Laws of Software Engineering · Pattern
Pattern
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
A method for aligning effort. Objectives describe what to achieve. Key Results describe how you would know.
How to use it. Use them to make alignment visible across an organisation. Three to five objectives per team per cycle. Key Results that are measurable and ambitious. Read Goodhart's Law before setting them. The moment they become compensation triggers, the measurements distort.
How it gets misused. Treated as performance management. OKRs are an alignment tool. When they become a stick, teams sandbag the key results and game the objectives, and the alignment value vanishes. The evidence that OKRs improve outcomes is weaker than the marketing suggests.
Related
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Pattern
Goodhart's Law
Once a measurement becomes a target, it stops being a useful measurement.
- Saying Outcome over Output Build to change something in the world, not to ship a feature.
Clusters
- The Lean Product cluster - How to build the right thing.