The writing of the OKRs is the highest-leverage thing I do

After waking up and finding Opus hallucinating, the product pulse operating on old stale data and context, I decided to streamline the system.

I’m already happy with how our OKRs tracker is working (mostly) but I’ve learned that I need to hand-rewrite the OKRs every time. They’re always too complex, too wordy, which ironically is the same problem I’ve had in the past with human teams. C’est la vie.

It hit me today that I really just need to use my time-tested system, codified here:

• OKRs at the company level
• Per-product OKRs that align/nest within them
• KPIs derived from these key results, but also to just ‘Run the business’
• One single issues list that we keep prioritized that

Every morning the pulse skill will read all of this, including fetching the latest KPIs, and we’ll look at the issues list and decide what to do today.

And, a lesson that I repeatedly learn: the writing of the OKRs is the single highest-leverage activity as a leader because it forces me to clarify my thinking and put it into writing. Thinking is bottom-up, but communicating is top-down.