Reviews - Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth

I enjoyed the first few chapters of this book. OKRs were introduced and Google's experience with them was reviewed. After that as the case studies went on they often felt like CEOs patting themselves on the back or even worse a company sales pitch. There were a couple case studies on non-profits that I found more interesting.

There is a lot of talk about both top down and bottom up OKRs. I was particularly interested in seeing some examples of the bottom up in action. But the case studies are all from the executives perspective and this topic was never addressed.

kiquecake's review against another edition

1.0

This book would be good if it was a 10 minute read blog post instead of a 320 pages slog. John Doerr might be a great venture capitalist, but he is a terrible writer.

There is no practical advice in this book, nor there are even consistent definitions. The case studies are laughably shallow and can be summarized by "Company A had a problem. Company A implemented OKRs (Usually after talking to John Doerr). Company A now has no problems anymore! Yay OKRs". What in the problems made OKR the right choice? What in the implementation contributed to the success of the program? There is absolutely no answers to these questions anywhere in the book.

If you really want to learn about OKRs steer clear of this book and go read the excelent "Objective and Key Results: Driving focus, alignment and engajement with OKRs" by Niven and Lamorte instead.

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