I like the balanced scorecard than the OKR propagation from top to bottom.

That said, I don't necessarily agree with the statement that you didn't find OKRs useful. It could be a testament of having a really well defined charter and goals for your team or losing the opportunity to think hard about your team goals.

I used to be in the "latter" category until I had to lead a team in a startup. The culture was focussed on activity than outcome and bringing in OKRs pushed product to think harder about outcomes to achieve and thereby creating a continuity than simply trying a bunch of things and on engineering to focus on what customer needs are and how they are solved as opposed to taking launch based goals like (Launch service "x").

That said, it was still hard to settle on an optimal set of goals. I could definitely see OKRs helping weed out a lot of bad, but easy goals but taking good goals was still time consuming and hard.