The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)

[00:00] People do not value celebrations enough. I've had CEOs who said, well, it was the middle of the quarter, so we didn't start OKRs, but we did start Friday celebrations. And oh, my God, things are already changing. Things are already getting better. [00:13] The simple act of getting together and saying, [00:17] What was the most awesome thing that happened to you this week? What's the most awesome thing that happened in marketing? What's the most awesome thing that designed it this week? It makes people feel like they're part of something really special. [00:25] you know, and it's super exciting. [00:30] Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts [00:35] to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. [00:40] Today my guest is Christina Woodke. [00:42] Christina is a multi-time author, speaker, and lecturer at Stanford, where she teaches product management, game design, and a few other topics. She also consults with companies on their product development processes, and in particular, their OKR process. [00:56] Before getting into teaching and consulting, she was a product leader at LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga, and Yahoo. [01:02] as well as the founder of three different companies [01:05] plus an online magazine called Boxes and Arrows. In our conversation, we go deep into OKRs. What is the atomic unit of an OKR? What might be broken about your OKR process? Why you may want to roll out OKRs or change how you approach them? Also, how the best companies leverage OKRs? The most common root causes of OKRs going wrong? [01:25] the elements of a healthy OKR cadence, [01:28] how OKRs fit with mission, vision, strategy, and roadmaps,

[01:31] We also touch on the skill of storytelling, and she also shares her most contrarian perspective on what new product managers should be focusing on. [01:39] Christina is a wealth of knowledge and super interesting and fun, and I know you will learn a lot from her. With that, I bring you Christina Woodkey after a short word from our select sponsors. [01:50] Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. I have a quick request. Head on over to my Miro board at miro.com slash Lenny and let me know which guests you'd want me to have on this year. I've already gotten a bunch of great suggestions, which you'll see when you go there. So just keep it coming. And while you're on the Miro board, I encourage you to play around with the tool. It's a great shared space to capture ideas, get feedback and collaborate with your [02:20] colleagues on anything that you're working on. For example, with Miro, you can plan out next quarter's entire product strategy. You can start by brainstorming using sticky notes, live reactions, a voting tool, even an estimation app to scope out your team's sprints. Then your whole distributed team can come together around wireframes, draw ideas with the pen tool, and then put full mocks right into the Miro board. And with one of Miro's ready-made templates, you can go from discovery and research to product roadmaps to customer journey flows to final mocks, [02:50] Head on over to Miro.com slash Lenny to leave your suggestions. That's M-I-R-O dot com slash Lenny. [02:58] This episode is brought to you by Dovetail, the customer insights platform for teams that gets you from data to insights fast, no matter the method. There's so much customer data to get through, from user interviews to NPS, sales calls, usability tests, support tickets, app reviews. It's a lot. And you know that if you're building something hidden in that data are the insights that will lead you to building better products.

[03:28] to evidence-based insights that your whole team can access. If you're a product manager who needs insights to motivate your team, a designer validating your next-pick feature, or a researcher who needs to analyze fast, Dovetail is a collaborative insight platform your whole team can use. Go to dovetailapp.com/lanny to get started today for free. That's dovetailapp.com/lanny. [03:48] dot com slash Lenny. [03:50] Christina, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Lenny. I'm really excited to be here. I've been hearing about you forever. It's so cool to be here in person. [04:00] I'm more excited for you to be on the podcast. [04:03] I kind of see you as the queen of OKRs. I don't know if you like that title or not, but that's in my mind, that's where you sit currently. [04:11] And [04:12] Partly because from what I can tell you, you've done more to help people with OKRs and understand OKRs and fix their OKR process. [04:18] than most anyone else I know. [04:19] and [04:20] As I'm sure you know, a lot of people just like [04:22] don't like OKRs or anti-OKR. [04:25] and have had bad experiences with OCRs, [04:27] And what I want to try to do with our chat today is to try to change people's mind. [04:31] who are maybe anti-ocare? [04:33] and two, help people optimize their arcade process. [04:36] if they're having an okay time with OKRs. How does that sound? That sounds just fine. Although I have to say in the tech industry it's a little too easy to be clean. Maybe when I'm emperor for life. That might be my title. [04:48] That might be. By the end of this podcast, we will crown you emperor for life. [04:53] Okay, that'll be our goal. [04:55] So as maybe a first question, I want to give people kind of this confidence that OKRs can lead to great product,

[05:03] Great success. [05:05] What can you share just to give people a sense of like, here's how many companies are having a great time with OKRs. [05:10] Here's the impact OKRs can have on your company if you roll it out or make it more optimal. You know, I've seen so many companies do extremely well with it. And I would say that not all companies will be successful. [05:20] period. Companies are really successful with it are companies that [05:24] I think I can swear a little. They have their shit together. Absolutely. Quite honest. 100%. You know, and the first step is get your shit together. They have strategy, you know, they have empowered teams, they have psychological safety. And then the OKRs, [05:37] are that extra layer that supercharges them. So, [05:42] I say OKRs are more of a vitamin. They're not a medicine. So if you take OKRs and you're like, oh, this will fix everything that's wrong with you. No, that's not going to happen. It's just going to reveal everything that's wrong with your company. But if you've done the hard work of getting your company to be strong, it's amazing how well it works. It works really well with startups. It works really well with multidisciplinary product teams. I've seen it over and over. I don't really have permission to talk about all my clients, but I have one client that I'm just working with right now. And it's a purpose built company. [06:12] other words, they exist in order to [06:15] make [06:16] the lives of their customers better healthier wellness and so they used okrs to really create this amazing focus on what does it mean to make everybody's life healthier and one thing that came out of applying okrs was this wonderful idea they're bringing robots into their warehouses not to replace their humans they're keeping all the humans but to

[06:39] reduce the amount of back problems their humans have. So the humans are doing much more complex tasks, thinking about inventory and how to be more efficient, and the robots are doing the heavy lifting. [06:50] And [06:51] They've been growing and growing like crazy. And the OKRs, [06:54] are this very simple way of allowing you to focus on what actually matters, and making sure you don't forget in the chaos of everyday life, [07:03] So, [07:05] If you know what you're trying to do, [07:08] then the OKRs just help that happen. It aligns the company. And I think [07:14] They're a lot like dieting advice. [07:16] in that they say, you know, eat less and exercise more. [07:20] That's really simple. It's worked for me. I've lost 25 pounds doing eat less and exercise more. But [07:26] Wow, it's hard. It's really hard to do. And I think about OKRs that way. It's like you have to just [07:32] Stay with it and be strong and committed and that will help. [07:36] There's a number of things I want to follow up on in what you said, so I'll start with [07:40] You talked about the benefits of OKR. If you had to just like boil down, like here's what OKRs can do for you as a company, as an organization, what would that be? What's just like the main benefit of OKRs at your company? The main benefit is that there's [07:54] a lot of concrete [07:56] action. [07:58] through an OKR that you don't always get from strategy. Strategy tends to be a little longer, a little more muji-muji. And then when you get the OKR, you say, this quarter is what we're actually going to be doing, and these are the numbers we're actually going to be pushing further. So that's really good. It creates a cadence.

[08:15] of progress, which is incredibly valuable. It creates alignment. There's no question what the single most important thing to do in the company is, assuming you're doing radical focus and you don't have 20 OKRs every quarter. Oh, don't like to think about that. And it's [08:29] Last of all, the thing that I don't see a lot of people talking about that I think is really amazing is because [08:35] An OKR focuses you for one quarter and at the end of the quarter you grade your OKRs. How well did we do? What got in our way? It creates this learning cycle. So then you can take that information and say next quarter, what should we try next? And [08:51] I think the time is the thing that a lot of leaders really struggle to think about. But if you've been really focusing on, say, retention for one for one quarter, two quarters, and then you go over and say, OK, let's work on acquisition. You don't forget all the things you learned about retention. No, you're just building knowledge and building knowledge and building knowledge, which means your company will constantly get smarter and more effective. [09:13] I love this. So just to summarize, the main benefits are [09:17] focuses you [09:18] Lines. [09:19] Creates a cadence. [09:21] and [09:22] creates a learning cycle. [09:23] And [09:24] Like maybe a simple way to think about it is it's like a plug and play product development process. You don't invent everything from scratch. There's this thing that exists. I know it's not the whole. [09:32] piece of it. But yeah, maybe you're nodding and I'm curious when I say that, what comes to mind? Yeah, I guess, um, [09:38] You have to have a product development process. And because obviously, otherwise you're just running around like chickens with your heads cut off. But it it keeps you from making the same stupid mistake over and over and over again, which has been a life goal in my in my life. My motto is make new mistakes. So by having this focus on really important things, not to spread yourself too thin, like the famous peanut butter.

