Most OKRs Are Theater. Build Ones That Change the Work.
Most OKRs fail before the quarter starts.
The team writes goals because the calendar says it is time. Leaders debate wording. Everyone agrees the targets look ambitious. Then the quarter starts, Slack fills up, incidents happen, priorities shift, and the OKRs sit in a document nobody opens until the review meeting.
That is OKR theater. It creates the shape of discipline without changing the work.
Useful OKRs do something harder. They force a leadership team to choose. They tell engineers which outcomes matter, which tradeoffs are acceptable, and which conversations cannot wait until performance review season.