stratechery.comStratechery by Ben Thompson
Most bad decisions aren't bad judgment, they're the right judgment applied to the wrong kind of decision. Knowing which framework to use is half the skill.
OKRs work when you use them to align a small number of things that matter. They fail when you use them as a reporting framework, a performance review tool, or a theater of strategy.
The annual plan no one follows and the quarterly plan everyone ignores are the two most common artifacts of planning theater. A good planning cadence does exactly three things.
A post-mortem asks why the failure happened. A pre-mortem asks why the failure will happen, before the project starts. The difference is whether the learning is free or expensive.
The instinct of every operator is to keep adding. Add features, add hires, add initiatives, add pricing tiers. The hardest operator skill is deciding what to subtract.