[10:01] uh, [10:02] memo from yahoo which i guess was long ago oh enough not everybody remembers it but uh you know companies have a tendency to try to do everything all at this exact moment [10:12] And so everybody's working with 1% on this, 1% on that, 1% on the other. And instead, you use the OKRs and say, OK, this is the big rock we're going to move. This is the big thing that's going to happen this quarter. And you can fiddle around with all the other stuff if you want. But this one has to move. And then the next quarter, the next thing gets moved and so on. And it just accelerates the speed of your accomplishments so much. It's kind of mind-blowing. I've actually been running my life for the last 8, 10 years on OKRs as well. [10:42] because I'm ADHD and I'm all over the place. And so looking at my OKRs every single Monday and say, well, you know, am I going to work on a book? Am I going to work on my teaching? Am I going to work, you know, where do I want to put that attention? It just, it, [10:57] changes me personally just like it changes my clients. [11:00] What's an example of your personal care? Is it a writing book maybe? Well, I wish, but no. It's actually been health. One of the great things about managing my OCRs for so long is I discovered this pattern, which is that anytime things get busy, I just stop taking care of myself completely. [11:16] And that's really bad because, you know, if I'm healthy, I can be there for my kid. I can be there for my students. I can be there for my colleagues. So this quarter has been about setting up habits of well-being. And like I said, I've been really pleased at how it's been going. [11:30] Amazing. I haven't heard that before.

[11:32] What would you say is kind of the atomic unit of an OKR? So people talk about we're doing OKRs, we're not doing OKRs. [11:38] What's like the line between we have goals and a plan. [11:41] and we're actually doing OKRs as a concept. Gosh, what is the atomic unit? That's a really lovely question. I would say. [11:51] What am I doing this week to get closer to our goals? If you could answer that question, like you could give up all the OKR stuff. But if you just ask the question, [12:00] What are we doing this week to get closer to our strategic goals, our longer term goals? [12:06] That is the very heart of it because there's the tomorrow problem. Like my kid will do his homework tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. It's always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. So what are we doing right now? [12:17] And I find that it's really useful to tie it into temporal landmarks. [12:21] By that I mean... [12:23] that there are things like birthdays or New Year's or Mondays or quarters that are already built into the world. And so we piggyback onto them and we say, OK, it's Q1. Boom. We're going to stop. We're going to take a breath. We're going to look at everything and we're going to say, what do we actually have to do? Raising your head above the noise is really vital. And then. [12:44] this quarter, you know, remember we have a mission over here and we have a vision and we have a strategy. Okay, this quarter is all about what? [12:50] And you move towards that. I know there's a lot of talk about outcomes, and I think that's absolutely right. It's really critical to think about outcomes because that gives you flexibility on how to attack the problem. But the biggest question is why? Why do we get up in the morning? What are we trying to actually do?

[13:06] Are we making a difference at all? And if you can say this week I'm going to do this, [13:11] And then at the end of the week, you say, oh, that worked or that didn't work. And you can try something new or keep going. [13:15] that's just [13:16] invaluable. [13:18] That is really interesting that it wasn't [13:20] Your answer wasn't like its outcome was some key results and 70% of success is goal. [13:24] that there's something more fundamental, which is just [13:27] being very clear on what you should be doing next week and we should be focusing on now and that [13:31] translates into what kind of the OKR process ends up being. [13:34] Oh, yeah. I can I tell you a little story? Absolutely. So this is personal OKRs, but it works for everything else. It's always easier to talk about personal OKRs because I don't have to do an NDA with myself. So I apologize. But I've been had this accountability group with these three women. [13:49] for at least five years. And... [13:52] Every Monday we send our OKRs to each other. Right. And I do it the way I do it in the book. You know, another woman, she had the getting things done approach where it was like, how percentage did I make and what am I trying to do? And exactly, you know, super detailed. And then another woman was like, I don't know. I guess I'm trying to think about what am I trying to think about? Oh, [14:12] Um... [14:13] maybe i should think about if i have to get out of product management or not well now the woman who is very precise has kind of disappeared [14:20] I think it was just something that she couldn't keep up that level of diligence. Well, the woman who was hand-wavy, she actually has gone from a product manager to a consultant to a life coach, and she's making... [14:34] So much money.

[14:37] And she is so damn happy and she has a new house. And so I really do think that the heart of everything [14:43] is answering that question. [14:45] And what is that question? What am I doing this week to get to the outcome I really want? Her outcome was to not worry about money and be joyful with what she was doing. And... [14:56] She got that just by every Monday saying, [14:58] What the fuck am I doing here? What am I trying to do again? And it worked. [15:03] That is a really cool framework. So the question you ask yourself every week is, what am I doing today that's helping me get closer to my... [15:10] uh outcomes is that the word you use outcome yeah yeah exactly and it is an outcome um in her case it was you know [15:16] not worrying about money, having a house, having joy in her work. I think a lot of us get caught up in [15:22] Do I want to be a writer? Do I want to be this thing? When the reality is we just want to be satisfied and happy. And with a business, it's the same thing. You know, we get caught up in this or that little details, but you need to go back and say, [15:35] What was our mission? I mean, think about it. How often do companies ever talk about their mission? [15:39] It's like they said it, they forget it, it's super vague, it's useless. And instead, [15:43] It's good to think, OK, when we started this company or when we changed this company or grew this company or whatever you want to go to, there's always these various points in time. Why? [15:53] What did we think would work? [15:55] And let's go back to that. [15:57] moment of meaning and [15:59] reconnect with it and then make it real in the activities we take every week. And I like every week rather than every day, because the reality is we still have to do progress reviews and we still have to do accounting and whatnot. But if we just push a little bit each week over time, amazing things happen.

[16:15] I want to drill into some of these things of just how mission, vision, roadmap, and OKRs fit together. [16:21] just to be pretty tactical. [16:23] So as a [16:24] PM say or founder, what is the process you recommend for [16:28] working through mission, vision, [16:30] and then OKRs and then, you know, roadmap. I think it's really important to have a mission. And people get freaked out because they think the mission's forever. And so they make them super vague so they can do anything. But instead, if you think about it, if a mission lasts for five years, [16:45] what would you like to see happen in five years? And it might be, you know, [16:48] we're going to [16:50] bring amazing games that delight our users and we're proud to ship, you know, into the world. [16:57] That could be a mission. And it's like, okay, I could do that over the next five years. And then there'll be a point where you probably want to change again. [17:03] So you're bringing, what does it mean? What does it mean to be proud? What does it mean to delight people? We can really talk about that, you know, and get into the nitty gritty. And then out of that would come your strategy, right? Which is, this is going to be our year of exploration, if you have enough money for such a thing. Or this is going to be our year of making our current games a little bit better. I'm in a very game mindset today because I was [17:25] talking to a client. So you get into that. Okay, now we have this sort of idea of what we're doing with our year. Now let's talk about the quarter. [17:32] And that's, [17:33] You can use OKRs for the year, but the quarter is where they have the most impact, I believe. Spotify talked about doing quarterly performance reviews because it's [17:43] long enough to get something done and short enough to not forget what you did. And I think that sums it up perfectly for OKRs as well. So,

[17:51] Once you know where you're trying to be and once you know what you want to do with your year, you can say, [17:57] What are the things we want to see happen across these four quarters? I call it sort of a half built strategy because too much strategy ties you down and too little strategy. You're too responsive to everything. So you say, OK, let's say you're building a new game. So Q1 is about figuring out what it is and what's going to be interesting to users. And then Q2 is going to be about getting some early prototypes out and validating those concepts. And Q3 is about sort of building an extensive and Q4 is about marketing and throwing it out like something like that. [18:27] And you could then turn them into your outcomes. A lot of people who are very metric driven don't understand outcomes, but outcome, or, you know, objectives, excuse me, objectives, outcomes, negative potato potato. - Yeah. - But it's really something inspiring, like, [18:41] Q1. Okay. We have a vision for this game that... [18:48] will drive us forward i don't know i'm making stuff up which is means it's gonna be imperfect although i do warn people not to get too caught up in wordsmithing we could spend hours doing that [18:56] And then you get to ask my favorite question, [18:59] How do we know? [19:00] I love how do we know that's how you get to outcomes. So what does it mean to have a vision for a product we believe will be successful and meet our mission? What not? Well, [19:11] What would it be? How are we going to figure this out? So something about user testing, probably. [19:16] Maybe we do a landing page, see how many people are excited by the concept. Maybe we do some technical builds to see if it's actually buildable. You know, what are the sort of things that would tell us, yes, please go forward?

