Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. The simple act of getting together and saying, 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, you know, and it's super exciting.

Starting point is 00:00:27 Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Christina Woodke. 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. Before getting into teaching and consulting, she was a product leader at LinkedIn,

Starting point is 00:01:01 MySpace, Zinga, and Yahoo, as well as a founder of three different companies, 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, the elements of a health.

Starting point is 00:01:26 healthy OKR cadence, how OKRs fit with mission, vision, strategy, and roadmaps. 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. Christina is a wealth of knowledge and is super interesting and fun, and I know you will learn a lot from her. With that, I bring you Christina Woodke after a short word from our select sponsors. 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 mirrorboard

Starting point is 00:02:01 at mero.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 mirror 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 colleagues on anything that you're working on. For example, with Mero, you can plan out next quarter's entire 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 sprints. Then your whole distributed team can come together around wireframes, try ideas with the pen tool, and then put full mocks right into

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Starting point is 00:03:40 insight platform your whole team can use. Go to Dovetail app.com slash Lenny to get started today for free. That's Dovetail app.com. Lennie. Christina, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Lenny. I'm really excited to be here. I've been hearing about you forever.

Starting point is 00:03:58 It's so cool to be here in person. I'm more excited for you to be on the podcast. 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. And partly because, from what I can tell, you've done more to help people with OKRs and understand OKRs and fix their OKR process than most anyone else I know.

Starting point is 00:04:19 And as I'm sure, You know, a lot of people just like okayers or kind of anti-OKR and have had bad experiences of OKRs. And what I want to try to do with our chat today is to try to change people's mind who are maybe anti-O-KER, and two, help people optimize their okay process 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 an emperor for life, that might be my title. That might be.

Starting point is 00:04:48 By the end of this podcast, we will crown you. you emperor, prayer for life. Excellent. Okay, that'll be our goal. So as maybe a first question, I want to give people kind of this confidence that OKRs can lead to great product, great success. What can you share just to give people a sense of like, here's how many companies are having a great time with OKRs, 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, period.

Starting point is 00:05:21 companies are really successful with it are companies that I think I can swear a little. They have their shit together. Absolutely. 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 are that extra layer that supercharges them.

Starting point is 00:05:41 So 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 every. 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 multi-disciplinary product teams. I've seen it over and over. I don't really have permission to talk about

Starting point is 00:06:05 all my clients, but I have one client that I'm just working with right now. And it's a purpose-built company. So in other words, they exist in order to make 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 reduce the amount of back problems their humans have. So the humans are doing much more complex tasks, you know, thinking about inventory and how to be more efficient. And the butts are doing the heavy lifting. And they've been growing and growing like crazy. And the OKRs are

Starting point is 00:06:54 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. So if you know what you're trying to do, then the OKRs just help that happen. It aligns the company. And I think there are a lot like dieting advice in that they say, you know, eat less and exercise more. That's really simple. It's worked for me. I've lost 25 pounds doing eat less and exercise more. But, wow, it's hard.

Starting point is 00:07:27 It's really hard to do. And I think about OKRs that way. It's like you have to just stay with it and be strong and committed. And that will help. There's a number of things I want to follow up on in what you said. So I'll start with you talked about the benefits of a care. If you had to just like boil down, like here's what OKRs can do for you. the company is an organization. What would that be? What's just like the main benefit of OKR is at your

Starting point is 00:07:50 company? The main benefit is that there's a lot of concrete action through a OKR that you don't always get from strategy. Strategy tends to be a little longer, a little more moody-moji, 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 of progress. which is incredibly valuable. It creates alignment. There's no question what the single most important thing

Starting point is 00:08:21 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 last of all, the thing that I don't see a lot of people talking about that I think is really amazing is because an OKR focuses you for one quarter

Starting point is 00:08:37 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 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 quarter, two quarters, and then you go over and say, okay, let's work on acquisition.

Starting point is 00:09:04 You don't forget all the things you learn 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. I love this. So just to summarize, the main benefits are focuses you, lines, creates a cadence, and creates a learning cycle. And like maybe a simple way to think about is it's like a plug-in play product development process. You don't invent everything from scratch. There's this thing that exists. I know it's not the whole piece of it. But yeah, maybe you're nodding. And I'm curious when I say that, what comes to my mind? Yeah, I guess 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 keeps you from making the same stupid mistake over and over and over again, which has been a life goal in my life.

Starting point is 00:09:51 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 memo from Yahoo, which I guess was long ago. Oh, enough, not everybody. remembers it. But, you know, companies have a tendency to try to do everything all at this exact moment. And so everybody's working with 1% on this, 1% on that, 1% on the other. And instead, you use the OKRs and say, okay, 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 settle around with all the other stuff if you want,

Starting point is 00:10:25 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 eight, ten years on OKRs as well 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? Am I going to work? You know, where do I want to put that attention?

