You don't, as an individual "unit", which is part of the problem, i.e. modern management's focus in trying to split teams/big companies down to its "elementary" unit, the employee.
> Not having metrics means it all depends on the gut feeling of executives.
And that's why you need good executives, executives who have good guts. You cannot automate your way into being successful, at the end of it all running a company is still pretty much a social endeavour, one that cannot be partitioned down to individual units, neither can its success or failure be explained by those individual units alone.
Higher ups love to be "a data guy"! Just reduce all their responsibilities into a few numbers so they don't have to really understand what's going on underneath them. Have you notice how in love they are with their "progress dashboards"? They love to kick back and put their legs on the office desk watching minions making "progress" on OKRs so they can report that to their manager. It's too much work to really understand things and be on top of them anyways...
The other way that being a numbers guy lets managers be lazy is that they will tell their data scientists to “do an analysis” so they can say that their product decisions are empirical and data driven rather than relying on any obvious design/product sense.
If they can point to a number from a really poorly/quickly done ad hoc study, they’ll never worry about being told they made the wrong decision
It's exceptionally hard to find good executives due to nepotism and other problems with hiring them that result in the wrong people in charge of the wrong thing more frequently than not, though.
So we need metrics., lest we get swept away in the Trickle-down Incompetence.
Yeah, I agree that it's a very difficult problem to solve and that getting the balance right between using metrics and having access to good "guts" is essential in a company's forward success, but that's the state of affairs we are in right now, for better or worse.
I also think that the companies that matter getting bigger and bigger, with no actual failure on the horizon (such as bankruptcy) in case of strategically wrong decisions doesn't help things one bit, because in those cases management failure is in many cases rewarded as there's no immediate and adverse affect on the life of the company itself. We need some return to creative destruction, otherwise we'll be left re-arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic (I see this type of discussion on this particular subject as part of that metaphorical re-arrangement) until the proverbial iceberg will strike.
This has always been my beef with OKRs in the software industry. Most shops are at least pretending to be agile-ish. And this means that a random IC dev is pulling tickets from the backlog and doing them.
They're not going to be personally responsible for "improving the response time of the FizzBuzz server by 22.3%" or anything like that. No - the product manager tells the team on what they'll be working, the work gets broken down into parts, and they take what's available when they come up for air.
OKRs should never be handled at a level more granular than a scrum team, or equivalent.
You don't, as an individual "unit", which is part of the problem, i.e. modern management's focus in trying to split teams/big companies down to its "elementary" unit, the employee.
> Not having metrics means it all depends on the gut feeling of executives.
And that's why you need good executives, executives who have good guts. You cannot automate your way into being successful, at the end of it all running a company is still pretty much a social endeavour, one that cannot be partitioned down to individual units, neither can its success or failure be explained by those individual units alone.