Sep 29, 2025 8 min read

🐫 DORA, Ambiguity, Time Thieves, Human Skills, Conflict, Motivation, Bad Thrashing, Team Sizes: TMW #450

Do you use OKRs as metrics for individual performance management?

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Hello hello hello, it's Monday!

OKRs as Performance Metrics?

This week, the CTO Craft community dove into one of the most persistent head-scratchers in tech leadership: How do you connect OKRs to performance reviews without totally messing things up? The core of our chat really came down to balancing organisational alignment (what OKRs are for) with individual evaluation (what performance reviews are for).

A clear theme emerged: most of us agreed that a direct tie between hitting an OKR target and an individual's performance rating is a dangerous game. Why? Well, you've likely seen these possible behaviours:

Sandbagging: Engineers start setting less ambitious goals just to ensure a "win" on their review.
Misaligned Incentives: People start prioritising the easy-to-measure, short-term OKR tasks over crucial things like code quality, long-term stability, or helping another team who really needs it. Suddenly, technical debt looks shiny because it's not on the quarterly report...

Instead, the preferred strategy is to focus on team-level OKRs and then evaluate individuals on their competencies, behaviours, and commitment to helping the team succeed. If a team consistently falls short, that's your cue to dive in, but the resulting performance discussion centres on growth, skill gaps, and collaboration, not just hitting the number.

What do you think - are you using OKRs, and do you have a direct link to how you do performance evaluations? What's working, and what isn't?

That's it, on with the links! See you next Monday

Andy @ CTO Craft

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