Starting point is 00:10:56 It just changes me personally just like it changes my clients. What's an example of your personal care? Is it writing book maybe? Well, I wish, but no. It's actually been health. One of the great things about managing my OPRs for so long is I discovered this pattern, which is that anytime things get busy, I just stop taking care of myself completely. 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. Amazing. I haven't heard that before. 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. What's like the line between we have goals in a plan and we're actually doing OKRs as a concept. Gosh, what is the atomic unit? That's a really lovely question. I would say, 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, what are we doing this week to get closer to our strategic goals, our longer-term goals? 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? And I find that it's really useful to tighten to temporal landmarks. By that I mean that there are

Starting point is 00:12:24 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, okay, 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 this quarter, you know, remember, we have a mission over here and we have a vision and we have a strategy.

Starting point is 00:12:48 Okay, this quarter is all about what? 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? Are we making a difference at all?

Starting point is 00:13:09 And if you can say, this week, I'm going to do this. And then the end of the week you say, oh, that worked or that didn't work, and you can try something new or keep going, that's just invaluable. That is really interesting that it wasn't, your answer wasn't like its outcome was. some key results and 70% of success's goal that there's something more fundamental, which is just being very clear on what you should be doing next week and we should be focusing on now. And that translates into what kind of the Ocare process ends up being. Oh, yeah. Can I tell you a little story?

Starting point is 00:13:37 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 for at least five years. and 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,

Starting point is 00:14:01 how percentage does 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, 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. I think it was just something that she couldn't keep up that level of diligence. Well, the woman who was hand-wazy, she actually has gone from a product manager to a consultant to a life coach. And she's making so much money.

Starting point is 00:14:37 And she is so damn happy and she has a new house. And so I really do think that the heart of everything is answering that question. 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 she got that just by every Monday saying, what the, what the fuck am I doing here? What am I trying to do again? And it worked. That is a really cool framework. So the question you ask yourself every week is,

Starting point is 00:15:07 what am I doing today that's helping me get closer to my outcome? Is that the way to use outcome? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it is an outcome. In her case, it was not worrying about money, having a house, having joy in her work. I think a lot of us get caught up in, 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. We get caught up in this or that little details. But you need to go back and say, what was our mission? I mean, think about how often do companies ever talk about their mission? It's like they said it, they forget it, it's super vague, it's useless. And instead, it's good to think, okay, when we started this company or when we changed this company or grew this company or whatever you want to go to,

Starting point is 00:15:50 you. There's always these various points in time. Why? What did we think would work? And let's go back to that moment of meaning and 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. So I want to drill into some of these things of just how mission, vision, roadmap, and OKRs can fit together just to be pretty tactical. So as a PM, say, or founder, what is the process you recommend for working through mission, vision, and then OKRs, and then, you know, roadmap?

Starting point is 00:16:33 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 the mission lasts for five years, what would you like to see happen in five years. And it might be, you know, we're going to bring amazing games that delight our users and we're proud to ship, you know, into the world. 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:17:11 And then out of that would come your strategy, right? Which is, this is going to be our Euro-Vexam. 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 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. And that's, you can use okayers 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 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.

Starting point is 00:17:50 So once you know where you're trying to be and once you know what you want to do with your year, you can say, 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, okay, let's say you're built. 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 and extensive. And Q4 is about marketing and throwing

Starting point is 00:18:26 it out, like something like that. And you could then turn them into your outcomes. A lot of people who are very metric driven don't understand outcomes. But objectives, or, you know, objectives, outcomes, give potato, potato, potato. Yeah. It's really something inspiring. Like, um, Q1, okay, we have a vision for this game that will drive us forward. I don't know. I'm making stuff up, which means it's going to be imperfect. Although I do warn people not to get too caught up in wordsmithing. We can spend hours doing that.

Starting point is 00:18:56 And then you get to ask my favorite question, how do we know? 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, whatnot? Well, what would it be? are we going to figure this out? So something about user testing probably. 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. What are the sort of things that would tell us, yes, please go forward?

Starting point is 00:19:30 We might be excited about VR. Well, how do we know that VR would be profitable for us? So once we answer those three, how would we know, then we can know that by March we have the results we need. 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. 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. So there's your okay ours, right?

Starting point is 00:20:12 And then for Q2, we don't know how Q1's going to go. So we're just going to leave the objective there, but we're not going to get into the NIDIGIVs. Key results cause a lot of arguing among the team. It takes forever to track them down. Just wait and see how Q1 goes. And that way, you have enough play within your strategy to react to new information. The question you talked about of how do we know,

Starting point is 00:20:35 that's to decide the objective or the key results? Key results. Yeah. Okay, got it. You're saying objective. Objective. Okay, cool. My bad.

Starting point is 00:20:43 I didn't signal when I turned. No. Okay, cool. That makes sense. Objective is that vision, like for the quarter. This is what we're driving towards in this quarter. And then the key results, the answer the question, how do we know we succeeded? And so what was the tip you gave of turning strategy into the objective?

Starting point is 00:21:03 What's like that how does you translate from strategy to deciding your objective for the quarter? Oh, that's, that sits between mission and OK ours. So strategy, 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, blows my mind, right? So if you think about strategy as a strongly held hypothesis about a way to win in the market and fulfill our vision, then you can say, well, our mission is this or vision. I kind of use them interchangeably because I think.