[19:30] We might be excited about VR. Well, how do we know that VR... [19:33] would be profitable for us, you know? So once we answer those three, how would we know? Then we can know that by March, [19:41] we have the results we need. [19:43] And we're always going to try to think about the best possible future. You know, the whole moonshot thing, which I'm a fan of. [19:50] But the reality is the reason we do that estimating is so we get good at estimating. Everybody sucks at estimating when you first start. And a lot of people think it's like black magic or something you're born with. But no, it's a learned skill. You practice estimating, you get good at estimating, you get better and better and better. And being good at estimating is incredibly valuable as a business skill. [20:09] So, [20:10] They're zero KRs, right? And then for Q2, we don't know how Q1 is going to go, so we're just going to leave the objective there, but we're not going to get to the nitty-gritty KRs. Key results cause a lot of arguing among the team, takes forever to track them down, just... [20:25] Wait and see how Q1 goes. And that way you have enough play within your strategy to react to new information. [20:32] The question you talked about of how do we know that's to decide the objective or the key results? Key results. Yeah. Okay, got it. You're saying objective. Objective. My bad. I didn't signal when I turned. [20:46] No. Okay, cool. That makes it. Objective is that vision, like for the quarter. [20:51] This is what we're driving towards in this quarter. And then the key results answer the question, how do we know we succeeded? [20:57] And so what was the tip you gave of turning strategy into the objective? What's like that? How do you translate from strategy to deciding your objective? Oh, that's that's it's between mission and OKRs. So strategy.

[21:14] I've been really shocked lately. I've discovered that lots of companies don't seem to have any strategy whatsoever, which is kind of like, [21:19] blows my mind right um so if you think about strategy [21:25] as a... [21:27] strongly held hypothesis about a way to win in the market and fulfill our vision. [21:34] Then you can say, well, our mission is this or vision. I kind of use them interchangeably because [21:40] I think they are kind of interchangeable. And I'm not going to get the semantics and the bitty bits. But the strategy is really important because it says, we think we're fulfilling our mission of connecting people [21:51] buy what? I think that there are a lot of good product strategy pieces out there, but [22:01] businesses have a lot of questions to answer. Are we going to ship physical products? Are we going to ship digital products? Are we going to be a service? Are we going to do a subscription? Strategy answers those questions. They say we're going to have a game. It's going to be an apple archaic. We have a hypothesis that's actually going to help us. [22:17] We're going to build in there and build our customer base there in order to get name recognition, which we can then use on other platforms. You know, that's the sort of strategic stuff. [22:30] And then we're like, oh, great, you have a vision. What are we doing? [22:33] You know, what does that actually mean for us this year, this quarter? [22:37] and then eventually this week. [22:39] For the actual OKRs you end up with, is it as simple as just in your, like, with the template of an OKR, is it just objective?

[22:46] three-ish [22:47] Q results, is there anything more to it that you recommend folks use? [22:51] Simple things give you a lot more room to fiddle. And I feel like every time I see people make really complicated methodologies, they get way too caught up in the rules and they don't think about what are we actually trying to do. [23:02] So simple is better. [23:04] And what's your rule of thumb for number of key results? I like three. [23:07] I think about it as triangulating, you know? I always like something that's like, [23:13] really hardcore numbers. I like something that's a little squishier, you know, like, [23:18] quality. [23:19] Make sure you don't forget about it. And I usually like something that involves a dollar sign. [23:25] But it's really going to [23:26] be specific to what objective you're trying to do. [23:29] Right. Launch a new product. Well, you probably want to make a certain amount of money. We want a certain amount of reach. And then you want that delight thing. And then when you get into the delight thing, you can say, well, is it going to be Metacritic? Is it going to be a survey? Is it going to be NPS? [23:42] You know, you can figure out what one makes the most sense for you. [23:45] That's an interesting topic. Is there anything you find there? [23:48] to measure customer happiness, satisfaction, delight. Like what have you seen work best for that sort of squishy stuff? [23:53] I know there's a big backlash against NPS. I think it's okay. [23:57] It's really... [23:59] funny because you can be insanely successful with a game that people feel [24:03] yucky to play. [24:05] And you can be incredibly successful, [24:08] with a product people hate using zoom for example like how many times have you heard zoom get cussed out so [24:15] The question is,

[24:17] Why would I care about that if I'm making money? [24:19] And I would say the answer is, would you like to keep making money? It's always about retention. So anytime you can get strong retention signals, I think those are good signals to get. So that comes out of qualitative research. There's nothing better. So if you don't have a qualitative researcher on your team, I think you should get one. [24:34] You need somebody who knows how to separate what people say and what they do and what the truth is in that. [24:39] and then use that to apply to your strategic decisions. So that happy users sell your product for you, right? Happy users stay with your product. Happy users are willing to type an email telling you when you're messing up. [24:54] I mean, you want. [24:56] committed users are just so important. [24:58] One final question around the actual OKR document. [25:01] What do you find are the most... [25:03] one or two common mistakes people make when writing out the objective. [25:06] or the key result in deciding what to get with? Objectives. People make them so fluffy that they don't have any meaning. They really should be a proper goal. Like we're doing this because we want to see this happen. It matters. You know, we want to delight our customers. Sometimes people make them too fluffy and sometimes it makes them too boring. You know, it's like, oh, we're going to ship this thing. [25:25] that doesn't inspire anybody your objective should make you when your alarm goes off and you wake up [25:30] oh yeah, I'm changing the world today, or I'm doing something really cool. You shouldn't be like, [25:35] snooze. So I think an objective should be like motivating, but not [25:40] ridiculous. [25:42] And then the key results, it's always going to be tasks. I mean, people put tasks in there all the time. And it can be tricky, like sometimes

[25:50] It feels like a task, like you have to get past a product review. [25:54] So it's going to have a binary. They either said yes or no. But when you think about it, [25:58] It is an outcome because it's really hard to get a product review group to say okay to anything. So making sure that you have real outcomes that let you move forward. [26:11] I think that's the biggest mistake people make in K.R.s. [26:14] I know you shared a few examples of just that came top of mind, but just [26:17] Is there any examples you can think of just like, here's a really good example of an outcome? [26:22] And I think your results are a lot easier to just move this metric to 10% or hit. Let's try to keep it fairly concrete. You're an online magazine selling interior design ideas. [26:33] So, [26:34] What are you trying to do? You're trying to get strong leads out to your advertisers? And that's really important and you're doing it because you believe that [26:45] People [26:46] deserve to have homes that are warm and wonderful. You have this mission, so and you want to make money while you do it. [26:52] So, [26:53] Your strategy is going to be about connecting human beings with the brands that will suit their lifestyle. OK, that's great. [27:01] And then we get to an 80 grade. Well, what does that actually mean? Are we going to really work on recommendations passionately? Are we going to really create various markets and throw down advertising where we think these people are? That's when your strategy comes in play because you're making all these interesting choices. So let's say we're going to double down on recommendations.

[27:20] which has a lot of presuppositions like we have to get people to [27:24] to like, we have to understand their patterns of behavior. And that's when we can start to go to OKRs. We can say, OK, so we have this online magazine. [27:33] Let's really work to get as many people being members rather than browsers as possible so that we can start understanding what they like. And that's what Q1 could be really about is like starting to collect profiles of people's passions. And that sounds kind of exciting. Okay, great. We're gonna do that. We're gonna create a profile of people's passions. Awesome. So how would we know? How would we know we were successful? Oh, gosh. [27:54] Well, [27:57] You probably need a bunch of people to do it, but do we really need everybody? Maybe 30% of our audience flips over. [28:04] And maybe that's right. Maybe that's wrong. If you don't know, you just set it and you'll know by the end of Q3 whether you were stupid or not. It's fine. Move on. Okay, that's great. Okay. How many things should people do what with? [28:17] So, [28:18] they [28:20] Bookmark, favorite, like. How about like? Okay, so maybe they're going to like... [28:25] a certain number of products. [28:27] each. [28:29] week let's go for weekly active users okay so they're gonna like [28:35] three things and present it. Okay, so now we've got a couple of numbers that are pretty good. How do we know they're actually kind of liking it? [28:41] Maybe you decide to do some panels and we're going to measure using a customer panel. Bring them in, have them talk to us, and we're going to do that at the end of every two weeks.

