So to describe the process. We would first brainstorm that watch hours is something we want to potentially be our OKR?
And then we brainstorm all the constraints and potential pitfalls and finally we think what the reasonable amount of watch hours is based on those constraints?
E.g. we first run by the constraints that these watch hours must still keep the same base level of ad revenue per watch hour, demographics proportions must stay similar, etc?
I do feel however despite that there will be quite many different ways to game this number that you couldn't think of before hand. And there's also a spectrum of "level of gaming". There's a spectrum of non obvious gaming to very obvious. So whoever is striving towards that goal will still be incentivised to find the level of gaming that is not obvious enough for everyone, but might still be fundamentally not good.
So then you have to spend a lot of your time to make sure this OKR couldn't be gamed, but you still probably won't be able to stop it from being gamed even if you spend very, very much time on preventing it.
No, we would figure out what we actually want to achieve (objective) and then (perhaps) arrive at that watch hours might be a useful way to measure our movement towards our objective.
If it is too much likely to be gamed than perhaps it is not a good metric or it needs other metrics alongside. If everything we can think of in terms of measuring if we get to our objective is too easily/too much game-able, then perhaps the objective needs revisiting.
Having things gamed to the extreme is also not such a big issue usually because in the end you also watch things like profit. During the ZIRP frenzy that got a bit forgotten in some places, so gaming was perhaps more of an issue. You can also switch objectives and measures if they turn out to be wrong/not useful.
And then we brainstorm all the constraints and potential pitfalls and finally we think what the reasonable amount of watch hours is based on those constraints?
E.g. we first run by the constraints that these watch hours must still keep the same base level of ad revenue per watch hour, demographics proportions must stay similar, etc?
I do feel however despite that there will be quite many different ways to game this number that you couldn't think of before hand. And there's also a spectrum of "level of gaming". There's a spectrum of non obvious gaming to very obvious. So whoever is striving towards that goal will still be incentivised to find the level of gaming that is not obvious enough for everyone, but might still be fundamentally not good.
So then you have to spend a lot of your time to make sure this OKR couldn't be gamed, but you still probably won't be able to stop it from being gamed even if you spend very, very much time on preventing it.