Starting point is 00:21:41 think they are kind of interchangeable. And I'm not going to get in the semantics and the bitty bits. But the strategy is really important because it says, we think we're fulfilling our mission, you know, of connecting people by what, you know? I think that there are a lot of good product strategy pieces out there. But 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 arcades. We have a hypothesis that's actually going to help us. 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

Starting point is 00:22:27 platforms. That's the sort of strategic stuff. And then we're like, oh, great, you have a vision. What are we doing? You know, what does that actually mean for us this year, this quarter? And then eventually this week. For the actual OKRs you end up with, is it a simple just in your, like, with the template of an OKR, is it just objective, three-ish key results? Is there anything more to it that you recommend those use? 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 cut up in the rules and they don't think about what are we actually trying to do. So simple is better. And what's your rule of thumb for a number of key results? I like three.

Starting point is 00:23:07 I think about it as triangulating, you know. I always like something that's like really hardcore numbers. I like something that's a little squishier, you know, like quality, you know, make sure you don't forget about it. And I usually like something that involves a dollar sign. But it's really going to be specific to what objective you're trying to do, right? Launch a new product. Well, you probably want to make a certain amount of money.

Starting point is 00:23:32 You probably 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? You know, you can figure out what one makes the more sense for you. That's an interesting topic. Is there anything you find there to measure customer happiness, satisfaction, delight?

Starting point is 00:23:50 Like, what have you seen work best for that sort of squishy stuff? I know there's a big backlash against NPS. I think it's okay. It's really funny because you can be insanely successful with a game that people feel yucky to play. And you could be incredibly successful with a product people hate using. Zoom, for example. Like, how many times have you heard Zoom get cussed out? So the question is, why would I care about that if I'm making money?

Starting point is 00:24:19 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. You need somebody who knows how to separate what people say and what they do and what the truth is in that. And then use that to apply to your strategic decisions.

Starting point is 00:24:43 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. I mean, you want committed users. They're just so important. One final question around the actual OKR document. What do you find are the most one or two common mistakes? people make when writing out the objective or the key result and deciding what to go with.

Starting point is 00:25:09 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. That doesn't inspire anybody. Your objectives should make you, when your alarm goes off and you wake up, you go, oh, yeah, I'm changing the world today. Or I'm doing something really cool, you know. It's You shouldn't be like, snooze. So I think an objective should be like motivating, but not ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:25:42 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 it feels like a task, like you have to get past a product review. So it's going to have a binary. They either said yes or no. But when you think about it, 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.

Starting point is 00:26:11 I think that's the biggest mistake people make in PRs. I know you shared a few examples of just that came top of mind, but just, is there any examples you can think of just like, here's a really good example of an outcome? And I think he was a lot easier and just like move this metric 10% or hit. Let's try to keep it fairly concrete, you know? Your online magazine selling interior design ideas. So 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 people deserve to have homes that are warm and wonderful. You have this mission. And you want to make money while you do it. So your strategy is going to be about connecting human beings with the brands that will suit their

Starting point is 00:26:59 lifestyle. Okay. That's great. And then we get into an any great. great, well, what does that actually mean? Are we going to, like, really work on recommendations passionately? Are we going to really create various markets and throw down on advertising where we think these people are? That's when your strategy comes in place because you're making all these interesting choices. So let's say we're going to double down on recommendations, which has a lot of presuppositions, like we have to get people to like. We have to understand their patterns of behavior. And that's when we can start to go to OKRs. We can say, okay. So we have this online magazine.

Starting point is 00:27:32 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 going to do that. We're going to create a profile of people's passions. Awesome. So how would we know? How would we know if we were successful? Oh, gosh. Well, you probably need a bunch of people to do it, but do we really need everybody, maybe 30% of our audience flips over. 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?

Starting point is 00:28:17 So they bookmark, favorite, like. How about like? Okay, so maybe they're going to like a certain number of products each week. Let's go for weekly active users. Okay. So they're going to like 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? 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 the every two weeks to hear how it's working and understand more about it. Okay, now we have some okayers. With key results, I always recommend spending like 10 minutes brainstorming every single way you could possibly measure that outcome because it with brainstorms you always think of all the obvious stuff first and then you have no

Starting point is 00:29:08 ideas and you're just sitting there with your post-notes going 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 brainstormings on the key results but the objective is sort of a manifestation of the strategy at a one one quarter level amazing that was an awesome example. You talked a bit earlier about how 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 of Figma on this podcast. And he told the story of how they moved away from OKRs at one point because they found themselves sitting these meetings, reviewing these like large spreadsheets of hundreds of tasks.

Starting point is 00:29:49 Oh God, yeah. That were basically just like tasks for ICs that are working on. And they kind of lost sight of like, why does any of this matter? What are you going to? trying to do as a company. So they moved away from OKRs and then they came back to them actually later and fixing some of these issues. So maybe just as a question, what do you, what do you think is like a sign that your OKR process is busted 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.

Starting point is 00:30:22 One of the biggest problems founders struggle with is they don't scale very well. But if you can set a good okayR and get people to work on it, then you don't have to decide all those little I see tasks, right? Like, you don't want to be drug down with that. You're, you got a job. CEO's got to figure out what's coming up down the line, not fiddling over everybody's tasks. So you set the okay R's and then you ask in the meeting, you know, what are the top three initiatives that 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. And then you can say, well, why do you think that's important, right?

