I worked at a smallish (~20 employees, at the time) agency that hard pretty good management overall, but one day decided to do OKRs. I assume one of the owners read a book or attended a talk or something.
But we had no historical metrics on... anything, really, related to software development or design. Nothing that'd be useful for quarterly goals, anyway. "Close X tickets" or "make X commits" are famously shit measurements. We did client work, so we couldn't just try to decrease load times on one of our own products, or something like that.
Having nothing meaningful to use for OKRs related to our actual jobs, developers & designers just latched on to sales & marketing projects and set our OKRs for those. Video views are relatively easy to measure. Sales funnel stuff's easy to measure. "Net promoter score". All that shit. The goal-setting for OKRs strongly favored sales & marketing, for whom measuring stuff was already a lot of what they did.
I'm not sure that's what they were aiming for, but it's what they got. I hope it was at least kinda useful for the company.
NPS, specifically, is a hard metric to set an objective against. You can never really separate the stuff you did to your software from all the rest of the stuff that happened to your company.
And yeah, using tickets as a success metric is gonna produce some incredibly awful behavior as people learn to game the system.
Good OKRs are not easy. It’s very hard to come up with good key results that incentivize the right behavior while actually measuring progress towards the goal. It takes quite a lot of skill to do that properly.
To me the most important part of OKR’s isn’t really the metrics… it’s the understanding that the team has been tasked with solving some problem without being told how to solve it. The team itself gets to own the solutions that drive the metric. Done correctly it lets everybody on the team take ownership of the product they are working on. It is far better than just being a feature factory that cranks out whatever sales or upper management thinks is a good solution.
But we had no historical metrics on... anything, really, related to software development or design. Nothing that'd be useful for quarterly goals, anyway. "Close X tickets" or "make X commits" are famously shit measurements. We did client work, so we couldn't just try to decrease load times on one of our own products, or something like that.
Having nothing meaningful to use for OKRs related to our actual jobs, developers & designers just latched on to sales & marketing projects and set our OKRs for those. Video views are relatively easy to measure. Sales funnel stuff's easy to measure. "Net promoter score". All that shit. The goal-setting for OKRs strongly favored sales & marketing, for whom measuring stuff was already a lot of what they did.
I'm not sure that's what they were aiming for, but it's what they got. I hope it was at least kinda useful for the company.