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Transcript: https://yuvalyeret.com/podcast/episodes/okrs-sk-but-we-dont-know-anything-better/transcript.md
## Published episode notes
In this episode, we dive into a brutally honest and all-too-common sentiment from the scaleup world: “OKRs s#Hk, but we don’t know anything better.” This quote from a Chief of Staff at a cybersecurity scaleup sets the tone for a candid discussion about the challenges and surprising potential of OKRs when scaling fast-growing companies.
Yuval shares real-world insights from working with scaleups, including a fascinating case study from a BioTech company that struggled to make OKRs work beyond a box-ticking exercise. We unpack the typical pitfalls that trap many organizations, from reinforcing silos instead of breaking them down, to drowning in tools and processes that create overload rather than clarity.
Key Takeaways
OKRs often become “Manager Mode” artifacts: They’re introduced as a grown-up way to manage growth but can feel like a bureaucratic burden if not thoughtfully implemented.
Common pitfalls with OKRs:
Using new processes to reinforce silos rather than bridge across teams.
Leaders micro-managing details instead of setting clear missions and stepping back.
Overloading teams with too many initiatives and tools, causing context-switching fatigue.
Imposing goals top-down without involving the team in mission and planning.
Fixing the OKR operating system:
Focus OKRs on what truly matters, not everything happening.
Organize teams and structure around these focused OKRs.
Shift from output to outcome-based goals (e.g., “Double the velocity of our search for therapeutics”).
Use collaborative, big-room goal-setting sessions to align the entire company.
Emphasize principles over pedantic processes: Agile is about empiricism and adaptation, not dogmatic Scrum rituals.
Leverage agility beyond software teams: Empower cross-functional teams to tackle key initiatives iteratively.
The payoff: More traction on important goals, less micromanagement, leadership freed up to focus on strategy, and employees feeling like players, not pawns.
Why This Matters
Scaling isn’t just about adding headcount or processes-it’s about evolving your operating system to keep Founder Mode alive while gaining the structure needed to grow. This episode offers a pragmatic, down-to-earth look at how to make OKRs work as a tool for agility and alignment, not just another checkbox.
Who Should Listen
Founders and leadership teams in scaleups who feel stuck or frustrated with their current goal-setting and agile practices.
Chiefs of Staff, COOs, and people leading organizational design and ways of working.
Anyone curious about the real-world challenges and solutions around scaling with agility.
Now What
If you’re wrestling with OKRs or scaling challenges, you might find Yuval's Mastering Organizational Traction Email Course useful - https://yuvalyeret.com/mastering-organizational-traction-trail-map/
Thanks for tuning in! Don’t forget to subscribe and share if this episode hit home.
## Transcript
Automatic transcript of the published podcast audio. Recognition errors are possible. Speakers are unlabeled; do not attribute a passage to Yuval or a guest without checking the audio.
Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/okrs-sk-but-we-dont-know-anything-better/
Source RSS GUID: substack:post:161734988
Source: published Riverside RSS audio enclosure
Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English
## Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to Scaling With Agility, a new vol.
[00:00:03] Today I want to talk about how to scale without reverting to founder base mode, and how OKRs
[00:00:13] are related.
[00:00:14] OKRs suck, but we don't know anything better.
[00:00:17] That's a direct quote from a cybersecurity scale up to ChicoStuff, but I hear the sentiment
[00:00:23] way too often from founders, ChicoStuff, COOs, and others in the scale up ecosystem and beyond.
[00:00:30] I started encountering OKRs when working with scale ups a couple of years ago, helping leaders
[00:00:34] fix their ways of working to reap the promised benefits of agile.
[00:00:39] A lot of the time I'm brought in to deal with agile theater and make it better, and in one
[00:00:44] of those organizations, it was a biotech scale up, they were using OKRs.
[00:00:49] The intent was to have a grown-up way to manage an organization that was growing fast, and needed
[00:00:54] more management, more alignment, more discipline, more focus.
[00:01:00] You could imagine their VC suggesting OKRs and EOS during their latest funding round.
[00:01:08] When I looked deeper into how they were using OKRs, I saw some familiar patterns, even though
[00:01:12] it was the first time that I saw OKRs.
[00:01:15] I've been helping leaders fix their agile for a while now, so it was interesting to see some
[00:01:19] of my usual nemesis patterns.
[00:01:23] Using new processes to reinforce rather than bridge the silos and departments and functions,
[00:01:30] managing dependencies rather than avoiding them, calling working different names, but still
[00:01:34] being involved in the details as if it was still early days in the lab garage we worked
[00:01:40] chart space, instead of providing clarity about the mission and staying at the right altitude.