Starting point is 00:31:01 What do you think that's going to do? Or I've been seeing that for weeks. Like, are you going to try something else anytime soon? You know, it's all about those conversations about is our current strategy, not just at the company level, but at each departmental level, are these strategies working? Are they moving us forward towards our goals? And so looking through OKRs, I tell people, you know, when you first started, it might take a half hour, but I fetched, take 10 minutes. It's like, 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,

Starting point is 00:31:41 the rest of the agenda. But that constant checking in 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, so I'm a teacher. I'm really into learning theory. So there's a really big concept, which is about repetition and retrieval practice. So retrieval practice means that I put a fact in your brain and I keep asking you to go back and get it again. 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? And you'd be like, oh, wait, I heard this.

Starting point is 00:32:19 Okay, I 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 a big rush, you don't want to go through a bunch of paper

Starting point is 00:32:35 to try to find what we're okay ours. You just go, boo, this is what we should do. I know what we're trying to do and I know how to make a decision about that. So I'm hearing is a lot of this comes back to, like if the meeting is not interesting and boring, change the way you run the meeting. Don't go through everything.

Starting point is 00:32:51 Maybe just pick the things that are most interesting and focus on that. You don't have to review every single key result. 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. I love it. I love learning how to learn. Feel free to share more as things come up. Okay, so I don't know. I'm trying to think Figma. I imagine they probably thought they could change this meeting. But I think maybe there's a more deep, rooted issue. And this is kind of where my next question is going to go.

Starting point is 00:33:18 was like, what do you think are just like the root issues of OKR is going wrong? Oh, my God. Maybe that's the symptom of the meeting is really boring. But yeah. Well, yeah, the symptom, it's really wrong is, yeah, it means that you're in the weeds, man. You're, you're fiddling with a little tiny bits. You got to let go of those. You have to trust your people.

Starting point is 00:33:39 So if we do the five whys, okay, why don't you trust your people? Is it you or are you hiring horribly? 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? You know, you have to keep chasing it down. OKRs are a great diagnostic tool because they tell you something's broken.

Starting point is 00:34:01 So if your OKRs are going sideways, something's broken deeper, there's also the problem of 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? 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.

Starting point is 00:34:24 I told you what my strategy is then they don't know how to make decisions. It means something's wrong with the strategy or you aren't being clear, you know, because a conversation always has two people. There's an old joke 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, you might be the asshole.

Starting point is 00:34:52 You have to think about how can I get more clear. If people are constantly bringing you little things, it's not because they're scared. It's because you're scary. So a lot of times you're okayers breaking are speaking to something else happening. And your okay, your process isn't working. Then you have to step back and go, okay,

Starting point is 00:35:11 how far deep do I have to go before I figure out what's wrong with my management team, you know, and it could be the CEO, but it could actually be some weird group dynamics, and you've got to focus on that. I really love Patrick Blanchione, five dyslctions of a team is his 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. You got to work on do your own work, and then everything else runs a little better. This episode is brought to you by writer. How much hype have you been hearing about generative AI. So much. But how do you take it from a shiny toy to an actual business tool that helps

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Starting point is 00:36:32 listeners to Lenny's podcast can get 20% off if they go to writer.com slash Lenny. That's writer.com slash Lenny. If you think back to what most often is the issue, In your experience, is it something at the top? Is it like a middle manager doing some wrong? Is it just like misunderstanding how to use OCAIRs? I think it's usually the issue with OCR's not working well. I mean, I can tell you, I can repeat everything I said, but instead I'll just say speed. People read, measure what matters.

Starting point is 00:37:02 They get their panties in a bunch. They get really excited. They're just going to do OCRs 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 say, ask your head of HR. are to implement it, and it gets implemented, and everybody's really happy, and then they're really sad, and then they spit it out, and then you say, okay, okay, ours don't work. I mean, that's what I see

Starting point is 00:37:22 over and over again. Nobody calls me for advice when they are thinking about okayrs. They call me for advice when they've done it in sales every damn time. And I think it's, what is it, the illusion of knowledge? Like, if I asked you right now, how does a bicycle work or how does a pen work, you're like, I know how that works. And if you tried to write it out, you couldn't. Well, I couldn't. Like, how does a bullet pen work? You know, okay, there's a spring and there's some ink.

Starting point is 00:37:49 I'm not sure. So really thinking about how would OKRs works throughout the company is valuable. So because you don't have time as a leader, right, what you should do is just, 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? Okay. Because the best team always wants to be better. I love piloting with the best team, but they're still very imbued in your, in your culture.

Starting point is 00:38:21 So they'll figure out where OKRs and 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, you know, little bit by little bit. That's how I tell people to start with OKRs. just figure out your best multidisciplinary team and say, you guys start and let us know. This might be a good time to talk a little bit more about your book for folks that are actually planning to roll out OKRs or try to fix their OKRs. You just talk about what it is, how to find it, what's called, anything else.

