I've hard a lot of great results using Google's OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework in my roles leading technical and product teams. I've been tasked with bringing this framework across my organization, including to teams like marketing and business development.

My main issue recently has been around defining the key results of the projects that our teams are going to be pursuing. All of the advice I've gotten in the past has been to ensure that KRs are quantitative, NOT qualitative. This has been at odds with some of the projects the marketing and business teams are planning on working on. These are projects like...

• create a new marketing plan given the new budget constraints
• audit the distribution process to increase our information about the retail sales process

The push back I am getting is along the lines of "when I create the new marketing plan, the project will be complete, and therefore it's just whether or not I finished the plan that matters." i.e. if the objective is finished then the project is a success. My point of view is that ALL projects should have metrics attached to them, and if we can't measure the progress then we cannot show the added value to the business as a result of our effort.

The natural response is: what metrics would you attribute to projects like these? And THAT'S where I could use help. Coming from a product/tech background, my understanding of marketing, biz, and operations leaves something to be desired.

For the marketing plan, I suggested a metric could be to reduce the monthly marketing budget from $current to $future. For the distribution audit, I suggest we track the # of insights/recommendations we produced as a result of the audit. The pushback was that these metrics "didn't really matter" and that "how can we set a goal on insights - even one good insight could be worth a lot, but I could come up with 4 crappy insights just to achieve a numerical goal."

I'm a bit at a loss. I understand their point of view, and I really feel in my heart that we need to be pursuing measurable KRs. Do you have any advice?

A rant honestly, but I thought this might belong in tech since it's a bit more of a tech society thing for me. I'm sure other industries have this issue too, but tech definitely does. If others disagree, please feel free to move it.

So yesterday, we had two new hires show up and we were informed this in our weekly leads meeting, so this is a pretty private setting. When our manager gave a quick blur of one, it was "we expect a lot from him, he's a bit more knowledgeable, did well on our tech test", that kinda thing. And then, when discussing the woman, he kept referring to her as a "girl", so I pointed out that maybe we should use "woman" instead.

I got made fun of - "maybe we can use lady or female or ..." honestly started tuning it out, can't remember the rest. Also accused of nitpicking.

I've been in the industry for a while now and though in general things are good, every now and then something small like this happens and it makes you check the date (yes it's still 2018, I didn't go back 20 years).

To be fair, I know my manager was being funny, but it's easy to joke at someone else's expense.

Wondering, other's experiences on both sides. Have you noticed changes in your workplace, for better hopefully? Maybe other ways you were discriminated against or singled out?