. "I get that you want us to pursue this new thing, but what would you like to sacrifice to reclaim resources for it? My recommendation would be this, but I want us to agree before proceeding."
This article tangents another huge problem with goal-setting, though: they focus on outcome, not behaviour.
- You can control behaviour, but outcome is often to a large extent determined by external factors. You cannot will external forces into your bidding by setting a goal.
- If you just miss a goal, you've still done an amazing job -- but you're still considered to have failed to accomplish what you set out to. Goals promote a binary view of success that has little connection to reality.
- If you meet a goal, you have succeeded and can only harm yourself by doing more work. Exceeding your goals lead to even more unrealistic goals in the future.
- If you know ahead of time it will be impossible to meet a goal, you have little reason to continue because you will fail anyway. The two last points mean goals are effectively an excuse to stop doing the right thing.
- Outcomes (and therefore goals) are often lagging indicators. Even though you've made great progress in shifting course, your past momentum in the wrong direction carrying over can make it look like outcomes are still getting worse.
- In trying to satisfy goal-setters, when outcomes aren't directly controllable, people find the other thing that can be controlled: the measurement process. There are a million subtle ways for someone under a goal to put a thumb on the scale to meet the goal although nothing material has changed.
Edit: I forgot: goals are almost always focused on the short term. You can meet them by trading off long term success for short term success and indeed this is what people do.
I'm kind of confused by why and how trade-off alignment can be a goal setting exercise. Isn't this something that changes as the year progresses? Aren't project managers constantly negotiating these changes?
Is this the kind of solution a consultant comes up with because "teams actually communicating effectively outside a managed workshop" isn't a marketable silver bullet?
I guess the key take away is it's an easy pitfall to make team OKRs that ignore cross team dependencies. If your team expects deliverables from another team, it can be useful to get that reflected in OKRs. To that end... actually talk to teams your team depends on and figure out if your dependencies are a priority!
It makes me happy to know others are thinking in terms of trade-offs as goals.
I wrote an article about this from the perspective of avoiding software technical debt, but I have to admit, this article does a better job on explaining why it works than my own article (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
But what if the "C-suite" and other upper management doesn't get it?
Ironically, I work for a large "PrintCo" on a smaller, more obscure product line. I'm the only software developer. The managers are all people coming from the ME side, and are all so focused on how to make money from their hardware perspective, they don't see that software can add value too. For them, it's a necessary evil, where things like "technical debt" are just me complaining.
My point being, people at certain levels are just clueless and I don't really trust their goals at all. Sure, they can say "make more money!" or "sell more!" but they don't always see at all the core reasons why maybe they can't make more money, or sell more. Or the things that might let them do that.
36 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 85.5 ms ] threadIn case it’s worth stating, yes there are firms where these sort of simplistic impact statements make it into OKRs and leave much to the imagination about what real desirable outcomes are.
Eg. A company looking to divest certain products or divisions would not be looking to increase revenue. A company looking to improve margins by eliminating low margin or even money losing products may not seek to improve revenue for a certain year.
And the increasing profitability part should be pretty obvious. The vast majority of startups that make it to the HN pages don’t even attempt to make a profit, never mind increasing it.
Which usually falls under increasing revenues. Though I suppose there are user/eyeball driven cultures.
Revenue is, accounting-wise, orthogonal to capital investment. Hell, many definitions of profit are, too.
I just increased my revenue by $10 but decreased my profitability by $5. Now pretend that $10 was spent on ineffective advertising and sales, so I actually gave it to Google and my sales guy Bob, and $5 is the price I charged you.
Even without the association with a disorganised useless twat it doesn't even flow in ordinary conversation. "We're going to do a Boris today". What does that mean, fuck up the future of the company?
Although I think they protest too much.
Anyway what's wrong with Boris.
Would it make you feel better if it was an awkward acronym BORRYYS.
Or do we need a catchy name that can then become a verb so we all feel hip and with it when we're 'Avalanching' or whatever.
Devs: Oh god... they are workshopping again.. what overpaid consultant they brought this time? SaFE? Sigma Six? ... Boris? wtf is that? nvm, we'll need to build it just the same.
This article tangents another huge problem with goal-setting, though: they focus on outcome, not behaviour.
- You can control behaviour, but outcome is often to a large extent determined by external factors. You cannot will external forces into your bidding by setting a goal.
- If you just miss a goal, you've still done an amazing job -- but you're still considered to have failed to accomplish what you set out to. Goals promote a binary view of success that has little connection to reality.
- If you meet a goal, you have succeeded and can only harm yourself by doing more work. Exceeding your goals lead to even more unrealistic goals in the future.
- If you know ahead of time it will be impossible to meet a goal, you have little reason to continue because you will fail anyway. The two last points mean goals are effectively an excuse to stop doing the right thing.
- Outcomes (and therefore goals) are often lagging indicators. Even though you've made great progress in shifting course, your past momentum in the wrong direction carrying over can make it look like outcomes are still getting worse.
- In trying to satisfy goal-setters, when outcomes aren't directly controllable, people find the other thing that can be controlled: the measurement process. There are a million subtle ways for someone under a goal to put a thumb on the scale to meet the goal although nothing material has changed.
Edit: I forgot: goals are almost always focused on the short term. You can meet them by trading off long term success for short term success and indeed this is what people do.
Is this the kind of solution a consultant comes up with because "teams actually communicating effectively outside a managed workshop" isn't a marketable silver bullet?
I guess the key take away is it's an easy pitfall to make team OKRs that ignore cross team dependencies. If your team expects deliverables from another team, it can be useful to get that reflected in OKRs. To that end... actually talk to teams your team depends on and figure out if your dependencies are a priority!
Seems like basic stuff though.
I wrote an article about this from the perspective of avoiding software technical debt, but I have to admit, this article does a better job on explaining why it works than my own article (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
https://connected.io/post/how-to-avoid-technical-debt/ tldr: You can find overlap or convergence by applying PCA on a trade-off matrix.
From the example:
Company Goal: Make more money
Sales: We'll help make more money by focusing on closing deals in our pipeline
Product: We'll help make more money by focus on new and exciting product offering in an untapped market
On the surface these both line up to the goal of "make more money" but there were unspoken trade-offs which undermined execution:
- Product didn't focus on current offering causing sales to flounder
- Sales wasn't focused on pre-sales of new product so new product isn't helping the bottom line either.
Ironically, I work for a large "PrintCo" on a smaller, more obscure product line. I'm the only software developer. The managers are all people coming from the ME side, and are all so focused on how to make money from their hardware perspective, they don't see that software can add value too. For them, it's a necessary evil, where things like "technical debt" are just me complaining.
My point being, people at certain levels are just clueless and I don't really trust their goals at all. Sure, they can say "make more money!" or "sell more!" but they don't always see at all the core reasons why maybe they can't make more money, or sell more. Or the things that might let them do that.