Google OKR Video Five Years Later - Review of Google Ventures OKR Implementation Experience (2012-2017)

This material can be viewed as a continuation, a retrospective of this manual and a video (for understanding of the material it is advisable to get acquainted with them): Google re: Work - Guide: Setting goals with OKR (translation) .

Google OKR Video - a video about OKR seminar from Rick Klau (Google Ventures partner) was recorded at the end of 2012 and was, in fact, the first OKR presentation to a wide audience - before that, information about the methodology was leaked only in small fragments through former employees of Intel and Google.

In November 2017, Rick decided to celebrate the fifth anniversary of this momentous seminar with a series of tweets, where he essentially corrects some points from his presentation. This new material is not presented on the official Google resources, so even in 2018, there are all new articles on OKR, including Russian, based on Google OKR Video, but do not take into account these important amendments to it:
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Rick Klau @rklau 7 Nov 2017
Here is the translation of this series of tweets (the text formatting has been slightly modified for readability):

This video, which I made on OKR a few years ago, just scored 500 thousand views. This is ... a little more than expected.

What is ironic! The whole point of OKR is to choose a few things that you want to succeed in and make them happen. Not just random success.

After this presentation, I spoke with hundreds of startup founders about how to implement OKR in their company and learned a lot.

Some of what I learned from these talks provided information for this introduction to the OKR Google guide I wrote in 2015: rework.withgoogle.com/blog/superpowers-at-work-okrs/

Although I think the video as a whole is still relevant, there are a few things that I would like to correct if I recorded the video today:

- Lower all personalized OKR. Especially for relatively young and small digging. They are redundant. Focus on OKR for the company and for teams.

- Spend more time on what the team wants to say no. High performance teams like to say yes to good ideas. Saying no is more important.

- Avoid metrics that measure promotion; focus only on metrics that reflect the real impact on something essential for a business. (By 'promotion,' I mean: avoid metrics that show that you are busy, but that are not related to the results that your team wants to achieve.)

- In the end, be easier! I saw how the teams got stuck in the process, got frustrated and refused the effort.

Choose a few things that matter. Identify metrics that represent success. Say no to the rest. Measure your progress. Learn from failures. Repeat.

PS - If I knew that so many people would watch this video, I would have made it much shorter. I'm sorry. BUT:

One of the founders of our portfolio requires each new employee to view my OKR video. I was disappointed until he reminded me of this: (shows the setting for accelerated watching videos on Youtube)

PPS - (Rick jokes about comments about his appearance)

It is especially interesting that after this, in May 2018, another article by Rick on OKR appeared on the official Google blog, but there is no mention of this specification to the methodology: rework.withgoogle.com/blog/how-OKRs-fuel-innovation/ - this can be explained by the fact that Google simply does not want to draw attention to these identified shortcomings in the original presentation, so they limited themselves to the unofficial publication of their employee on Twitter.

Previously, a rather detailed criticism of these tweets from Felipe Castro (Felipe Castro) was published - there are useful ideas for clarifying OKR, but in general, the criticism does not look very justified - if only because he criticizes the book of John Dorr in the same way (John Doerr), and Dorr, in fact, is the primary source on OKR and a link in transferring the entire methodology from Intel to Google.