I really enjoyed John Doerr’s TED Talk on OKRs:

However I found the Google OKR playbook to be extra helpful. I have not used OKRs in the past but found the challenges with them to be well enumerated in this Google document.

Team managers are expected to assess the resources required to accomplish their aspirational OKRs and ask for them each quarter, fulfilling their duty to express known demand to the business. Managers should not expect to receive all the required resources, however, unless their aspirational OKRs are the highest priority goals in the company after the committed OKRs.

In some ways the magic of OKRs appears to be that everyone in the organization is setting their goals and resources are being allocated in the same way. The act of writing goals down in a big organization and having folks at the top write their goals down before the folks that are individual contributors helps create alignment. OKRs are a two way street. If the folks at the top are not doing them, then it makes it much harder for folks at the bottom to write OKRs that are in alignment with the goals of the organization.