Google CEO Sundar Pichai once told me that his team often “agonized” over their goal-setting process: “There are single OKR lines on which you can spend an hour and a half thinking, to make sure we are focused on doing something better for the user.” That’s part of the territory. But to paraphrase Voltaire: Don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.* Remember that an OKR can be modified or even scrapped at any point in its cycle. Sometimes the “right” key results surface weeks or months after a goal is put into play. OKRs are inherently works in progress, not commandments chiseled in
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