[28:51] to hear how it's working and understand more about it. OK, now we have some OKRs. [28:56] Key results, I always recommend spending like [redacted address] you could possibly measure that outcome because... [29:04] With brainstorms, you always think of all the obvious stuff first, and then you have no ideas and you're just sitting there with your post-it notes going, [29:11] How long is 10 minutes at anyway? And then you start getting the weird ideas. And often out of those weird ideas are really good insights. So I recommend some pretty long brainstorming on the key results. But the objective is sort of a manifestation of the strategy at a one one quarter level. [29:26] Amazing. That was an awesome example. [29:28] You talked a bit earlier about how [29:31] OKRs end up being or sorry, key results end up being tasks for a lot of people. And this reminds me, we have the CPO Figma on this podcast and he told the story of how they moved away from OKRs at one point because they found themselves sitting in these meetings, reviewing these like large... [29:46] spreadsheets of [29:48] Hundreds of tasks. Oh god, yeah. [29:50] that were basically just like tasks for ics that are they're working on their [29:54] And they kind of lost sight of like, why does any of this matter? [29:56] What are you even trying to do as a company? So they moved away from the K.R.s and then they came back to them actually later. [30:01] and fixing some of these issues. [30:03] So maybe just as a question, what are you... [30:05] What do you think is a sign that your OKR process is busted? [30:09] and that you need to spend some time improving and rethinking the way it works. I think if those meetings are boring, that's a great example. One of the other benefits which I didn't bring up about OKRs is that they scale really well. One of the biggest problems founders struggle with is they don't scale very well. But if you can set a good OKR and get people to work on it,

[30:30] then you don't have to decide all those little icy tasks, right? [30:34] You don't want to be drug down with that. You got a job. CEOs got to figure out what's coming up down the line, not fiddling over everybody's tasks. So you set the OKRs and then you ask in the meeting, you know, what are the top three initiatives you're doing towards them? And, you know, or two or five, whatever. It's going to vary a little bit, but you want to keep it small. You only want to look at the most important stuff and just trust your people to take care of everything else. [30:58] And then you can say, well, why do you think that's important? Right? What's that? What do you think that's going to do? Or I've been seeing that for weeks, like. [31:05] Are you going to try something else anytime soon? You know, it's all about those conversations about, [31:11] Is our current strategy... [31:14] not just at the company level, but at each departmental level. [31:17] are these strategies working are they moving us forward towards our goals and so [31:22] Looking through OKRs, I tell people, you know, when you first start, it might take a half hour, but after that, it takes 10 minutes. It's like... [31:28] I think that's stupid. We should talk about that. Or no, it looks fine. It looks essentially correct. Let's move on. Anybody got anything? You know, and then you can get into whatever else you do. If it's a metrics review situation or if it's talking about a new deal, the rest of the agenda. But that constant checking in. [31:45] is like touching a lucky stone in your pocket. It reminds you, oh yeah, there's this thing, there's this thing. And that rhythm... [31:54] So I'm a teacher. I'm really into learning theory. So there's a really big concept, which is about

[32:00] repetition and retrieval practice. So retrieval practice means that [32:06] I put a fact in your brain and I keep asking you to go back and get it again. [32:10] like qualitative research is really useful for understanding the psychology of users. And I'll say, well, how do we understand the psychology of users? [32:17] And you'd be like, oh, I heard this. Okay, bring it up. Well, it's the same thing in these weekly meetings. You're practicing retrieving what your OKRs are. And after a while, they're just in that long term memory. And you don't have to struggle to think about them. And you've got them. And anytime you make a decision and you're in a big rush, you don't want to like... [32:34] go through a bunch of paper to try to find what were our KRs. You just go, "Boo! This is what we should do." [32:39] I know what we're trying to do and I know [32:41] how to make a decision about that. [32:44] So I'm hearing is a lot of this comes back to like if the meeting is not interesting and boring. [32:49] change the way you run the meeting don't go through everything maybe just pick the things that are most interesting and focus on that you don't have to review every single [32:55] Key result. [32:57] keep the meeting level at the right place i'm sorry i wandered off in a different direction i get really nerdy around learning theory [33:02] I love it. I love learning how to learn. [33:05] Feel free to share more as things come up. [33:08] Okay, so... [33:09] I don't know, I'm trying to think Figma. I imagine they probably thought they could change this meeting [33:13] But I think maybe there's a... [33:15] more deep [33:16] rooted issue, and this is kind of where my next question is going to go, is like, [33:19] What do you think are just like the root... [33:21] issues of OKR is going wrong. Oh, my God. Maybe that's a symptom of the meeting is really boring. But yeah. [33:27] Well, yeah, the symptom, it's really wrong. It's, yeah, it means that

[33:32] you're in the weeds, man. You're fiddling with the little tiny bits. You've got to let go of those. [33:38] You have to trust your people. So if we do the five whys, [33:41] Okay, why don't you trust your people? Is it you? [33:44] Or are you hiring horribly? [33:47] Okay, if you're hiring horribly, why are you hiring horribly? Is it because you can't find the right people? Is it because you're rushing through it? [33:55] you know, you have to keep chasing it down. OKRs are great diagnostic tool because they [33:59] they tell you something's broken. So if you're OK, ours are going sideways, something's broken deeper. There's also the problem with psychological safety. You need your teams to be able to say, this isn't working. We're doing something else. Instead of just saying, this isn't working. Tell us how to fix it. People are coming to you and saying, how do we fix this problem? [34:16] something's broken in the company. You're doing something wrong as a leader. You have to think about if somebody doesn't know what to do and you're like, well, I have a strategy. I told you what my strategy is and they don't know how to make decisions. It means, [34:28] Something's wrong with the strategy or you aren't being clear. [34:31] you know, [34:31] because a conversation always has two people. [34:34] I love, there's an old joke. [34:36] that I think about a lot, which is if during the day you meet one asshole, he's probably an asshole. But if all day long you meet nobody but assholes, you might be the asshole. And I think that's very true. If your entire company is confused, [34:51] you might be the asshole. You have to think about how can I get more clear if [34:54] people are constantly bringing you little things [34:57] it's not because they're scared it's because you're scary you know so a lot of times your okay hours breaking are speaking to something else happening

[35:05] and [35:07] Bureau payer process. [35:08] Is it working? Then you have to step back and go, okay, [35:11] how far deep do I have to go before I figure out what's wrong with my management team? [35:18] you know, and it could be, [35:19] the CEO, but it could actually be some weird group dynamics. And you've got to focus on that. I really love Patrick Lencioni. [35:26] Five Dysfunctions of a Team is this most famous book. And I would recommend that if you like the Fable-style book. But it's the same thing. It's like you've got to fix things at the top. [35:35] You got to work on do your own work and then everything else runs a little better. [36:05] content bottlenecks across your organization, from marketing web pages to sales emails and product messages, to creating high quality on brand content at scale. And unlike other AI applications, writer's training happens securely on your data and your style and brand guidelines that you provide specific to your organization. Thank you. [36:24] The result is that you get consistent content in your brand voice at scale. Get AI that your people will love. For a limited time, listeners to Lenny's podcast can get 20% off if they go to writer.com slash Lenny. That's writer.com slash Lenny.

[36:40] If you think back to what most often is the issue, [36:43] In your experience, is it something at the top? Is it like a middle manager doing something wrong? Is it [36:48] just like misunderstanding how to use OCRs. [36:50] But I think it's usually the issue with OKRs not working well. [36:55] I mean, I can tell you, I can repeat everything I said, but instead I'll just say speed. People read, measure what matters, they get their panties in a bunch, they get really excited, they're just going to do OKRs for everybody, but they didn't really read the whole thing, you kind of skimmed it, and you don't really understand how it works, and so you just implement it, or you ask your head of HR to implement it, and it gets implemented, and everybody's really happy, and then they're really sad. [37:18] And then they spit it out and then you say, okay, okay, ours don't work. I mean, that's what I see over and over again. [37:23] Nobody calls... [37:24] Me for advice? [37:26] When they are thinking about OKRs, they call me for advice when they've done it and it fails every damn time. [37:31] And I think it's... [37:34] What is it? The illusion of knowledge? Like if I asked you right now, [37:38] How does a bicycle work or how does a pen work? [37:40] You're like, I know how that works. And if you tried to write it out, you couldn't. [37:44] Well, I couldn't. Like, how does a ballpoint pen work? You know, there's a spring and there's some ink. I'm not sure. So really thinking about [37:53] how would OKRs work throughout the company? [37:56] is valuable. So because you don't have time as a leader, right, [38:00] What you should do is just [38:02] you know, give my book to your best team and say, we're thinking about OKRs. Can you guys see if it works? And then three months later, check in with them. What did you figure out, guys? OK, because the best team.