Starting point is 00:38:53 Yeah, it's called Radical Focus. I could have called it Guide to OKRs, but I think what's really important is to 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 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 it struggles they follow.

Starting point is 00:39:27 And so I think the first part's nice because it's fun to read stories. But I think what's really good about is what you noticed, which is when I talked you through this company trying to figure out with their OKRs where everything became a lot more. clear. And I think that's one of the powers of stories is seeing an 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 problem's with strategy or my problems with tasks versus outcomes. And you could flip around and figure out what's the piece I need to solve. And folks can flane on Amazon, they search for radical focus. It's everywhere, baby. And it's been translated to like eight languages, which is pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:40:04 Wow. Yeah. Which one's your most favorite language has been translated? into. Well, Chinese because it sells like crazy because apparently some Chinese actress said he loved it. And then it's been selling bigger there than anywhere else. So Chinese actresses using OKRs. What is going on? Mind blown once again. Life that's always more surprising than anything you can imagine. I've were questions. I want to ask about OKRs, but you were talking about storytelling and fables and things like that. So you also wrote a book about like not that we're going to go through all your books, but you wrote a book about drawing and the power of drawing. And also you just believe in storytelling is a really powerful tool. So I'd love to hear just your take on, like,

Starting point is 00:40:42 why storytelling is so powerful and drawing, why skill drawing is so important for product leaders at PM. I think there are some things that are fundamentally human that are built into our genes. Storytelling's one. If all of human history was a clock, we started writing things down at 11 p.m. So most of human history has been an oral tradition where we told each other's 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. So if you use storytelling, you're talking to the

Starting point is 00:41:27 most ancient part of the human brain 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 one thing I read that it kind of blew my mind was they said that if you tell people a bunch of facts, they'll forget 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, like everybody loves a TED talk. They're mostly all just stories, right? And facts sprinkled inside those stories. So I think stories are very powerful. I think images are very powerful.

Starting point is 00:42:08 Words are very abstract. If I say the word chair, what pops into your brain? Was it a big easy chair? Was it a hard wooden chair? 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, Zingha, 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.

Starting point is 00:42:37 Somebody else would go, no, no, no, it doesn't work that way. Give me this pen, you know, and start doing it. And it gets you so fast to a shared vision of what's going on. I know designers spend all this time making wireframes, and I'm like, that's the lamest use of time ever. Just get some whiteboards, go into the room with your engineers, and start making some marks together. And that just works better.

Starting point is 00:42:56 And I found that for some reason in America, people seem to think that you have to be one of the chosen few and bore in a drawer, but it's like anything. You know, it's like playing piano. You just got to practice a little bit. So the book 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 that gets pretty intense pretty quickly. 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.

Starting point is 00:43:28 Is there like one tip you could share of 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... When you finish telling a story, if you're telling it to someone you can trust, say, what's something I could have done to make the story better? You're going to find out, do I just blather on forever? Or do I not give enough details? I mean, if I only can do one thing, get feedback is always the answer.

Starting point is 00:43:58 The second tip would be structurally, there's a beginning, middle, and end. You know, intrigue people with a hook, a mystery. that's the beginning, right? A mystery is secret, a surprise. The middle is 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, see your product in, whatever. And the end is always going to be success in celebration, you know, because you're trying to get people excited about your story or remember this information. So just a basic structure in your head really kind of make a big difference. Yeah, I love that. That's like such an actionable, straightforward tactic or getting better,

Starting point is 00:44:35 people, how could this have been a better start? Great idea. Your second piece made you think about the Minto Pyramid. Do you know much about you work with that at all? The Minto Pyramid principle? I had a mental binge for a little while, but I had I moved on each other stuff. I do. It's a triangle. Yes, but I can't recount it to you. I just, I do remember. I was just going to ask because it's kind of the reverse concept, which is 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, like a hook just gets you excited. So how do you get people excited?

Starting point is 00:45:08 You can start with a conclusion. There's going to be success. Oh, tell me more. I want to be successful. It could be a mystery. Ooh, what's happening there. I want to be part of that. It could be a secret.

Starting point is 00:45:18 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. So I think you can do it backwards as well.

Starting point is 00:45:32 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's worth following. That's a really interesting perspective because to me, there were like opposites of like, build tension and you reveal the answer. The Minto approach is start with the answer. Here's what we're going to do and here's why.

Starting point is 00:45:51 And here's all the work I did to get. Yeah. Your point is that's also really interesting. You're like, oh, wow. I don't know how you got to that. There's so many ways to tell a story. Just don't bore your users. Great advice.

Starting point is 00:46:01 Okay, I want to come back to a couple more of Kia questions. It's going to be less fun than the story, maybe, but hopefully more useful. I want to just get your take on, like, what is the cadence of a healthy Ocare process? Like, what are the ceremonies and meetings and emails that are involved? I know you have this kind of weekly status email, a practice you recommend. Just like, how do you describe the system of an OCR process? Oh, my gosh. I'm glad you asked because I think the cadence is probably the single most valuable piece of it.

