[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Product OKRs

Janna Bastow: [00:00:00] So welcome, everybody. And thanks for joining today’s webinar. So this is a series of webinars that we run here at ProdPad. We’ve been running them for years, and there’s a whole bunch of them that have been recorded. You’ll be able to find those on our site. But the focus is always on the experts that we bring in people with experience in whatever sort of area that we’re there to talk about.

And it’s a focus on the content, the learning, and the sharing. So today is going to be recorded, and you will have a chance to ask questions. So I’ll throw them into the chat there. And we’ll go from there. And so today we’re joined by Ben. We’re going to do a full intro on Ben in a moment, but we’re going to be talking about how to set product OKRs, the most effective way for this year ahead.

Everybody say hi to Ben Lamourne.

And on that note, I want to jump in and just really quickly tell you about what we’re building here at ProdPad. Know that there’s a bunch of familiar faces in the chat there. So everybody who’s already a ProdPad user, welcome. Thanks for the [00:01:00] support. I’m glad to see you here. Anybody who hasn’t heard about it, it’s a tool that was built by myself and my co-founder, Simon Cast.

We were both product people ourselves, and we needed tools to do our own job. And now it’s being used by thousands of product teams. People around the world. We needed something to help us keep track of all the ideas and experiments in our backlog, all the feedback from our customers, but also tie it up to the more strategic, like what was going on a road map and what our high level objectives were.

And so ProdPad is designed to give you control and organization and provide transparency into the product management process as well. It creates a single source of truth for all of your product decisions. So you can absolutely try it for free. We’ve got a free trial and we also, Maneesha has just posted a link in the chat there.

We have a sandbox version of ProdPad and a sandbox basically. ProdPad but pre-filled with example data. So you can see how lean roadmaps and OKRs and all different sorts of experiments play together in that space and you can move it all around and see how it’s all working. [00:02:00] And our team is made up of product people founded by product people.

We got product people throughout. So if you ever got feedback just drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you. On that note, we have something new that we’ve launched officially this month. I know some of you had a chance to try this out in the beta phase, so thank you for all the feedback and helping to inspire some of the use cases that we’ve tested this thing on.

But it’s ProdPad CoPilot. And the co CoPilot is your AI sidekick, which sits alongside you in ProdPad, and it knows what it is that you’re trying to build, what it is you’ve tried to build, what decisions you’ve made. It knows what your customers have been asking for, and so you can ask it questions. Hey, can you summarize everything from that customer, and then tell me if there’s anything on the roadmap I should talk to them about for this next call.

It can do some of your homework and you can have it come up with questions for a survey that you’re putting together. to test a particular idea that’s in your backlog. You can ask it to critique or help brainstorm around your OKRs. You can help you make a launch plan, throw things at it.

Let us know what you’re [00:03:00] using this for. And we’re continuing to be just absolutely amazed with what you can do once it’s got this sort of context to build from. So on that note, as I said, today, we’re going to be talking about product OKRs and we’re joined by Ben Lamort. So Ben is one of the world’s leading OKRs experts.

He’s got more coaching experience in this field than anyone else. He’s the founder of OKRs.com, and he’s worked with hundreds of organizations worldwide, including eBay, Adobe, Capital One, helping teams to define and achieve their most important goals. And he’s also the co author of Objectives and Key Results.

Driving, focus, alignment, and engagement with OKRs. So it’s a must read for anybody who is serious about their OKRs. So on that note, thank you, Ben, for joining us today. Everybody, say hi to Ben. Hi, Ben. Thanks for joining. 

Ben Lamorte: Oh, great to be here. What a great introduction and a nice overview of the ProdPad solution.

In fact, I was looking at that and I was saying, wait a minute, you mean I can just [00:04:00] say I have a feature and I want to know how this could be prioritized and connected to company goals? Just in that one little question, there’s so much magic that could happen because so many times people don’t even really know what their company’s goals are.

So I guess if ProdPad knows, this is a good thing. I’ll be so many. It’s like business therapy or something. Like I’m having this idea, is this relevant? Should we do it or not? So I’m really excited about the product. The first time I’ve really seen that demo really really blew me away.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. And if anybody else wants a demo of it drop us a line, say hello in the chat now, or just drop us a line afterwards and we’ll show anybody through. 

Ben Lamorte: Yes, excellent. All right. So I guess this is my chance to do my quick intro, right? I think you probably know from the chat by now that I’m calling in from California and just before the presentation Of course the best part you missed it was like 15 minutes before we just kicked us off.

We just started chatting about OKRs and the market and all that, but I’ll give you a quick history. And I’ll try to make it just as good. Okay. Jenna, you can tell me if it’s as good as our private call before this one. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, we were talking about this before. And I, the question was like you’ve been working in OKRs since before OKRs were cool.

[00:05:00] Tell me about that journey. 

