Measure What Matters

Apart from the clear examples and guidance to come up with OKRs for your own company or team, which is why I was mainly reading this book, I finally understood what the company that employs me wants to achieve with continuous feedback and all around conversations around performance. I did not know those two things were so much linked together. Now things make more sense. Maybe a good read if you work in a large tech company.

Waste of time.

I was expecting it to analyze real problems, like how the chain of command gets broken in big companies. I was expecting questions like "how to ensure people focus on something useful?"
"What to do if you're CEO, middle manager, or junior developer wanting to help the system?"

Instead, I got boring advertisements of companies from the title page (Google, MyFitnessPal, Nuna, and so on). The story is the same everywhere "we're an awesome company, we had no problems, but decided to adopt OKR, now we don't have any problems". Seriously?

It was fine. I like the OKR concepts, but felt that most of the book was spent offering "fan-boy" recognition of the giants of Silicon Valley. I get that it is good to show context on how a program has worked for others, but the book spent the MAJORITY of the time talking about how an OKR program worked for business and not enough time discussing HOW to set up OKRs.

کتاب جذابی بود، واقعا لذت بردم از مطالعه‌اش اما نسبت به رویکرد داستان‌وار و غیرعملی نویسنده توی طرح و توضیح مفهوم OKR نقد دارم.
من به عنوان مخاطب کتاب تا انتهای کتاب شاید به اندازه ۳ صفحه هم تکنیک عملی از نویسنده دریافت نکردم و این موضوع چندان خوشایندم نبود.
به جز این موضوع، کتاب رو خیلی دوست داشتم.

This book made me finally understand OKRs. I heard “As measured by” and it finally clicked. Would give 5 stars if I was considering only the OKR part!

But the CFM part is full of platitudes. I would tune out while listening and come back seconds later and it still sounded empty as “multidirectional continuous communication built to strengthen strategic global organization” or something innocuous like that.