Thanks for this post! It was helpful to see the differences laid out. I agree with Patrick that too in practice we can too easily ignore meaninfulness. The issue I see is that it's often hard to know how to measure what matters -- budget, time and even understanding the basics of measurement can all come into play. I have sometimes settled for "good enough" proxies, with low grade worry about diverting focus to what we care about. I welcome any thoughts on this quandry. Thanks!
I love how you call out that analyzing/explaining the relationship between OKRs and KPIs is critical.
It tackles a couple of my pet peeves with how people implement them.
1. They ignore “meaningfulness”. OKRs and KPIs are only valuable if they measure something meaningful to what you want to achieve and in a meaningful way. Too often people just pick what they can easily measure and optimize around it. Why should e-book downloads matter to our efforts? Does the metric actually prove what we need it to?
2. They treat it as a performative act, used to justify decisions vs. guiding them. i.e. I already know what I want to do and I’m going to build my OKRs and KPIs to support that.
Having to regularly analyze and explain the relationship between your OKRs and KPIs would help force you to address the above.
Thanks for this post! It was helpful to see the differences laid out. I agree with Patrick that too in practice we can too easily ignore meaninfulness. The issue I see is that it's often hard to know how to measure what matters -- budget, time and even understanding the basics of measurement can all come into play. I have sometimes settled for "good enough" proxies, with low grade worry about diverting focus to what we care about. I welcome any thoughts on this quandry. Thanks!
I love how you call out that analyzing/explaining the relationship between OKRs and KPIs is critical.
It tackles a couple of my pet peeves with how people implement them.
1. They ignore “meaningfulness”. OKRs and KPIs are only valuable if they measure something meaningful to what you want to achieve and in a meaningful way. Too often people just pick what they can easily measure and optimize around it. Why should e-book downloads matter to our efforts? Does the metric actually prove what we need it to?
2. They treat it as a performative act, used to justify decisions vs. guiding them. i.e. I already know what I want to do and I’m going to build my OKRs and KPIs to support that.
Having to regularly analyze and explain the relationship between your OKRs and KPIs would help force you to address the above.