2 posts tagged with "okrs"

Walk into a quarterly business review and ask whose name is on the AI feature. Watch what happens. The PM points at the platform team. The platform team points at the research engineer who wrote the eval harness. The research engineer points at the FinOps analyst who keeps emailing about the cost graph. The FinOps analyst points back at the PM. Four people, one feature, zero owners. The eval score has been drifting downward for six weeks and nobody has triaged it because the dashboard lives in a Notion page that was last edited the day after launch.

This is the most predictable outcome of how organizations actually ship AI features in 2026. The feature was launched by a tiger team that got disbanded the moment the launch press release went out. The instrumentation was bolted on by an infra group that has no product mandate. The prompt is a prompts/v3.txt file in the repo whose blame is split across nine engineers, none of whom remember why line 47 says what it does. The user-facing tile has a PM whose OKRs moved on to the next launch two quarters ago. The feature is technically in production, technically owned, and structurally orphaned.

The team commits to "ship the AI summarizer this quarter," gets it past the technical bar by week ten, takes a victory lap at the all-hands, and ships. Six weeks later the telemetry curve starts bending the wrong way — quietly, slowly, in a way nobody dashboards because nobody owns the shape. The OKR is already marked green. The next quarter's OKRs are already drafted around new launches. The summarizer is now somebody's second-priority maintenance job, and by quarter-end review the team is wondering why customer satisfaction on the feature dropped fifteen points without anything obvious changing.

This is not a bug in the team. It's a bug in the operating model. Quarterly OKRs were calibrated for software where a feature can be scoped, built, shipped, and then largely left alone until the next major rev. AI features don't have that shape. They have a launch curve and a sustain curve, and the sustain curve is where most of the value — and most of the risk — actually lives. The OKR template that treats them as deliverables with launch dates quietly produces a portfolio of demos that decay before the next planning cycle.