Jenna Butler

Jenna Butler is a principal applied research scientist at Microsoft Research. Her work includes research on how software teams organize and experience their work.

With Thomas Zimmermann and Christian Bird, Butler coauthored a study of objectives and key results (OKRs) in a large software organization. Drawing on interviews and a survey, the researchers examined how teams set goals, translate organizational priorities into work, and coordinate across team boundaries. Participants described difficulties when teams pursued different outcomes or leadership priorities were unclear. For OutcomesLab’s discussion of alignment debt, the study offers a bounded example of coordination problems—not a measurement of alignment debt or proof that OKRs resolve them.