Are your OKRs actually driving performance or quietly rewarding mediocrity? Daniel Terhorst-North unpacks what’s gone wrong with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in modern organisations. Inspired by Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives and Andy Grove’s evolution of that thinking at Intel, OKRs were designed to be aspirational, exciting, and a little bit scary. So why are so many teams using them like glorified KPIs? Daniel explores: • The real difference between KPI vs OKR • Why most OKRs are defined incorrectly • How to write objectives that inspire rather than manage • What a key result really is (“Who does what by how much”) • Why tracking activity instead of behaviour change is a trap • How misusing OKRs leads to sandbagging and “lowballing” • Why comparing actuals vs planned drags you back to 1970s management thinking For leaders in software engineering, software development, and modern tech organisations, this conversation goes deep into goal setting, motivation, and business strategy. Whether you're a CTO, engineering lead, tech lead, or developer stepping into leadership, understanding the difference between KPIs and OKRs could completely change how your teams perform. - Daniel on LinkedIn ➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tastapod/ Daniel On Mastadon ➡️ https://mas.to/@tastapod Daniel on bluesky ➡️ https://bsky.app/profile/tastapod.com Modern Software Engineering on X ➡️ https://x.com/ModernSoftwareX Modern Software Engineering on LinkedIn ➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/company/modern-software-engineering Modern Software Engineering on bluesky ➡️ https://bsky.app/profile/modernswe.bsky.social - ⭐ PATREON: Join the Continuous Delivery community and access extra perks & content! ➡️ https://bit.ly/ContinuousDeliveryPatreon 🎥 Join Us On TikTok ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@modern.s.engineering - 👕 T-SHIRTS: A fan of the T-shirts I wear in my videos? Grab your own, at reduced prices EXCLUSIVE TO CONTINUOUS DELIVERY FOLLOWERS! Get money off the already reasonably priced t-shirts! 🔗 Check out their collection HERE: ➡️ https://bit.ly/3Uby9iA 🚨 DON'T FORGET TO USE THIS DISCOUNT CODE: ContinuousDelivery - CHANNEL SPONSORS: Octopus Deploy sets the standard for Continuous Delivery (CD), empowering software teams to deliver value in an agile way. Globally, more than 4,000 organizations rely on its Continuous Delivery, GitOps, and release orchestration solutions to deliver swift value to their customers. Octopus efficiently orchestrates software delivery across multi-cloud, Kubernetes, data centers, and hybrid environments, whether containerized modern apps or heritage applications. With governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) at its core, Octopus supports Platform Engineering teams in their mission to provide a superior developer experience (DevEx). Octopus also actively contributes to the developer community with open-source projects. ➡️ https://bit.ly/MSExOCTDEP Equal Experts is a product software development consultancy with a network of over 1,000 experienced technology consultants globally. They increase the pace of innovation by using modern software engineering practices that embrace Continuous Delivery, Security, and Operability from the outset ➡️ https://bit.ly/3ASy8n0 TransFICC provides low-latency connectivity, automated trading workflows and e-trading systems for Fixed Income and Derivatives. TransFICC resolves the issue of market fragmentation by providing banks and asset managers with a unified low-latency, robust and scalable API, which provides connectivity to multiple trading venues while supporting numerous complex workflows across asset classes such as Rates and Credit Bonds, Repos, Mortgage-Backed Securities and Interest Rate Swaps ➡️ https://transficc.com - #businessoptimization #leadership #businessleadership #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment