OKR Rant #1: monthly OKRs = post-mortem

OKRs tracked monthly are basically post-mortems: you're looking at your strategy when it's already dead.

A terrible OKR situation is:

• Quarterly OKRs, that
• are tracked monthly, and
• the first month is 🟢, really close to being on track

Why is it bad? Because it lulls you in a false sense of security while you're still super early in your effort. You have to keep in mind that if you're doing monthly reviews, a meeting for month N will happen between the 1st and the 7th of month N+1.

You've already lost a week before you can have a chat about how things went.

Example for Q2 👇

🗓️ Apr 1st: OKR start

🗓️ May 2nd: First review meeting 🟢

🗓️ June 2nd: Second review meeting 🔴

Now there's just 21 days left to figure out what went wrong, rally people, design a plan, and execute it. It's just impossible and your strategy is already dead.

Things would have been better if you were 🟡 on May 2nd because you'd have a better sense of urgency.

But the real way to fix this is to get teams to track their OKRs on a weekly basis. We're not talking about a presentation to exec every week. It should feel more like a 30min team standup (although you'll be sitting and looking at your OKR dashboard).

The main reason why teams don't do this is because their tooling suck. If this is the case for you then let's talk – we can easily solve that.

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