A Radical Take on OKRs: Two Solutions for Better Goal Setting
I recently spoke at the Productized conference in Lisbon, where I experienced the adrenaline of being on stage and was struck by Radhika Dutt’s talk on OKRs.
Her approach was provocative yet simple: OKRs, as most organizations use them, are just duct tape over cracks in your strategy and vision. They won’t work if you rely on them alone.
The Issue with OKRs
Radhika’s point was clear: using OKRs as your sole goal-setting tool leads to:
Short-term thinking—OKRs feel like exams you need to pass, making hitting the goal an obsession.
Feelings of failure when you set the bar too high.
Limited innovation because metrics drive all decisions.
She coined a term for this: hypermetricimia—the obsession with metrics, which Tim Herbig also discussed at Product at Heart. If you let goals or frameworks control you, the results are often disappointing.
This leads to vision debt and what Radhika humorously calls enshittification of experiences—a degraded customer experience created by optimizing for some other metric. Think about airlines: many of us can relate to the experience of revenue-focused service, where customer experience takes a backseat.
This got me thinking.
While I agree with Radhika’s approach in many ways, I also see challenges in applying it, especially in larger organizations. Introducing a new framing could be a hard sell, leading to spending a lot of energy into convincing others rather than driving impact.
From the evil OKR circle, to better goal setting.
My take on applying the Radical Approach: Align OKRs with Vision and Goals
I believe Radhika’s approach could really work in smaller organizations, where flexibility and agreement on common goals are easier to achieve. I’ve recently made the case for not investing in heavy product strategy processes depending on where your product is on its lifecycle and on the market you operate in. But I have a hard time seeing how this could fly in a bigger org that is used to something else.
So here’s my take: keep OKRs, but don’t let them run you. Ensure they’re aligned with your vision and customer experience.
From my experience, OKRs work best when these components are aligned:
Vision—What should the product be from the customer’s perspective? Who are we for, and why do they love us?
Strategy—A long-term plan that invests in both the present and future.
OKRs—Yearly goals, reviewed quarterly, with one OKR for the entire company.
When OKRs don’t work:
They’re set too soon—the focus should be on speed, not processes.
They’re siloed by departments—without a common vision, you get dependencies and scattered investments.
They’re solely focused on big shifts, leaving operations out. Result: misalignment among different parts of the company working on different things. Or in other words no common goal.
They’re too focused on quarterly targets, leading to short-term decisions and creating experience debt.
To achieve the right balance, you need a clear vision, a well-defined strategy, and a transparent process for handling opportunistic ideas. This is similar to Radhika’s approach but with the twist of keeping the OKR framework in place.
Because what I’ve seen work best is starting small, showing results, and achieve something bigger.
