OKR Methodology

For the second year in a row, I set annual goals using OKR.

I had 4 ambitious goals, each with its own priority.

Strict prioritization of goals is something I decided to try in 2025. And it worked well: I focused on achieving the highest priority, deliberately leaving everything else in the background.

So, let’s take a look at the results.

Results

✅ P0 — Achieving the Next Grade

The most important goal—the one I had been working toward all year—was achieved!

It required significantly more effort than I initially expected and seriously impacted progress on other goals. However, since this was my top priority, I kept full focus on it, consciously ignoring everything else.

You can read more about how I achieved this goal and how much time it took me to grow into a Senior role in Big Tech in this post.

❌ P1 — Developing Strong Thinking

SRE school, a frontend architecture course, and DevOps best practices did not receive enough attention this year.

Of course, I continued to develop my thinking, but it did not make it into my OKRs.

❌ P2 — Strengthening the Brand

The channel audience grew organically by only 25%. Instead of the target 300 subscribers by the end of the year, I had 184.

Previously, I thought that publishing an article on Habr or VC would help me gain visibility and attract a larger audience. Over time, I realized that chasing numbers is rather pointless, so I am changing my strategy here.

I also dropped the LinkedIn Challenge on my own after two months. I realized it was not for me. I did not like the posts I had to write to “fit” the platform’s style, and I did not have enough energy for a different approach.

Migrating the blog to my own domain was another idea. At the beginning of last year, I was even ready to buy a domain, considered various options, and looked for a new server for migration. However, since I am very satisfied with my Hugo-based blog running on GitHub Pages (I described in detail how I launched it and what challenges I faced), I decided not to change anything for now.

“If it works, don’t touch it.”

❌ P3 — Mathematics

To be honest, from the very beginning I did not really believe I would be able to complete this OKR. I simply like mathematics and really want to spend time on it when there is an opportunity—but apparently not in 2025.

Key Events

✍️ Personal Brand

Telegram Channel “Novikov > The Journey to Big Tech”

LinkedIn

📈 Career

  • Promotion to the next grade (now a truly serious specialist—where to grow next?)
  • Became a full-fledged mentor in the company’s internal professional development program (mentoring internally, with external requests as well)
  • Launched a project where I share key ideas from popular IT books. Started with Microservices. Added a convenient navigation page by chapters on my personal blog, but its development slowed down due to a significant shift of focus toward closing OKRs.

🌰 Hard Skills

  • Completed an F# course and understood lambda calculus
  • Learned VIM through a game
  • Vibecoded a chess trainer (currently parked locally)
  • Studied hoverfly
  • Explored non-standard data structures
  • Formalized the concept of system reliability
  • Committed code to a PHP monolith
  • Got introduced to chaos testing (chaos engineering) and participated in such testing for my service
  • Practiced Hoare triples
  • Completed the “System Design for High-Load Projects” course (project defense postponed to 2026)
  • Learned the basics of x86/x64 assembly and wrote a simple console game

🏆 Sports

  • Ran my first trail race in Teberda: 23.3 km with 900 m elevation gain (finished within 3 hours)
  • Ran many 10K races, one of them in 30-degree heat (finished under 50 minutes)
  • Ran several half-marathons (consistently finishing within 1:50–1:53)
  • Participated in the Urban Heroes team race
  • Organized offline chess games in different cities (including tournaments)
  • Big tennis entered my life (training once a week)
  • Swimming also found a place in my tight schedule (so far once a week)

❓ Other

  • Attended HighLoad++
  • Went to a T-Bank meetup in a new IT hub
  • Spent a lot of time talking with various team leads and higher-level managers (wonderful people)