Do OKRs create empowered teams, or do empowered teams create OKRs?

Welcome to the kickoff post of The Daily ROI: a 2-min weekday newsletter to help you get better at the hard stuff: people, culture, hard calls, ambiguity, the inner game. We’re going to learn so much together! =)

---

Between kicking off the quarter and the recent noise about product-led everything, there’s been a recent uptick in people talking about OKRs. There’s also been a lot of frustration where good product people feel stuck (and judged) for being in “bad” product companies.

This is a tough experience, and people understandably seek a way out. At worst, this leads to cargo-cult like behavior, where folks try to copy/paste the practices that they’ve read “the best” are doing.

Here’s the thing: do you really know that practice X or technique Y caused the effectiveness at BigTech Company Z?

Any given framework/tool/process to “empower your team” is not the point. The underlying culture of empowerment is.

Said another way: OKRs don’t create empowered teams. They amplify the empowerment that’s already there.

– Andrew

p.s. product-landia is rife with this kind of apeing—it’s just what people tend to do in high-uncertainty contexts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