Should employee and team performance be managed through formal KPIs and goals, or through direct observation and judgment?

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

OKRs are a poor planning framework because they set a goal without any strategy for achieving it, and they turn planning into a political game of debating and sandbagging metrics

OKRs only measure performance; quarterly planning should instead debate what truly matters for the business and how to achieve it, e.g. 'ship a product solving cash flow conversion in three months and get 10 customers' rather than 'hit X dollars of revenue'

27:15 20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

Mark Goldberg · Oct 25, 2024

OKRs were inappropriately lifted from the manufacturing industry and dropped into software, and don't belong at the early stage

Endorses Zach Perret's argument that the framework was transplanted from manufacturing into software

20:40 20VC: The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms; Why Portfolio Services are for VCs not Founders | Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | Why Reserves are Bad for Founders & How Boutique Firms Will Win with Mark Goldberg @ Chemistry

Jason Fried · Jan 6, 2023

Driving teams with numerical goals is counterproductive; people should be intrinsically motivated to do the best work they can and let the results fall where they may

Targets are arbitrary made-up round numbers, so all the stress and challenges you take on are based on something invented rather than real

13:23 Intrinsic motivation beats numeric goal driving for teams

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

You don't need KPIs to know who is performing — working alongside people tells you

When you work with people directly you know what's good or not; he assumes the same is true in Harry's teams

24:29 Working alongside people reveals performance without needing kpis

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

Goals should not be set for most teams, especially developers, because agile tasks and features change constantly and any goal is too subjective

You can't give a developer a meaningful goal when tasks and features shift all the time

25:11 Goals should not be set for agile teams because tasks are too fluid and subjective

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

KPI-based performance management misleads managers because work is too subjective and unevenly distributed

In the US services team, the expert brought in from Belgium scored worst on the director's KPIs precisely because he was given all the hardest, messiest projects

25:41 Kpi based performance management misleads because work is too subjective and unevenly distributed