Measuring productivity
This is a brief note, I’ll add more as I go on this one.
In Hitting OKRs vs doing your job, Jessica Joy Kerr, highlights the key differences between OKRs and KPIs.
OKRs highlight a special difference. OKRs are for “What is special about this quarter? What is new? How do we want to be different? What do we want to figure out?”
KPIs should measure the core job. For engineering teams, that’s running software and shipping updates. Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) and Accelerate metrics like Deployment Frequency tell us we’re working smoothly.
And this is a great punch “When a team’s OKRs duplicate the roadmap, I read that as ‘We aren’t trying to improve. This is a quarter for trudging along.’ Not a good sign.”