OKRs failed at WP Engine 4 times. Here’s what worked instead
Four attempts at OKRs at WP Engine. Four failures. Each time, the post-mortem verdict from the experts was the same: you didn’t do it right.
Jason Cohen, the founder who ran those teams, has a name for that response. He calls it the Precision Fallacy, and it’s worth understanding before you spend another quarter forcing a framework onto a team that will quietly reject it.
The Precision Fallacy
The Precision Fallacy works like this: a framework is declared to always work, so any failure must belong to the person who implemented it. The precision required to succeed is never defined clearly enough to be tested, which means the framework can never be disproved. No matter how many times it fails, no matter how capable the team, the answer stays the same.
Karl Popper identified this pattern broadly: any theory that cannot be disproved regardless of evidence isn’t a valid theory. Cohen applies that logic directly to business frameworks.
OKRs are the example here, but the pattern shows up everywhere:
- Scrum’s co-creator Ron Jeffries has written about what he calls Dark Scrum, where teams apply the label but miss the substance, and failure gets blamed on implementation rather than fit.
- Aaron Ross separated prospecting from closing at Salesforce. Thousands of SaaS companies copied the SDR model. Most failed. Common explanations: wrong ramp time, wrong cadence, wrong hiring, wrong management.
- Two years of content marketing, 200 posts, flat organic traffic. The excuse list is endless: not 10x content, no topical authority, no links built, algorithm changed 493 times.
- Zappos went all-in on Holacracy. 18 percent of the workforce took a buyout and left. The company later reverted. HolacracyOne’s position: it wasn’t implemented correctly.
The frameworks aren’t frauds. Plenty of organizations genuinely succeed with OKRs, Scrum, and Holacracy. The problem is the claim that they work for everyone, everywhere, if only you execute precisely enough.
Try It On Like Clothes
Cohen’s mental model: a framework is an off-the-rack shirt. It’s shirt-shaped. For roughly 15 percent of buyers it fits perfectly. For everyone else it fits okay in some places and badly in others. That’s not a defect. That’s how off-the-rack clothing works.
The move is not to declare the shirt wrong and sew from scratch. The move is to tailor it. Find what fits, adjust what doesn’t, and if the fit is too far off, return it and try a different cut.
The approach Cohen recommends for rollouts:
- Don’t announce a company-wide switch. Standing up and declaring we’re doing OKRs now creates instant detractors and almost guarantees failure.
- Run a one-quarter experiment with one team. Frame it explicitly as a test, not a rollout. Find out what you like and what you don’t.
- Expand from what the team already accepted. If the experiment produces something the team actually wants, grow from there.
This isn’t a communication trick to soften resistance. It’s the actual method for finding what fits your culture, your people, and your existing processes.
What Actually Replaced OKRs at WP Engine
Cohen built and tuned his own metrics framework through iterative feedback with his teams. His description of why it worked is specific:
“Whenever management requires a KPI that the team doesn’t believe in, doesn’t respect, doesn’t care about, the team always wins.”
The framework started with one requirement: each team picked one metric they personally wanted to hit, not because a manager asked for it, not even because it was good for the company, but because they believed they were failing at their craft if it wasn’t true. Something tied to personal pride.
They tracked that one metric for a quarter. Then they asked what one or two other metrics belonged alongside it. The framework grew outward from what the team had already accepted, not from a list handed down from above.
The key distinction from OKRs: the team was held accountable for outcomes they could control, not outcomes they merely influenced. That distinction mattered enough to make the difference between a framework the team owned and one they quietly worked around.
When This Works
This approach works when your team has enough autonomy to select metrics that connect to their own sense of craft. It works when you have a quarter of runway to run an honest experiment before declaring success or failure. It works when the person running the experiment is willing to hear that the framework isn’t a fit and try something else.
When It Does Not
It doesn’t work if leadership needs a uniform system across every team immediately. It doesn’t work if the experiment is framed as a formality before a predetermined rollout. And it probably doesn’t work if the team has already been through two or three framework failures and stopped believing experiments lead anywhere real.
Cohen is direct about the limits of his own solution: what worked at WP Engine may not work for you. Some iteration of it might. Something else entirely might. The framework is not the point. The experiment is.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
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