I hate OKRs... and other thoughts about goal setting

Hi! I’m Molly. I write about what it actually takes to lead inside growing, changing companies: the frameworks that help, the honest truth about what it feels like, and the messy work of shaping a career that actually fits.

Lessons is where those ideas live — both the writing and the conversations around it. (If you want to learn more about how Lessons and the community work, you can read more here.)

I hate OKRs.

Let me explain...

I believe strongly in having a goal-setting process. The purpose of goal setting in my mind is to ensure that everyone is aligned on what success looks like for the next period of time and how we know if we got there. A good goal setting process is important for two reasons: 1) it creates clarity so that your team knows what to prioritize and can make aligned choices day-to-day and 2) it is an essential learning process for discovering how to govern and run your business.

In smaller startups (50-250 people), I focus goal-setting primarily on the top level — the company goals — and I don’t worry about having any elaborate process for teams or individuals. The company goals usually drive the clarity for teams or teams can choose to add their own process to get to whatever level of detail they need. The most important thing to me is that everyone is clear on where the company needs to go in the next period; everything else will flow out of that clarity. And to be clear, I focus on having 3ish clear metrics / goals that we use to measure company progress, not 10.

When you’re designing a goal-setting process, the number one thing you need to do is ask “what do we need (in terms of goal setting) at our stage of company and for our specific business?”

The reason I hate OKRs is that they are often the wrong answer for startups. OKRs are just a form of a goal — they make the goal specific and measurable and all the other things a goal should be. But OKRs are a very heavyweight, structured form of goal setting that was evangelized by Google. Just because OKRs worked for Google does not mean they are right for you. (As an example, SMART and V2MOMs are two other forms of goals…)

I see a lot of startups try to copy and paste processes like OKRs, or practices from companies like Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, and it just doesn’t work. It’s too much structure and too much specificity. I watch startups go in to goal-setting processes and come out with a set of goals that reads like a scroll. They’re trying to quantify everything. There is a goal for everything. People inside the company get lost in the KRs or the excel spreadsheet that you created to house the OKRs. OKRs or heavy weight goal-setting processes often mean that people in your company lose the point — what is the most important thing we have to do this period? — which means they lose the alignment and that is the whole purpose of goal setting.

5 things I believe about effective goal setting inside of startups:

1) Less is more. What is the smallest number of things you need to define in order to create alignment and get everyone on the same page about where we are going and what success looks like? Make sure that every person who reads the goals or listens to the presentation will walk away clear on what the most important thing is. As a test, a week after a goal setting presentation at an All Hands, as 3-5 mid-level or junior people what the goals are. If they don’t remember (at least some of it), you are probably “over defining” your goals or communicating them poorly.