Starting point is 00:46:27 So 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, right? And it could be an email to your boss. It could be an email to your accountability group. It could be an email out to your team. Could be standing there like stand-up. I mean, it's very easy. OKR rituals were built on agile rituals. So there's a lot of connections there, which is great. So you just, Mondays you commit and Fridays you celebrate. 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

Starting point is 00:47:09 already getting better. The simple act of getting together and saying, 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, you know, and it's super exciting. So you have these nice bookends, and I think if you only do that, you're probably in good shape. I think status emails, I hated them so profoundly 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 him to my boss.

Starting point is 00:47:43 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 in my status email that should not have happened. I was like, fuck. And I waited to hear back for my boss and nothing. Apparently he wasn't reading him either. So I was like, what's the point of the stupid thing? And then when I was at Zingo, we were using OKRs. And they were really short.

Starting point is 00:48:03 They were like, what's your confidence level on your key results? And what are you doing last week? What did you do last week? And what did you do last week? Next week is great because it allows you to start noting down what stops you from getting shit done. And that, I got to say, there's so much learning in that. I tried to do this, but what?

Starting point is 00:48:23 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, I tried to do this last week, and I failed. 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, and P3s, if you really think you should.

Starting point is 00:48:46 But you can scam it, scam it, you can skim it, right? Go through it really quickly. And we would all send them to emails. You could subscribe to email lists, which meant I could read the status emails of most of the company. And I would know what was going on and I could quickly see who should I go over and talk to

Starting point is 00:49:03 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. And that works really well, if you have this place where you're putting your status in and people will quickly go,

Starting point is 00:49:15 you know, skim, skim, skim, skim, oh, okay, I got to talk to that guy. So it's hyper valuable. If you resume that there's the OK or Doc, you're like, here's our outcomes for the quarter, here's our three key results. You make that plan, once a quarter. Do you have any recommendation how long to spend on planning your O'KR?

Starting point is 00:49:32 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. So in an ideal world, you would grade your OKRs like week at the end of the quarter, 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, and that's it. like boom if you can do it in a bird usually you can do it in like four days total unless 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

Starting point is 00:50:18 happen over and over again so i was working with one of my clients when we came up with this different kind of approval process that's working really well is that basically instead of having your boss it. You write your OKRs. You get three, I'm a big fan of the rule of three, so 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 a 24-hour turnaround. They say, this looks right, but I don't think this is possible. They give you that feedback and you're done. That's it. That's the entire approval process. And it's so fast. And it works so well. And that means, you know, you might have to say no to somebody.

Starting point is 00:50:57 you know, if they're asking you to do more than, like if you had 10 teams asking you to look over their OKRs, you have to say no, you want to keep it down to a reasonable number. But if you do one a day, it could be done in a week. I'm thinking about companies like the size of Airbnb when I love trying to do it that quickly. And it's hard to imagine, partly because, you know, there's top level strategy that has to align with individual team road maps and dependencies with platform teams and things like that. So I imagine it's hard to do as the company scales. I like 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?

Starting point is 00:51:36 And so if tech looked at it, if somebody from strategy looked at it, if somebody from sales looked at it, whatever, the right people looked at it, you're probably fine. And if you're not right, you'll figure it out over the quarter and do better next quarter. Like, we have to let go. or we will get mired down in all this crap. I love that. Okay, so I went off track, but just to kind of put a ribbon on the concept of OKRs,

Starting point is 00:52:05 you have this document with your outcome, your key results, and then your recommendation is do a weekly email, and is the idea everyone on the team sends this weekly email to the, or Slack, to the rest of the team? To the rest of the company, if you can. Wow. I mean, the thing is like Google, even as a huge company, everybody's OKRs and their weekly updates are on their intranet.

Starting point is 00:52:25 You can look stuff up. So why not? And we'll link to a template that you have on your blog post and also I think in the book, you imagine you have this template of what it is, but essentially it's your confidence level of hitting your OKR, what you did last week, what you're going to do next week. And then a little, a few notes if you need to. Does this replace stand-ups in your experience? It could.

Starting point is 00:52:46 I never try to tell engineering how to get their shit done. but if they felt like it was doing the same job, then they could combine them. Cool. Okay. Great. Is there anything else? Is this the whole OCA process in your 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 0.08, I got 80% of the way there. But a lot of times they're qualitative. So how do you think about that like getting approved by the product, So it doesn't matter. Like, it really doesn't matter. Don't get fussy. Don't try to make it really precise.

Starting point is 00:53:26 Just go ahead and say, eh, hand wave, hand wave, 80%. What matters is why 80%. Really focus on the learning. So we almost got there. 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?

Starting point is 00:53:43 It's all about the retrospectives. Like, make sure your grading is secondary to retrospective is the biggest thing I would say. because that's what's going to be valuable. And you could spend so many hours trying to come up with some fake measurement system that never is quite accurate and just waste everybody's time when you could just be faster. I'm just obsessed with speed. You may have noticed that. I thought it was 70%.

Starting point is 00:54:04 Is it 80% of success? Is that the rule of thumb for O'Carrs? It's about 70%. Some people do 80%. Some people do 0.075. I don't know. My feeling is a good goal is one that makes you feel somewhat uncomfortable, but not doomed.