[38:14] always wants to be better. I love [38:16] piloting with the best team but they're still very imbued in your uh in your culture [38:21] So they'll figure out where OKRs in your culture don't fit. They'll figure out where it's helpful. And then they can give it back to you and you have a template. And then you can take it to two more teams. And then you can take it to two more teams. And maybe you adopt it with your management team. [38:33] you know, little bit by little bit. [38:36] that's how I tell people to start with OKRs. [38:38] Figure out your best multidisciplinary team and say, you guys start and let us know. [38:43] Bye. [38:44] This might be a good time to talk a little bit more about your book for folks that [38:47] are actually planning to roll out OKRs or trying to fix their OKRs. You just talk about what it is, how to find it, what it's called. Anything else? Yeah, it's called Radical Focus. I could have called it [38:57] guide to OKRs, but I think what's really important is to [39:01] learn how to focus on the most important things and make them happen. It is a business fable, as I call it, where I tell a story about two startup founders and their struggle to find focus and how OKRs help them. And then the second half, it's a second edition that's out now. It's gotten twice as big. [39:19] because I started working with big companies as well as startups and had to work through what does it mean when you have a larger company and what struggles they follow. And so I think the first part's nice because it's fun to read stories, but I think... [39:31] What's really good about it is what you noticed, which is when I talked you through this company trying to figure out what their OKRs were, everything became a lot more clear. [39:39] And I think that's one of the powers of stories is seeing example. And then the rest of it is really like you can almost open it to any page and look at your problem, go, oh, my problems with strategy or my problems with.

[39:51] tasks versus outcomes and you could flip around and figure out what's the piece I need to solve. [39:57] And folks can play on Amazon. They search for Radical Focus. It's everywhere, baby. And it's been translated into like eight languages, which is pretty cool. [40:04] Wow. Which one's your most favorite language that's been translated into? Well, Chinese because it sounds like crazy because apparently some Chinese actress [40:12] said she loved it. And then it's been showing bigger there than anywhere else. So. Chinese actresses using OKRs, what is going on? Mind blown. Once again, life is always more surprising than anything you can imagine. [40:26] I have more questions I want to ask about OKRs, but you were talking about storytelling and fables and things like that. [40:31] You also wrote a book about, not that we're going to go through all your books, but you wrote a book about [40:35] drawing and the power of drawing. And also you just believe in [40:38] Storytelling is a really powerful tool [40:40] So I'd love to hear just your take on like why is storytelling so powerful? [40:44] and drawing, why skill drawing is so important for product leaders and PM. I think there are some things [40:50] that are fundamentally human, that are built into our genes. Storytelling is one. If all of human history was a clock, [40:57] We started writing things down at 11 p.m. [41:00] So most of human history has been [41:03] an oral tradition where we told each other stories to help pass on knowledge and so like don't get anywhere near the big kitty with a great big teeth because you will die or don't eat those red berries because my grandfather threw up for three days and then croaked you know, but we tell them better than that longer stories tend to have more conflicts and they tend to be seen as having more information.

[41:25] So if you use storytelling, you're talking to the most ancient part of the human brain. [41:29] and you will get attention, you'll get comprehension, and you'll get retention. The teacher's holy trinity, right? So I love stories. They work well. They catch people's attention and [41:40] One thing I read that kind of blew my mind was they said that if you – [41:44] tell people a bunch of facts, [41:47] they'll forget [41:48] most of them, especially those that don't fit into their current mental model of how the world works. But if you tell them a story and that's full of facts, they will remember it. And if you look at Ted, [41:57] Like everybody loves a TED Talk. [41:59] Like they're mostly all just stories, right? And facts sprinkled inside those stories. So [42:05] I think stories are very powerful. I think images are very powerful. Words are very abstract. [42:10] If I say the word chair, what pops into your brain? [42:13] Was it a big [42:15] easy chair? Was it a hard wooden chair? You know, we use these words as if everybody knows what we're talking about, but people don't. So in my time in industry, you know, because I was at what Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, MySpace, stuff like that, I just found if I got up on the whiteboard and drew really badly. And I think it's almost important to draw badly, you know, make some marks, make some squares. Somebody else will go, no, no, no, it doesn't work that way. Give me this pen, you know, and start

[42:45] I know designers spend all this time making wireframes and I'm like, that's the lamest use of time ever. [42:49] just get some whiteboards go into the room with your engineers and start making some marks together [42:54] And that just works better. [42:56] And I found that for some reason in America, people seem to think that you have to be one of the chosen few born a drawer. [43:02] But... [43:02] it's like anything, you know, it's like playing piano. You just got to practice a little bit. So the book, [43:07] mostly just has some really simple things you can draw and then it tells you how to use them in business so i wanted to make something that was even simpler than back of the napkin which is an awesome book but gets pretty intense pretty quickly [43:21] With the storytelling piece, I feel like most people are like, yes, I know storytelling is powerful, but they're just they don't know how to do it. Is there like one tip? [43:30] you could share just how to get a little bit better at storytelling or integrate storytelling into your work as a product leader or founder. If you say one tip, you're really holding me down. I would say when you finish telling a story, if you're telling it to someone you can trust, say, [43:47] what's something I could have done to make the story better? Like, you're going to find out, do I just blather on forever? Or do I not give enough details? I mean, if you're only going to do one thing, get feedback is always the answer. The second tip would be structurally, [44:00] there's a beginning, middle and end. [44:02] you know, intrigue people with a hook, a mystery. That's the beginning, right? A mystery, a secret, a surprise. [44:09] The middle is... [44:10] You can tell them a little bit about it. That's where you get your message in. You know, if you're trying to pitch something, sneak your product in, whatever. And the end is always going to be success and celebration, you know, because you're trying to get people excited about your,

[44:22] your story or remember this information. [44:24] So just a basic structure in your head really kind of make a big difference. [44:29] Yeah, I love that. That's like such an actionable, straightforward. [44:33] acting [44:34] We're getting better. Just ask people, how could this have been a better start? Great idea. [44:38] Your second piece made me think about the Minto pyramid. Do you know much about the Minto pyramid principle? [44:45] I had a mental binge for a little while, but I had to move to other stuff. [44:49] It's a triangle. Yes, but I can't recount it to you. I just, I do remember it. I was just going to ask because it's kind of the reverse concept, which is, [44:58] You start with the conclusion and then you kind of share how you got there. I think that's a good one. I mean, if you think about what's the job of a hook, [45:05] Like a hook just gets you excited. So how do you get people excited? You can start with a conclusion. [45:09] There's going to be success. Oh, tell me more. I want to be successful. It could be a mystery. Oh, what is happening there? I want to be part of that. It could be a secret. Shh. [45:18] Something happened and I'm not going to tell anybody else, but I'm going to tell you. Like there's so many ways to hook people in, but they're all doing the same job because you want people to actually listen to you and not pretend and nod. [45:29] So I think you can do it backwards as well. But I bet even when Barbara Minto did it, she probably opened with a success and ended with a success. I would bet good money to remind people that there's a happy ending and the story is worth following. [45:42] That's a really interesting perspective, because to me, they were like opposites of like, [45:45] You build tension and you reveal the answer. [45:47] The Minto approach is start with the answer. Here's what we're going to do, and here's why, and here's all the work I did to get there. Your point is that's also really interesting. Oh, wow. I don't know how you got to that. There's so many ways to tell a story.

[45:58] Just don't bore your users. Great advice. [46:01] okay i want to come back to a couple more okay questions give you less fun than the story maybe but hopefully more useful [46:07] I want to. [46:08] you just get your take on like what is the cadence of a healthy care process like what are the ceremonies and meetings and emails that [46:14] are involved [46:15] I know you have this kind of weekly status email. [46:17] practice you recommend just like how do you [46:19] describe the system of an OKR. [46:22] process. Oh my gosh, I'm glad you asked because I think the cadence is probably the single most valuable piece of it. So, [46:28] Every Monday, because Monday is a great temporal landmark, you say, look at your week and you go, okay, what am I going to do to move the ball forward? [46:35] Right? [46:36] And it could be an email to your boss. It could be an email to your accountability group. It could be an email to your team. It could be standing there like stand up. I mean, it's very easy. OKR rituals were built on agile rituals. So [46:50] there's a lot of connections there, which is great. So you just, Mondays you commit, and Fridays you celebrate, [46:57] People do not value celebrations enough. I've had CEOs who said, well, it was the middle of the quarter, so we didn't start OKRs, but we did start Friday celebrations. And oh, my God, things are already changing. Things are already getting better. [47:10] The simple act of getting together and saying, [47:14] What was the most awesome thing that happened to you this week? What's the most awesome thing that happened in marketing? What's the most awesome thing that designed it this week? It makes people feel like they're part of something really special. [47:22] you know, and it's super exciting. [47:24] So you have these nice bookends, and I think if you only do that, [47:28] you're probably in good shape. I think status emails, I hated them so profoundly.

