The OKR That Never Was (A Satire)
It was a typical Monday morning in the office. The air was filled with the sound of keyboards clacking and the smell of freshly brewed coffee. But then, Jasmine from HR barged into our daily standup meeting like she had just seen the Loch Ness Monster.
“Team, team, team! I have some amazing news! We’re doing OKRs!”
OKR Inception
We all stopped in our tracks. Mike slowly put down his triple-shot espresso. Rupa paused mid-chew on her triple-stack bagel. Even Dave, who is the kind of guy that enthusiastically nods along to everything, looked baffled.
“What was that? Objectives and Key Results?” Dave repeated, trying to wrap his head around it.
“That Google…Facebook…some of those new companies do, right? Like those trendy start-ups with bean bags and way too much kombucha?”
If you’re not familiar with them (and, honestly, I don’t blame you) OKRs are a brilliant Silicon Valley framework where you set ambitious, inspiring goals and then promptly forget about them until the last week of the quarter when someone frantically backdates some progress charts and paste cycles from the team with the most green progress bars on their team dashboard.
I raised my hand cautiously.
“But don’t we have quarterly goals already? And KPIs? And wasn’t there like a project called “Project Phoenix” or something no one understood?”
Jasmine explained. “Those are sooooo last quarter. OKRs are the future. It’s like regular goals, but fancier. They’re specific, time-bound, and aspirational.”
In the week that followed, our humble marketing department morphed into an OKR-producing juggernaut. My goal to “increase brand awareness” magically transformed into seventeen key results, including tracking the frequency of our logo appearing in employees’ dreams and measuring the emotional response to our colour scheme among Gen Z TikTok-influencing hamster owners.
Dave, bless his soul, created an OKR for improving OKRs. His key result was “achieve 73.5% OKR creation satisfaction score in internal OKR creation satisfaction surveys”. When I inquired about the 73.5% rather than a round 75%, he shrugged. “Seemed more scientific.”
Every month that followed, during the company-wide town hall, someone from the Leadership inevitably stands on stage and says, “Let’s examine how our OKRs align with our company’s vision”, and we all pretend to listen while frantically checking our phones for how many slides are left.
The interns, on the other hand, have really only taken OKRs one way. I heard that one of them made a Notion dashboard to track OKR progress.
Poor kid.
I last saw him wandering the hallways mumbling, “But the data doesn’t seem to support the north star metric…” before he got sucked into the product backlog vortex.
OKR Review
Best of all, at the end of the quarter, we gather for the OKR review meeting, where we all colour-code ourselves:
Green for “yes, we crushed it”, yellow for “yeah sure, whatever, it happened”, and red for “whoops, we had other priorities, whoops”.
That was, until last quarter of the year when Jasmine decided we needed OKRs for our OKRs. I kid you not. During our quarterly OKR review meeting, Jasmine had invited Marcus, our new VP of Strategic Initiatives, over for a little guest stint.
He’d apparently gone from corporate nobody to the company’s go-to-guy on OKRs in just one quarter. Marcus was wearing elbow patches and kept saying things like “Let’s drill down into the granularity of our impact vectors.”
“Rupa,” Marcus said, swiping through his tablet.
“It looks like your objective to ‘optimise the customer touchpoint experience’ is only at 23% completion. Can you give us a little more colour around your blockers?”
Rupa blinked. “I read thirty-seven customer service emails and resolved fourteen billing discrepancies this week. Everyone seemed super happy to hear from me.”
“But what about the hard data on customer engagement metrics?”
“They…sent us cookies?”
Marcus made an unimpressed sound. “Cookies are not a KPI, Rupa.”
Meanwhile, real work had all but come to a grinding halt. We spent Tuesday mornings brainstorming objectives, Wednesday afternoons evaluating key results, and Friday afternoons updating the OKR tracking spreadsheet, which had, by some miracle of computer technology, increased in rows to a whopping 847.
The spreadsheet even had a sub-spreadsheet to track who was responsible for updating it.
Mike’s objective to “promote a culture of innovation” had a key result of “generate 12 new ideas every week.” He started making suggestions like, “What if we made our website a bit more blue?” and “Have we considered getting a mascot?”
Finally
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Jasmine declared that our OKRs needed their own OKRs. “Meta-objectives,” she declared triumphantly. “So we can be sure we’re optimally optimising our optimisation efforts.”
That’s when Rupa had enough of this and decided to walk out. She left a note on her desk that just said: “Objective: Locate sanity. Key Result: Leave.” I hear she now works at this little startup that makes artisanal soap or something. No OKRs, just soap. She’s never been happier.
As for us? We’re still here, knee-deep in our perfectly quantifiable, beautifully aligned, utterly meaningless objectives. But hey, at least we’re 42% more strategic than we were last quarter.
You can take that to the bank, or your quarterly KPI review, whichever comes first.
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