Our startup recently started using OKRs and gotta say, I'm not a fan. OKRs were set to be quarterly objects, but things move fast and priorities change. What once was important 2 months ago is now irrelevant.
The other difficult things about OKRs is attempting to assign metrics. Most of the stuff worked at in a startup are new and exploratory. That means there isn't a sense of what a good number for success even looks like. What happens is arbitrary, and thus meaningless, numbers are assigned to OKRs just for the sake of adding metrics.
It seems to me OKRs are over-engineered for the purposes of achieving short-term goals. There's probably a better framework for this.
How some tool providers describe OKRs it can be over-engineered I agree. You need to adapt tonyour context. E.g. startups can use OKRs but should be very lean about it. OKRs aren't really a framework - there's not lots of things you must do.
The only essential is can a team align on a sentence describing what is true if the goal is achieved and 2-3 measurable items of evidence of the goal being achieved or progress towards achieving the goal.
If things change, scrap the goal and write a new one. Presumably you learnt something that invalidated the previous one. If it's because of someone else's whim you've got a different problem.
The quarterly cadence is not essential but it is often helpful to periodically know when there is a great opportunity for alignment across teams.
When timing of goal setting is inconsistent across teams it's hard to be available to each other when you need support across teams e.g. maybe one team provides a service that another team needs to achieve a goal.
The other difficult things about OKRs is attempting to assign metrics. Most of the stuff worked at in a startup are new and exploratory. That means there isn't a sense of what a good number for success even looks like. What happens is arbitrary, and thus meaningless, numbers are assigned to OKRs just for the sake of adding metrics.
It seems to me OKRs are over-engineered for the purposes of achieving short-term goals. There's probably a better framework for this.