[47:34] for most of my life, I had this huge team at MySpace, and my project manager would gather everybody's status emails and put them together into this giant status email that I had to send to my boss. [47:44] And I was so busy, I just sent it forward, figuring it was fine. And then I read it, and there was this really bad thing. [47:49] in my status email. That should not have happened. I was like, fuck. [47:53] And I waited to hear back from my boss and nothing. Apparently he wasn't reading them either. So I was like, what's the point of this stupid thing? And then when I was at Zynga, we were using OKRs and they were really short. They were like, [48:04] What's your confidence level on your key results? And what are you doing? [48:08] last week what did you what did you do last week and what are you doing next week and the last week next week is great because it allows you to start noting down what stops you from getting done and that i gotta say there's so much learning in that i tried to do this but what [48:23] Did I get sick? Did somebody get mad at me? Did somebody not want to work with me? Did somebody, do we not have this critical database? Like the whole thing. [48:33] I tried to do this last week and I failed. [48:36] learning goes through the roof. And that rhythm of just having like three P1s, you can't have more than three P1s. You can have as many P2s as you want. [48:44] and P3s if you really think you should. [48:46] but you can skim it, right? Go through it really quickly. And we would all send them [48:53] to emails, you could subscribe to email lists, which meant I could read the status emails [48:58] of most of the company. [49:00] And I would know what was going on and I could quickly see who should I go over and talk to and who should I make a connection with. So those emails were invaluable. I think a lot of my clients are doing it in Slack now instead.

[49:10] And that works really well. You know, if you have this place where you're putting your status in and people will quickly go, [49:14] you know, skim, skim, skim, skim. Oh, okay. I got to talk to that guy. [49:18] So hyper valuable. [49:20] if you resume that there's the okay or doc you're like here's our outcomes for the quarter here's our three [49:25] Key results. [49:26] You make that plan once a quarter. [49:29] Do you have any recommendation how long to spend on planning your care? My goal is always as little as possible. Time you're planning is not the time you're shipping. And the best is the enemy of the good. [49:38] So in an ideal world, you would grade your OKRs, [49:44] Like. [49:45] week at the end of the quarter. [49:47] Maybe second to the last week of the quarter, depending on it. If it takes you a whole week to set OKRs, which I hope it doesn't, but who knows. And then the very last week, you set your OKRs for the next quarter. [49:57] And that's it. [49:59] Like, boom. If you can do it in a... Usually you can do it in, like, four days total, unless... [50:06] you have a very hierarchical, huge, deep bench. And even then, like I have something, I'm going to share this with you because I don't think many people talk about this. The approval process will kill you. I've seen it happen over and over again. So I was working with one of my clients and we came up with this different kind of approval process that's working really well, is that [50:25] Basically, instead of having your boss approve it, [50:28] You write your OKRs, you get three, I'm a big fan of the rule of threes, I'm a storyteller, but you could do less or more, I guess. Teams that work with you enough to know what you're up to, to look them over. And they just look them over, 24 hour turnaround, they say, this looks right, but I don't think this is possible.

[50:45] They give you that feedback and you're done. That's it. [50:48] That's the entire approval process. [50:50] And it's so fast and it works so well. [50:54] And that means, you know, [50:56] you might have to say no to somebody, you know, if they're asking you to do more than, like if you had 10 teams asking you to look over their OKRs, [51:04] you have to say no, you want to keep it down to a reasonable number. [51:07] But if you do one a day, it could be done in a week. [51:09] I'm thinking about companies like the size of Airbnb when I try to do it that quickly, and it's hard to imagine. [51:14] Partly because... [51:15] There's top-level strategy that has to align with individual team roadmaps and [51:20] dependencies, platform teams and things like that. [51:22] I imagine it's hard to do as the company scales. [51:25] I like the... [51:26] the drive to make it a week and be done. Well, I mean, who really has to approve it? And what does it cost you if you get it wrong? [51:36] And so if tech looked at it, [51:39] If somebody from strategy looked at it, if somebody from sales looked at it, whatever, the right people looked at it. [51:45] you're probably fine. [51:46] And if you're not right, you'll figure it out over the quarter and do better next quarter. [51:50] Like we have to let go. [51:52] or we will get [51:54] mired down. [51:56] in all this crap. [51:57] I love that. [51:58] Okay, so I went off track. [52:00] But just to kind of [52:01] put a [52:03] put a ribbon on the concept of OKRs. You have this document with your outcomes, your key results. [52:08] and then your recommendation is do a weekly email [52:10] And is the idea everyone on the team sends this weekly email or slacks to the rest of the team? To the rest of the company if you can.

[52:18] I mean, the thing is, like Google, even as a huge company, everybody's OKRs and their weekly updates are on their intranet and you can look stuff up. [52:27] So why not? [52:28] And we'll link to a template that you have on your blog post. And also, I think in the book, imagine you have this template of what it is, but [52:35] Essentially, it's your confidence level of hitting your OKR. [52:38] what you did last week, what you're going to do next week. Yep. [52:40] And then a few notes if you need to. [52:42] does this replace stand-ups in your experience uh it could i never try to tell engineering how to get their shit done [52:50] But if they felt like it was doing the same job, then they could combine them. [52:56] Great. [52:57] Is there anything else? Is this the whole OKR process in your [53:00] experience the only other thing i would bring up is thinking about the word grading so a lot of people think about trying to make something really numerical like 0.[redacted address] there but a lot of times they're qualitative so [53:15] How do you think about that, like getting approved by... [53:19] the product committee. [53:20] So, [53:21] It doesn't matter. Like it really doesn't matter. Don't get fussy. Don't try to make it really precise. Just go ahead and say hand wave, hand wave 80%. What matters is [53:31] Why 80%? Really focus on the learning. [53:34] So we almost got there. [53:36] Well, if we would have gotten there, if we got two more days, that's fine. We basically got there. We knew what we were doing. If we didn't, if we were really far away, what went wrong? It's all about the retrospectives. Like, make sure your grading is secondary to retrospective is the biggest thing I would say, because...

[53:50] That's what's going to be valuable. And you could spend so many hours trying to come up with some fake measurement system [53:56] that never is quite accurate and just waste every time when you could just be faster. I'm just obsessed with speed. You may have noticed that. [54:03] I thought it was 70%. Is it 80% of success? Is that the rule of thumb for who cares? It's about 70%. Some people do 80%. Some people do 0.075%. I don't know. My feeling is... [54:15] And [54:16] Good goal is one that makes you feel somewhat uncomfortable but not doomed. [54:21] Tch. [54:22] You're like, that's going to be tricky. Okay, let's go for it. That's about where I like to land with a key result. [54:29] Bye. [54:30] Newsletter post with [54:31] Wayne Shackleton from COTA. [54:33] And he made this point that [54:34] OKRs were created by Google. [54:36] which is the most incredible business model in history. [54:40] They just print money. [54:41] And for them, it's okay not to hit your goals. [54:43] Like 70% of goals, fine. We'll be fine. We're making so much money. [54:46] And so his perspective, [54:48] For most companies, it doesn't make sense to set the goal. [54:51] to be like 70% of those goalies set is a success. [54:54] give a [54:55] perspective on that? I think you'll never know what you're capable of unless you try to do something that you're not sure you can do. [55:01] I agree. I find setting more ambitious goals than you think you can quickly. [55:05] immediately achieve is actually really pushes you to achieve them. And the literature agrees. [55:10] Like there's a lot of literature that shows ambitious goals are actually quite motivating, unless you feel you're doomed, at which point then they're demotivating. I've seen that too. [55:18] Okay, two more OKR questions. One is, I noted this from before, so I'm just going to come back to it.