Starting point is 00:54:21 You're like, whoof, that's kind of good. That's going to be tricky. Okay, let's go for it. That's about where I like to land with a key result. I had a newsletter post with Wayne Shackleton from Cota,

Starting point is 00:54:33 and he made this point that okayers were created by Google, which is this like, like the most incredible business model in history. They just print money. And for them, it's okay not to hit their goals. Like 70% of goals, fine. It will be fine or make him so much money.

Starting point is 00:54:46 And so his perspective, for most companies, it doesn't. makes sense to set the goal to be like 70% of those goal he's set is a success. Give a 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. I agree. I find setting more ambitious goals than you think you can immediately achieve is actually

Starting point is 00:55:07 really pushes you to achieve them. And the literature agrees. Like there's a lot of literature that shows ambitious goals are actually quite motivating unless you feel your due at which point then they're demotivating. I've seen that too. Okay. two more okayar questions one is uh i noted this from before so i'm just going to come back to it there's those balance with key results of as you talked about being like very precise and like metrics driven

Starting point is 00:55:30 and and uh focus and then there's like you talked a bit about like sometimes it's okay for them to be a little fuzzy like quality and delight and those latter ones are harder to measure it's hard to to keep accountable do you have any advice or just how to find that right balance of like this is will keep you accountable and this is how we drive the business forward and this is how we know you're doing a good job versus here's a general thing 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. Not precisely necessarily, but you can get enough of a swag to be useful. So by trying to measure things, you'll start learning how to measure things. So you maybe try

Starting point is 00:56:13 NPS and you're like, wow, this is not actually. accurate or weird or not, you know, there's a lot of stuff we don't know until we try them. And of course, you know, my background is in lean and agile and design. And they're all iterative. They're, you know, 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 trying out ways to measure it and trust the team to be able to figure out whether it's working or not. Like revenue, it's easy, right? Like, this is what we're making now.

Starting point is 00:56:49 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? Do people actually like this? That's harder, but it's not impossible.

Starting point is 00:57:11 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 rack package like an NPS, or you can dig a little harder and figure out what would be meaningful to your company, you know? And I think 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? So you're really got to say, how will we know about our product and what are the approaches are out there and which one makes sense for us? final okay our related question say someone's listening to this and they're like wow this is this is awesome

Starting point is 00:57:53 I want to do this at our company we have focused problems we have alignment problems we need to be more clear about what we're working on other than buying your book and reading it and sharing with everyone what would you recommend would be the first few steps to work along that journey to rolling out in a chaos process at I hate to say this but there are a lot of consultants that have popped out out of nowhere, and it's kind of terrifying because so many of them really, really suck. And they're just like, oh, okay, ourselves like smart goals 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 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.

Starting point is 00:58:37 Yeah. I mean, I guess I think that finding someone to coach you is really high value. but I also think it would be okay if just read a book or read a bunch of blog post and start experimenting. It's not rocket science. You know, you've got like, you just listen to this podcast, right? Listen to it again. Take lots of notes, you know, 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 okay ours. You can just try, we're going to do outcome focus this quarter and let's see where it takes us, you know. But just try it because that's where you learn stuff and try it at a small,

Starting point is 00:59:20 safe level where you don't think it's going to hurt too many things. 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. So just don't do that. It's not a medicine. But that's high-preferring team. They're going to be the ones who go, oh, well, okay, 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,

Starting point is 00:59:54 like I've seen people do the coolest stuff with OKRs, totally changing what I recommend, doing wonderful things with it, just because they're smart and they messed with it until it work. Awesome. Final question and topic. You teach product management at Stanford. what's maybe a surprising or contrarian opinion about how to learn to do product management, how to get into product management, how to do product management from your experience teaching

Starting point is 01:00:21 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 in education and conferences is, I mean, it's good that they take a lot from U.X, and it is important to be people-centered. But the reality is the product manager serves the business. That's their role.

Starting point is 01:00:46 You know, when we, Teresa Torres talks about the product triad, right? Trio. Trio. Trio. She's talking about business and user experience and technology. So 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.

Starting point is 01:01:10 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 need to serve the business.

Starting point is 01:01:33 And it's not a bad thing. Like if you have a company, it needs to survive. And all money is is oxygen. And what'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, don't do anything unethical, but really focus on these questions.

Starting point is 01:01:55 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 it app purchases in your mobile devices. Go learn it. I'm really shocked at how many product managers are just smart people who care about users and just showed up and said, yes, I will be a product manager. So no, you've got a business is a real thing. It has a long history of knowledge and understanding and go 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, product sense is intuition. Intuition is compressed experience.

Starting point is 01:02:43 Compressed experience comes from having lots of experience. And if you're young and you don't have a lot of experience, the most thing you could do is learn. You know, you've got to, you've got to learn what models work and why they work. And just, uh, intuition is overvalued and under exists. Imagine that's kind of freeing to a lot of people listening where they're like, man, I just don't up. I have product sense. I've learned product.

