OKRs do force you to put down your company's priorities and metrics to measure their success. Unable to do that usually is a symptom of being too tactical and reactive and not having a strong strategy/vision.
Company-level OKRs are only as good as your leadership team's clarity on strategy and long-term direction and conviction to largely stay the course for at least 3 month chunks.
If you feel your company OKRs are bad or you are unable to connect with it, it is because your leadership team has not done the necessary homework to define and socialize it well.
If you agree your company OKRs make sense but you are unable to connect it to your work, think of it this way:
For a functional feature engineer, the team OKRs should clearly and directly connect the features they are working on to the company OKRs. If not, then you need to engage with your product managers to achieve that clarity.
For a senior platform engineer responsible for evolution of tech platforms, it is critical to have a good sense of the direction in which business will evolve and expand. (Annual OKRs and strategy articulations are crucial for this).
From this, you should be able to draw out a mind map of the kinds of features and capabilities needed by your platform.
Then you can articulate this to your team to build those required enhancements to the platform while also ensuring immediate feature building activity is moving as productively as possible.
If you are unable to connect the dots between the business OKRs and tech platform OKRs, it is usually a sign that there isn't a good functional model for your business domain and your tech platform isn't really a platform that supports that functional model. For architects, this should be the most important deep work – to keep the functional model of the business and that of tech platforms in sync. Without this common model, teams cannot collaborate effectively.
Company-level OKRs are only as good as your leadership team's clarity on strategy and long-term direction and conviction to largely stay the course for at least 3 month chunks.
If you feel your company OKRs are bad or you are unable to connect with it, it is because your leadership team has not done the necessary homework to define and socialize it well.
If you agree your company OKRs make sense but you are unable to connect it to your work, think of it this way:
For a functional feature engineer, the team OKRs should clearly and directly connect the features they are working on to the company OKRs. If not, then you need to engage with your product managers to achieve that clarity.
For a senior platform engineer responsible for evolution of tech platforms, it is critical to have a good sense of the direction in which business will evolve and expand. (Annual OKRs and strategy articulations are crucial for this). From this, you should be able to draw out a mind map of the kinds of features and capabilities needed by your platform. Then you can articulate this to your team to build those required enhancements to the platform while also ensuring immediate feature building activity is moving as productively as possible.
If you are unable to connect the dots between the business OKRs and tech platform OKRs, it is usually a sign that there isn't a good functional model for your business domain and your tech platform isn't really a platform that supports that functional model. For architects, this should be the most important deep work – to keep the functional model of the business and that of tech platforms in sync. Without this common model, teams cannot collaborate effectively.