[55:24] There's this balance with key results of [55:26] as you talked about being like very [55:28] precise and like metrics driven and [55:31] And [55:32] Focus. [55:33] And then there's like you talked a bit about like sometimes it's OK for them to be a little fuzzy, like quality and delight. [55:39] And those latter ones are harder to measure and it's hard to keep people accountable. [55:43] Do you have any advice for just how to find that right balance of like, [55:47] This is what will keep you accountable and this is [55:49] how we drive the business forward and this is how we [55:51] No, you're doing a good job versus [55:53] "Here's a general thing that we think is success, and it's fine. Do your best." Yeah. One of the most common arguments I have with my friends is, I think everything can be measured to a certain degree. [56:03] Not precisely, necessarily, but you can get enough of a swag to be useful. [56:07] So... [56:09] by trying to measure things you'll start learning how to measure things so you maybe try nps and you're like wow this is [56:16] not actually accurate or weird or not, you know, there's a lot of stuff we don't know until we try them. [56:22] And of course, you know, my background is in lean and agile and design, and they're all iterative. [56:27] They're all about let's try something and then learn something and then do something, which is why I'm so fanatically iterative. So I think that when you got these fuzzy things, you just got to start. [56:38] trying out ways to measure it, [56:41] and trust the team to be able to figure out whether it's working or not. [56:46] Like revenue, it's easy, right? Like this is what we're making now. [56:49] This is what we could be making or you're not making anything now. So you can like look up some numbers from public companies or whatnot. You know, that's easy. DAU, you know, it's easy acquisition numbers. It's easy. But when it comes to will people stay?

[57:06] Do people actually like this? [57:09] That's harder, but it's not impossible. There's a lot of user researchers who have worked hard to figure out how to measure it. So you can either buy the obvious off the... [57:18] off the rat. [57:20] package like an nps or you can dig a little harder and figure out what would be meaningful to your company [57:26] you know [57:26] And I think... [57:28] There's a desire not to do things that are hard and take a little bit longer, but that's where you're going to get the super value. That's how you become the next Netflix or Amazon or whatnot, you know. [57:38] So you really got to say, [57:39] How will we know about our product? [57:42] And what are the... [57:44] approaches are out there and which one makes sense for us. [57:47] Final, okay, our related question. [57:49] Say someone's listening to this and they're like, wow, this is awesome. I want to do this at our company. We have focus problems. We have alignment problems. [57:56] We need to be more clear about what we're working on. [57:59] other than buying your book and reading it and sharing with everyone. [58:02] what would you recommend would be the first few steps to work? [58:06] along that journey to rolling out an FKR process. I hate to say this, but there are [58:12] a lot of consultants that have popped out over [58:14] out of nowhere and it's kind of terrifying because so many of them really really suck. [58:20] And they're just like, oh, OKR sounds like Smarkles or whatever. I'll just use that. Or it's hot. And so I'm going to figure it out by reading some articles. And so. [58:30] I would ask for references. I think that's a good one. So your advice is find someone to come in and help you figure out how to do this well and find the right person.

[58:40] finding someone to coach you is really high value. [58:43] But I also think it would be OK if just. [58:45] write a book or read a bunch of blog posts and start experimenting it's not rocket science you know [58:51] You've got like you just listen to this podcast, right? Listen to it again. Take lots of notes. [58:56] you know, [58:56] Google around, see if you can learn a little more about some of the concepts that you didn't fully understand or you want to know more about. And then just run a tiny pilot and say, Okay, what does this mean for us? You don't even have to call them OKRs. You can just try [59:08] We're going to do outcome focus this quarter, and we'll see where it takes us. [59:13] You know? [59:15] But just try it. [59:17] Because that's where you learn stuff and try it at a small, safe level where you don't think it's going to hurt too many things. [59:25] And you said to start with a high performing team. Oh, yes. Because they're smart, they're capable. And if anybody's going to figure out how to make it work, they will. If you try to fix a bad team with OKRs, you'll make everybody hate OKRs and make the bad team worse. [59:39] So just don't do that. It's not it's not a medicine, but that's high performing team. They're going to be the ones who go, oh, well, OK, our stand ups like this. So we should add this to stand up. And then instead of emails, let's just have a brag channel on our like I've seen people do the coolest stuff with OKRs. [59:57] totally changing what I recommend, doing wonderful things with it just because they're smart and they messed with it till it worked. [1:00:03] Awesome. [1:00:04] Final question and topic. [1:00:06] You teach product management at Stanford, [1:00:09] What's maybe a surprising or contrarian

[1:00:13] opinion about how to learn to do product management, how to [1:00:16] get into product management, had to [1:00:18] do product management. [1:00:20] from your experience teaching young PMs? I taught it and a bunch of students who thought they were going to be product managers realized that they wanted to be interaction designers and not product managers at all. I think one of the things that might be off with a lot of the product management education and conferences is [1:00:38] I mean, it's good that they take a lot from UX and it is important to be people centered. But the reality is the product manager serves the business. That's their role. You know, when we Teresa Torres talks about the product triad. Right. [1:00:51] Trio. Trio. She's talking about business and [1:00:56] user experience and [1:00:57] Technology. [1:00:58] So... [1:00:59] If products over here messing with the user experience or products over there, you know, messing with the engineering, who's taking care of the business? I think it's absolutely critical product managers. [1:01:10] They say they're the mini CEO, but that just means they want to be in charge, you know, and nobody's in charge. You know, it's all about working together as a team. So they need to understand business models. They need to understand how to do a target market and what is a target market? Why is that target market the right one to go after? And how is it going to grow? And what are the trends that are going on that's going to change the business? Product managers. [1:01:30] Need [1:01:31] to serve the business. And it's not a bad thing. Like if you have a company, it needs to survive. And all money is, is oxygen. And let's the company keep going unless people are being greedy assholes, which definitely happens. But, you know, it's okay to care about the health and well being of the company's ability to make money and feed itself. And, you know,

[1:01:51] Don't do anything unethical, but really focus on these questions. And if you don't know business models, if you can't talk about why you might want to do a subscription or if you want to just do one off sales, if you don't understand why, you know, you have all these in-app purchases in your business. [1:02:07] mobile devices go learn it i'm really shocked [1:02:11] at how many product managers are just smart people who care about users, [1:02:16] and just showed up and said, yes, I will be a product manager. So no, you've got to business is a real thing. It has. [1:02:23] a long history of knowledge and understanding and go, go, go. [1:02:29] Go do that. What I'm hearing is maybe product sense is overrated in your experience. Ain't none of them yet old enough to have product sense. I mean, seriously, like, uh, [1:02:39] Pranic sense is intuition. Intuition is compressed experience. [1:02:42] Thank you. [1:02:43] Compressed experience comes from having lots of experience. And if you're young and you don't have a lot of experience, the smartest thing you could do is learn. [1:02:51] You know, you've got to learn what models work and why they work and [1:02:55] Just, uh... [1:02:57] Intuition is overvalued and under exists. [1:03:01] Imagine that's kind of freeing to a lot of people listening where they are like, man, I just don't know if I have product sense. I don't have a product. [1:03:07] All this like [1:03:08] Yeah, don't worry about it, is what you're saying. [1:03:11] Any other questions? [1:03:12] advice for just people thinking about getting into product or trying to get into product. [1:03:16] They probably all can't [1:03:18] Many can't get to Stanford and learn product from someone like you. What else would you suggest they do to try to help them get into a product management role? What other...

[1:03:26] activities or [1:03:27] areas they should spend time in your experience. I think I agree with my friend Ken Norton on this and that you shouldn't probably start in product. Go be an engineer or be a designer, you know, work, get to know businesses and. [1:03:42] I got into product. [1:03:43] from-- well, I was a developer and then I was a designer. [1:03:47] And [1:03:48] Both of those gave me a lot of knowledge, but when I moved into product, [1:03:52] It came out of my startup where I had to learn business and I absolutely had to learn business or else I wasn't surviving. So [1:03:58] I would say... [1:04:00] Work for a company that's small enough that you can poke into the corners and learn from other people. [1:04:07] And... [1:04:08] learn and then [1:04:10] do stuff. I don't know. It's I'm very, I'm very basic. It's funny because I'm at Stanford, which is all fancy with a degree and stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, just read up, go hang out with people, get a job figured out, because that's very much how I did it. And I think that if people want to get into product, [1:04:24] I'd ask why, why do you want to be a product? Do you want to be in charge? [1:04:28] I learned that nobody's in charge. You know, no matter what you do, you have to use your influence. You have to use your people skills. Are you willing to work on your interpersonal dynamics? Because if you can't fire someone, if you can't tell somebody their behavior is interfering with the ability to get things done, don't be a product manager. If you can't solve a fight between two of your coworkers, don't be a product manager. If you can't go out and talk to somebody in a Starbucks line and say, hey, we're going to do this new thing. What do you think? Don't be a product manager. You know, you got to have hustle. You got to talk to people.

