Why justDice Ditched OKRs

What?! Why? Sacrilege! 🤬

OKRs have been a staple of modern companies for years—an untouchable artifact of productivity. Yet here we are, tossing them out like last year’s memes.

Why? A few key observations led us to make this move:

• Most of our teams had more than one objective and several key results that were irrelevant to others. Our design team, for example, had OKRs focused on video ad creative performance while our backend services team was deep-diving into scalability and security — and they never quite aligned.
• Due to our internal structure, some teams’ OKRs significantly outweighed others in their impact on company objectives. It’s like comparing an elephant to a hamster and wondering why it isn’t pulling the same weight.
• We ended up with 2-3 objectives per team, each with 2-4 key results per objective. That’s over 50 key results floating around, more than one per person. Reviewing progress on these every month turned into a snooze fest.
• When you’re a team of 40 with minimal hierarchy, this fragmented focus on minor details rather than steering us towards what matters most.

So, we took a step back and asked ourselves: Are we doing OKRs just because everyone else is, or are they helping us achieve our key goals?

Enter Company-Wide Targets

Instead of team-specific OKRs, we piloted a new approach in Q2: company-wide targets.

Here’s how it works:

• We focus on a shared mission. We set a few (3-6) measurable targets for everyone to work toward with target deadlines. This isn’t about individual departments working in isolation anymore; it’s about the whole company moving together toward shared goals
• Cross-departmental collaboration is baked in. One target might require product, marketing, and design to achieve, while another involves engineering and BI teaming up to solve a critical challenge. This ensures we all paddle in the same direction instead of spinning in circles.
• We prioritize quality over quantity. By limiting the number of targets, we ensure they’re meaningful, achievable, and tied directly to our key business drivers. Instead of tracking 50+ KRs, we’re focusing on fewer, sharper goals that truly make an impact.

The Results So Far

After a few months, the change has already been noticeable:

• Our all-hands sessions are shorter and sharper. No more rambling updates on “low-priority” KRs that no one remembers.
• Teams feel more connected. When you’re working toward the same goal as your colleagues in another department, collaboration becomes second nature.
• We’re spending more time on what actually matters: creating the best rewarded mobile gaming experiences in the industry.

What’s Next?

Of course, our target setup isn’t perfect. One lingering question we’re asking ourselves: How do we keep individual accountability high while working on shared goals?

We’re also learning how to balance ambitious, collaborative targets with the freedom for teams to tackle their own passion projects. After all, innovation thrives on experimentation, not only on execution.

And at justDice, our goal isn’t to follow trends—it’s to create the kind of focus and alignment that helps us stay ahead in a competitive market. Sometimes, that means rethinking even the most “sacred” systems.

Final Thoughts

Napoleon Hill said, “Goals are dreams with deadlines”, but we could extend it to “Goals are dreams with deadlines—unless you have 50 of them, in which case, they’re just nightmares.”

Our new approach to defining company targets aligns closely with the concept of SMART goals, albeit not verbatim, and we use these on a company level rather than team level. Our teams work closely together on many key projects internally, and adding an extra layer of setting goals also on our team level after our OKR’s overkill felt a bit too much.

Maybe we’ll introduce this later once we learn more lessons from this shift.