It's a risky idiom in general because it's often used to prevent debate. "Every existing product has feature X, so feature X is table stakes." "Why are we testing whether we really need this feature, it's table stakes!" My observation has been that "table stakes" features are often the best ones to reject. (Not so in the case of this title, though)
I code a lot on these. They're amazing on planes and trains as advertised, but I also spend a lot more time coding outside because they don't have the glare issues of a laptop screen.
I think this is only hard for poorly informed KRs. If something has risen to your top hypothesis for what's holding your Objective back, just look at the signal that made you honestly believe this. Customers keep telling you the product is painful to use? You can rely on the same communication channel to discover when it's fun and guardrail that it hasn't also lost utility. If teams deliver their KRs but don't move the Objective then the problem isn't with the KR delivery.
What about this scenario: two teams, rnd and delivery team. Rnd has an okr to make the projects easier to deliver. How do you objectively measure that, as one team does not completely control the result.
Start by answering why projects need to be easier to deliver. Of course they should be, but the nuance of the answer is the thing you measure. You see something that indicates that they're "too slow." What impact would you see on the R&D team if the delivery team did better? Go back to why you have a delivery team at all.
Or you can ask in the reverse: when would you stop wanting to invest in delivery beyond maintenance? What does "good enough" look like?
I'm not sure if you're being serious or ironic given the recent press attention about Google Search being crap to ensure that Google Ads makes more revenue.
So, yes, they definitely can game it by focusing on short term unsustainable wins and ignoring all medium and long term negative impacts. Push the AB testing games to their limits, like running the same text 5 times with minor "improvements", so that the statistical metrics no longer apply. Dark patterns that cause long term user value to drop but drives some short term revenue. And so on. Then you get the more fun ones like stealing work from other departments without giving them credit. They eat the R&D cost and you get the revenue win. A good middle manager will even spin it so it looks like their team did the R&D as well.
That said, it all works fairly well when you've got a monopoly in the area (ie: search and ads for Google) but in those cases most everything works fairly well.
I generally agree with your original comment, and I think a lot about Schmidt's quote when operating in a startup context. You're right that it's ironic in the Google context. Search should absolutely go back to being measured on retention and they should disentangle from the revenue team. And I agree that the real death of Google was in the statistical game: 95% confidence in a microscopic metric improvement still lets through serious quality degradation 5% of the time. This gets to another important point: OKRs should be _big_ or they're not worth doing.
I think revenue or any other KPIs makes sense when it's easier to drive the KPI the "right" way versus the "wrong" way. As a business grows the low hanging fruit are used up and things start to shift to the "wrong" way being significantly easier. Moreover if the culture is about driving a KPI then, like any culture, it's very hard to shift it and no one wants to eat the political cost of trying to do so. I think executives often forget that people are clever and will game any metric if it's possible. I was at a company where there was a silent agreement across the EMs to over-level engineers. The pay was below competitors at the same level and set by HR but the promotion committees were not run by HR. Every new EM that joined was horrified at first at the competencies of their engineers, but then either learned to play the game or eventually got pushed out by their ever growing enemies.
I like the idea, but I noticed that there seems to be some kind of issue with it registering clicks. I don't know if I'm just sometimes clicking slightly outside of the hitboxes or what, but I find myself "dragging" stuff by accident when the game doesn't register that I "dropped" whatever object I had selected.
> Unfortunately, due to a problem also present in the first public version of Bitcoin, Satoshi could never spend the money from that transaction.
What evidence suggests that this was unintentional? It offers a sense of fairness and objectivity from the originator, without generalizing the concept of a transactionless block or requiring any special logic to enforce it.
Great question. I can't say this was intentional or not. To people interested, it was only one line of code missing: he ""forgot"" to include the first transaction to the mapTransactions.
TempleOS has a number of interesting Oracular things. The F7 button gives you a random Bible word, and Shift+F7 gives you a random Bible passage. The author claimed that God provided guidance through this functionality.
Lower down, TempleOS's "god" library was a 'random' number generator that was seeded/pre-populated with the entirety of the KJV. The "GodBits" function would get you "random" numbers from it.
I worked on a project once involving divination from texts and wrote Terry about this topic. Here's what he told me (2015):
"""The easiest way to pick a random passage is to read timer that is in the random 1-20Mhz.
If you have a faster timer, then divide by a number.
The Bible is 4Meg. You want a random number from 0 to 4 million.
The Bible is 100,000 lines of text.
If you have the Bible in memory being edited, broken down by line number, you can pick a random
line number from 0 to 100,000.
If you flip 17 coins, you get a random number from 0 to 120,000. I use that for picking a line number.
God can do pretty-much any technique. The simplest and best is probably just randomly opening the Bible by hand."""