[1:04:58] as a bottom line. [1:04:59] And maybe you don't want to be a product manager. Maybe it's much more fun to leave work every day at six o'clock and be a designer and think about how all the systems work and how where the error message is going to come in. Is blue the right color? You know, all the combinations of that. That's fun. Or maybe you want to be an engineer and solve puzzles all day. [1:05:15] Like product managers play the worst job if unless you love, you know, talking to everybody and connecting them and stepping into the mess. [1:05:23] I definitely agree there's not enough talk about how painful and hard the PM role is and how thankless it often is. And I love it, but I love everything. I mean, I just, I love, I fell in love with the web and I haven't stopped. [1:05:35] even though it's now mostly on phones and stuff. It's just, it's an exciting space. But yeah, you got to step up and do the hard stuff. That is an awesome way to end it. And with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round, where I just have six quick questions. [1:05:48] I don't know if you know what they are. So we'll just go through them and see how it goes. I love it. [1:05:54] What are two or three books that you recommend most [1:05:57] to other people. The Fearless Organization. I think that book on psychological safety is the bomb. It's so, so, so good. [1:06:05] for fiction i loved the overstory [1:06:08] It's about trees. [1:06:10] And it's mind blowing and so good. [1:06:14] I'm going to leave it at that. Less is better. [1:06:16] Yeah. [1:06:16] I tried reading the Overstory and it's just like, it's very long, but it's beautiful. It's a lot like Cloud Atlas. If you liked Cloud Atlas, you liked the Overstory. [1:06:24] I think I watched that movie. No, a terrible movie. Only read the book.

[1:06:28] Agreed. [1:06:29] Speaking of movies, what's your favorite recent movie or TV show? You know, we just saw Wakanda Forever, and it's a very different movie than Black Panther. And my kid and I spent quite a bit of time talking about it. [1:06:39] and what it meant and [1:06:42] It was it was a lot deeper than I expected. And I'm very passionate about the Mayan people because I live in Belize part of the year. And I don't know, the Mayans are just the OGs of everything. Invented zero writing. They're just so amazing. Love it. [1:06:57] Next question, favorite interview question that you like to ask. [1:07:00] What questions should I have asked you? [1:07:03] I've been using that one forever, whether I'm interviewing somebody or being interviewed. [1:07:08] because the person is an expert in themselves. And if you say, "What question should I have asked you?" [1:07:13] A lot of times they'll be like, oof, they'll be knocked off base, and then they'll give you a really honest... [1:07:19] answered. What are five SaaS products or tools that you just love and use constantly? Oh, I hate all technology. That's what the problem. If you've been a product manager and a designer, all you can see is the flaws. But I [1:07:30] I would say I like Zoom better than you might think. It's like the work, it's... [1:07:36] It's terrible, but it's better than everything else. [1:07:38] Um... [1:07:39] Slack, when I saw it, I was like, this is not going to get rid of email. This is just going to be another channel of nonsense. And that showed up. [1:07:46] but I do use it. God knows I use it. The Google Suites, I got to say, the Google Suite is pretty amazing. Most people think that the students go to Stanford are all rich, but like 70% of them have huge amounts of financial aid. And so I'm always looking for things that are free and won't cost too much for these students. Oh, so many of them are first generation, the first student who's gone in their family here. So having the Google Suite and being able to have free slides, free

[1:08:16] sort of a gift, right? So I've got to say, I love those. [1:08:20] Oh, I didn't expect the question to get in that direction, but I love it. [1:08:24] Two more questions. [1:08:25] What's something relatively minor that you've seen a company you've worked with change in their product development process that's had a tremendous impact on their ability? [1:08:33] to execute and ship great stuff. [1:08:35] I will never forget... [1:08:37] when people stop sitting with their disciplines and started sitting with their teams. I think that we in tech want everything to be tech and be remote and everything, blah, blah, blah. And there are definitely jobs that are wonderful remote. [1:08:49] But if you're trying to innovate, [1:08:51] There's nothing like getting the. [1:08:54] product trio to sit together. [1:08:57] And preferably with walls. Walls are really underrated. If you can just give them a war room where they can put stuff on the wall, or I hate to say cubicles, like I'd rather see offices, but if you can give people walls, it becomes part of your memory. And then you're not using your short term memory. [1:09:13] to remember stuff you're using it to think. [1:09:15] And so the war room becomes like a living memory. [1:09:19] So you can make connections. I mean, it's one of the hardest things I have to teach my students too, is that some things are just better done analog. That's okay. [1:09:27] Reminds me of a story I just heard from a friend where [1:09:29] there was a team sitting next to a data science team. And they were like two table, one table apart. They're like right next to each other. [1:09:36] And the data team just had a lot of [1:09:38] concerns with what that team was building. They didn't believe in what they're doing. And they're just like, why are we wasting all these resources on this thing? [1:09:44] And [1:09:45] the head of data science put one of the data people on the team and had them sit

[1:09:49] Just one table over with the team. [1:09:51] and everything changed. [1:09:52] They're just like, okay, let's do this. This is great. We're going to build some awesome products. We're human. Just that one move. We are human. We are social. Yeah. [1:09:59] And I think moving people around every year or so, everybody hates it. Nobody wants to change desks. [1:10:04] But do it to them anyway. It always makes things better. [1:10:07] Final question. [1:10:08] What's a company that you think has a really strong and effective product culture? [1:10:11] If you can name one, if not, that's okay too. When I think of all my clients, the best cultures all seem to be very small companies working in strange little corners of the world. They're not the big sexy guys. Everybody's there because they want... [1:10:25] to make [1:10:27] dog food or they want to make, you know, this kind of financial software. [1:10:33] and [1:10:34] They're amazing. I think we treat scale like it's a virtue when it's merely a tactic and it might be a bad tactic as well. So. [1:10:43] Yeah, I think there's something really sweet. [1:10:45] around 250 people working on something that everybody agrees is important. [1:10:49] Christina, I... [1:10:50] Honor you as emperor for life of OKRs. [1:10:54] You've achieved it. I'm very proud of you. [1:10:58] I think we've made a big dent in how people perceive OKRs and will utilize OKRs. Thank you so much for being here. [1:11:04] Two final questions or give folks find you online. If they want to learn more, reach out. [1:11:08] And how can listeners be useful to you? [1:11:10] If they want to learn more, I've been blogging at eleganthack.com. [1:11:14] like a hack writer since 2000. So there's like, it's where I've dumped my thoughts for a long time. So it's always a good place if you want to go spelunking about anything.

[1:11:24] if you want to, [1:11:25] attempt to hire me. You know, cwoodkey.com is not a bad place to go. I say attempt because I teach and so I don't have a lot of time. But you know what users could do? [1:11:34] Users! [1:11:35] could slow down. [1:11:37] Thank you. [1:11:38] I just wish everybody would take a deep breath and think about, [1:11:44] "Okay, we're going to adopt this thing. Let's read up on it. Let's think about it. Oh, we're going to build this new product. Let's do a literature review. Let's do a competitive analysis. Let's see what's been done. What's learned from the past. I think if you could slow down, you'll end up going a lot faster." [1:11:58] So I would encourage people, if you're in a panic and you're in a tizzy, and I know the economics bad and the world's on fire, but just... [1:12:05] Take some deep breaths before you do anything. [1:12:08] And just ask yourself, what's a good way to do it? [1:12:12] What's a good way for me to move forward? [1:12:14] I think I would like to encourage that. [1:12:16] Beautiful way to end it. [1:12:18] But I also want to make sure you plug your books. [1:12:20] Just say the titles of your books and where people can find them. And then we'll. Radical Focus. Get the second edition. [1:12:25] team the bench itself and pencil me in those are my three books that are out there right now you can [1:12:32] pretty much anywhere, I do believe. But definitely, I mean, Amazon, [1:12:37] Amazon rules us all, so they're definitely there. [1:12:40] Amazing. Christina, again, thank you for being here. [1:12:42] Thank you so much for having me here, Lenny, and sharing your audience with me. It's been an honor. [1:12:47] Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

[1:12:57] Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. [1:13:03] You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show [1:13:06] at Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.