Starting point is 01:03:07 All this like, yeah, don't worry about it is what you're saying. Any other advice for just people thinking about getting into product or trying to get into product. Other, you know, they probably all can't. 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 activities or areas they should spend time in your time? experience. I think I agree with my friend Ken Norton on this in that you shouldn't probably start in product. Go be an engineer or be a designer, you know, work, get to know businesses. And

Starting point is 01:03:41 I got into product from, well, I was a developer and then I was a designer. And both of those gave me a lot of knowledge. But when I moved into product, 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 I would say, work for a company that's small enough that you can poke into the corners and learn from other people and learn and then 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, I'd ask why. Why do you want to be a product? Do you want to be in charge?

Starting point is 01:04:27 I learned that nobody's in charge. 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 the 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 on this new thing. What do you think? Don't be a product manager.

Starting point is 01:04:55 You know, you got to have hustle. You got to talk to people. you got to always have your eye on the bottom line. And maybe you don't want to be a product manager. Maybe it's much more fun to leave work every day at 6 o'clock and be a designer and think about how all the systems work and where the error message is going to come in and is blue the right color, you know, all the combinations of that.

Starting point is 01:05:12 That's fun. Or maybe you want to be an engineer and solve puzzles all day. Like product managers play the worst job, unless you love, you know, talking to everybody and connecting them and stepping into the mess. I definitely agree there's not enough talk about how painful in heart the PM role is and how thankless it often is. And I love it, but I love everything.

Starting point is 01:05:30 I mean, I just, I love, I fell in love with the web and I haven't stopped, 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. I don't know if you know what they are.

Starting point is 01:05:50 We'll just go through them and see how it goes. I love it. What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people? The Fearless Organization. I think that book on Psychological Safety is the Bomb. It's so, so, so good. For fiction, I loved The Overstory. It's about trees.

Starting point is 01:06:10 And it's mind-blowing and so good. I'm not leaving it at that. Less is better. 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 like the Overstores, you like. story. I think I watched that movie. No, it's a terrible movie. Only read the book. Speaking of movies, what's a favorite recent movie or TV show? You know, we just saw

Starting point is 01:06:33 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 and what it meant. And 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 O-Gs of everything. thing instead of zero writing. They're just so amazing. Love it. Next question. Favorite interview question that you like to ask when you're interviewing people? What question should I have asked you? I've been using that one forever, whether I'm interviewing somebody or being interviewed because the person is an expert in themselves. And if you say, what question should I have

Starting point is 01:07:12 asked you? A lot of times, they'll be like, oof, they'll be knocked off base and then they'll give you a really honest answer. 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 would say I like Zoom better than you might think. It's like the work, it's terrible, but it's better than everything else.

Starting point is 01:07:39 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. 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 docs, everything interconnected, drive is sort of a gift.

Starting point is 01:08:17 Right. So I've got to say I love those. Oh, I didn't expect the question to get in that direction, but I love it. Two more questions. 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 to execute and ship rates. I will never forget 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, but if you're

Starting point is 01:08:50 trying to innovate, there's nothing like getting the product trio to sit together. 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 to remember stuff you're using it to think. And so the war room becomes like a living memory 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. And that's okay. Reminds me of a story I just heard from a friend where there was a team sitting next to a data science team. And they were like two table, one table apart.

Starting point is 01:09:34 They're like right next to each other. And the data team just had a lot of 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 these resources was on this thing. And the head of data science put one of the data people on the team and had them sit to the one table over with the team. Everything changed. They're just like, okay, let's do this. It's great. We're going to build some awesome products. We're human. Just that one move. We are human. We are social. Yeah. And I think moving people around every year or so, everybody hates it. Nobody wants to change desks. But do it to them anyway. It's always, it always makes things better. Final question. What's a company that you think has a really strong and

Starting point is 01:10:10 effective product culture. If you can name one, if not, that's okay, too. Well, 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 to make dog food or they want to make, you know, this kind of financial software. And 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 yeah, I think there's something really sweet around 250 people working on something that everybody agrees is important. Christina, I honor you as emperor for life of OKRs. You've achieved it. I'm very proud of you. I think we've made a big dent in how people

Starting point is 01:11:00 perceive OKRs and will utilize OKRs. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. We're good folks finding you online. They want to learn more. Reach out. And how can listeners be useful to you? If they want to learn more, I've been blogging at elegant hack.com, 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 splunking about anything. If you want to attempt to hire me, you know, see woodkey.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? Users could slow down. I just, just wish everybody would take a deep breath and think about, okay, we're going to adopt this

Starting point is 01:11:46 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. So I would encourage people if you're in a panic and you're in a tizzy and I know the economic's bad and the world's on fire, but just take some deep breaths before you do anything and just ask yourself, what's a good way to do it? What's a good way for me to move forward? I think I would like to encourage that. Beautiful way to end it. But I also want to make sure you plug your books. Just say the titles of your books and where people can find them. And then we'll

Starting point is 01:12:23 radical focus. Get the second edition. Team the bench itself. And pencil me in. Those are my three books that are out there right now. You can get them pretty much anywhere I do believe. but definitely, I mean, Amazon, Amazon rules us all. So they're definitely there. Amazing. Christina, again, thank you for being here. Well, I'll go slow down right now. Thank you so much for having me here, Lenny, and sharing your audience with me. It's been an honor.

Starting point is 01:12:47 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. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)

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