  Building software, like building almost anything, requires people to
understand a common goal and work together towards it. In large software
companies, a VP or Director will have an idea or goal and it is often the job
of middle management to distill that lofty, general idea into manageable,
finite units of work. How do organizations do this hard work of setting and
measuring progress towards goals? To understand this question, we undertook a
mixed methods approach to studying goal setting, management dissemination of
goals, goal tracking and ultimately software delivery at a large multi-national
software company.
  Semi-structured interviews with 47 participants were analyzed and used to
develop a survey which was deployed to a multi-national team of over 4,000
engineers. The 512 responses were analyzed using thematic analysis, linear
regressions and hypothesis testing, and found that tracking, measuring and
setting goals is hard work, regardless of tools used. Middle management seems
to be a critical component of the translation of lofty goals to actionable work
items. In addition, attitudes and beliefs of engineers are critical to the
success of any goal setting framework. Based on this research, we make
recommendations on how to improve the goal setting and OKR process in software
organizations: invest in the data pipeline, increase transparency, improve
communication, promote learning communities, and a structured roll out of OKRs.
