OKR - Waterfall of the Agile era

OKR ("Objectives and Key Results") were meant to bring clarity and focus - but too often, they do the opposite.

Let's be honest: The way we implement OKR has more in common with the denounced Waterfall than with Agile methodologies. They start as top-down declarations of intent, polished into slides, then handed to teams with the expectation that they'll make it work. Teams spend cycles retrofitting their actual work to match key results, rather than letting goals emerge from validated learning and iteration.

The irony? In trying to drive agility through metrics, we often recreate the same command-and-control dynamics we were trying to escape: Fake alignment, shallow metrics, and a slow drift back to the rigidity Agile was supposed to free us from.

Maybe it's time to admit that if we're hunting down annual goals more than we're listening to users, we're not being Agile - we're just rebranding Waterfall. Instead, we should start treating goals as hypotheses again, not contracts.