[00:01:47] Choosing strategically what check and cadence and involvement is appropriate where.
[00:01:52] Using cool new tools, Monday, ClickUp, Trello, Jira, Basecamp, Conlonboards, but still working
[00:01:58] on too many things and inflicting context overload and unsustainable pace on everybody.
[00:02:04] Telling people their goals rather than involving them in fearing of the mission and the plan.
[00:02:10] So what we started doing was focusing their OKRs on the things that mattered, not everything
[00:02:15] that was happening.
[00:02:17] You don't typically need to have an OKR for everything that is going on.
[00:02:22] OKRs should focus on what I call development work, work on developing your company, moving
[00:02:29] from one way of doing things to another, moving from one product focus or business focus to
[00:02:35] another, business model change and operational change, those changes grow optimization.
[00:02:42] Those are the things that you need OKRs for.
[00:02:45] You don't need them to run the day to day.
[00:02:47] And if you actually do use them to run the day to day, they are not as helpful for that.
[00:02:53] But also you lose the forest for the trees.
[00:02:55] There's so much that OKRs capture that it's hard to see what's really strategic.
[00:03:01] One other thing that we've done is we've reflected on how to organize around these OKRs.
[00:03:06] We made some structural changes to the organizational topology, complimented by temporary and power
[00:03:12] teams.
[00:03:13] So we created some teams that were cross-functional, multi-disciplinary, involving people in the
[00:03:20] tech side of biotech, as well as the biocide of biotech, as well as the GNA, to tackle things
[00:03:26] like, for example, onboarding or accelerating the velocity of our biotech search for therapeutics.
[00:03:36] We rewrote OKRs to focus on outcomes, think double the velocity of our search for useful
[00:03:42] therapeutics, and brought those into a big-room collaborative goal-setting session where everybody
[00:03:50] in the company tried to figure out what does this mean, what will need to be true for this
[00:03:55] to be possible, hopefully it's not working twice as hard, it's working smarter, figuring
[00:04:03] out where the bottlenecked, and also what does that mean for my own area, whether that's
[00:04:08] a specific function or maybe it means collaborating across functions, maybe even creating some temporary
[00:04:13] teams to tackle an aspect that needs to change in order to support this bigger mission, this
[00:04:19] bigger, more strategic goal.
[00:04:23] We didn't worry as much about mechanics and pedantic processes, we emphasized principles,
[00:04:29] like organizing around outcomes, reducing the number of things that were working on focus
[00:04:35] was an important principle.
[00:04:38] This also applied to their use of edge-on methods.
[00:04:41] A dogmatics crime guide compiler would probably have issues with the changes that we've made,
[00:04:46] but they didn't care, and for sure I didn't care.
[00:04:50] These folks understood empiricism, it helps when you're a scientist, and they did what was
[00:04:57] needed to ensure that their process allowed them to run quick feedback loops, that enabled
[00:05:04] them to leverage a daily feed-on, necessarily agile, beyond the software and technology teams,
[00:05:09] they used agility to improve their onboarding processes, the way they were finding partners
[00:05:17] and onboarding partners.
[00:05:21] They started using iterative, outcome-oriented, empowered, cross-functional teams for initiatives
[00:05:25] such as scientist productivity.
[00:05:28] How quickly can we get a new scientist up to speed and get out of the way?
[00:05:33] The sort of initiative that involves people, ops, IT, business ops.
[00:05:38] As a result, finally there's traction, more traction towards what's really important without
[00:05:44] micromanaging.
[00:05:45] The leadership team finally had time to focus on where to take the company and not just
[00:05:50] managing the day-to-day.
[00:05:52] People feel like players, not pawns, in this environment.
[00:05:58] People are agile, organization is agile, but not necessarily doing agile, it's lower-case
[00:06:03] agile instead of upper-case agile, and they're leveraging OKRs rather than following OKRs.
[00:06:09] OKRs are helping them align and empower.
[00:06:13] They have a scalable operating system in place, and what that allows them is to tackle their
[00:06:19] next growth and scaling inflection points, because they know that the next time something
[00:06:24] like this turns up, they will create an OKR around tackling it, and they will organize
[00:06:31] the right people together, try different things to work through that inflection point
[00:06:38] until they find something.
[00:06:40] They find a way to manage their scale to scale up, without reverting to founder Bismod.
[00:06:48] Without putting people and sustainability and empowerment aside.
## Source boundary
These are the published show notes from the podcast feed. They are a starting point for discussion, not a verbatim record of the conversation. The transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors or unlabeled speakers. Check the audio before quoting anyone.