Ben Lamorte: Yeah. So I started with OKRs. It was probably about 2010 and I was using it in my own company and we were of course doing it wrong, but nonetheless, there was something there that was incredibly valuable. What happened to me. Was I got a mentor who happened to be the founder of Oracle applications, which was back in the 1980s.

This guy’s name was Jeff Walker. He was also, he’s one of those, polymath genius guys. So he was also the CFO at one point. He was also the VP of marketing at one point, and he was also the founder of Oracle applications, meaning Oracle financials. In fact, he was the first developer. If you want to go back to punch cards, he built Walker interactive.

This was actually the first general ledger that was like a software program. So this guy is a legend from way back in the beginning of punch cards here. Yeah. To now. And anyway, he became my mentor and he would always ask me these questions. And later I learned that actually Oracle used OKRs and he and a gentleman named Gary Kennedy from Intel where OKRs pretty much [00:06:00] originated ended up using OKRs at Oracle.

And so the questions were things like, what is the most important thing to improve? Why is that important? How will we know that we’ve achieved that? And he became my mentor right around 2010 or so. And we started using OKRs. The famous story that I’ll give you is that you can probably tell just by the way I’m talking, energy and all that, probably half the things I’m saying are really smart, but the problem is you don’t know which half.

And so when I was at the executive meetings, I would get excited. I would have my cup of coffee. Thank you. I’ll take a sip right now and it would be high energy and people would go around the room and talk and then I would talk and I would say, Hey, everything’s going great. Jeff Walker would give me a call before the executive meeting and say, Ben, give me a business update.

How’s it going? Oh, we got the webinar coming up. We’ve got the sales team doing great. We’ve got a bunch of marketing stuff going out. The products are, we got some new features, we’re operating on all cylinders. It’s going great. And I was effectively the VP of sales and marketing, and also working a little bit with the product launches and things like that.

So Jeff [00:07:00] paused and let me stop talking for a minute. And he said, Ben, let me ask you a question. When you go on a hike, do you have a destination? And I said I have a daughter and we would go on a hike, and she was four. So we would maybe have a general idea of our destination, but we might see a butterfly.

We might see a waterfall, whatever, and we would have some fun on our hike. And Jeff said, Ben, when I ask you about your personal life, I’m happy to hear about your daughter and the waterfall and where you’re going on your hike. At work. Do you realize when you talk to me the way that you just talked to me on your business update that I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and that you’re wasting my time, and that you’re actually wasting everybody’s time that reports to you.

And basically, he just went Oracle on me. I won’t give you any of his language because it’s clearly not appropriate for recording. See, the thing is Jeff Walker was a good mentor. So he said, Ben, let me tell you how you could have answered that question, which is a hint how you should have answered that question.

And he said, begin with the destination, right? Tell me where we’re trying to get, and then pause. Make sure I understand. Okay. Now tell me how we will [00:08:00] know we’re getting there. Tell me what the key results look like. And then in that context, tell me the action plans for what we are trying to do to drive those results forward.

And then if you’re really smart, you’ll ask me what you should be doing. So that was a little bit of an arrogant thing to say, but he deserves it. And what I learned was that I had been criticized in my career. Oh, my, my thirties. I was the guy that was building spreadsheets and doing all this work.

And the feedback was always, we love you, Ben, you’re great, whatever, but you’re too detail oriented, you’re too in the weeds. And that wasn’t very helpful. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, some leadership people start telling you, you’re like this. You’re too like that.

Huh. What does that mean? What did they do? They didn’t coach me up, but Jeff did. So I started talking more here’s the objective. Here’s why it’s important. And then, you could see leadership people were Oh, wait, what? Let me adjust my glasses. What is this guy saying again?

As opposed to we got this, the webinar is filling up. We got that. They’re used to these people who are busy talking to them like that. And so OKRs started getting me talking in a way that [00:09:00] made me transform into a leader myself. I ended up doing this thing that Jeff Walker did to me. I started doing that with anyone who would talk to me, basically, for free, and nobody really knew what OKRs was, but I started doing this OKRs coaching.

And it was incredibly valuable. The most interesting conversation I had just to highlight the story. This is when I knew I was onto something. I had a mentor who was a book author, a gentleman named Wayne Eckerson. He won’t mind me mentioning his name. And he was a top guy in the business intelligence dashboard product space.

He would create all these cool tools. And I read all his books and I was like a big fan and I was trying to get a hold of him. He kept blowing me off and I said, hey, listen, I’m doing these OKRs. It’s super cool. It’s strategic. He’s oh I’ve heard of that. Yeah, that sounds really cool. We should totally do that and talk to my secretary like a year later.

I finally got a call and it was, but I’m only going to give you half an hour. He’s that’s all I have. I started doing OKRs with him. I started saying, Wayne, what is your objective with your new dashboard system, why is it important? How about two hours later, okay. We’re on this conversation for two hours and I’m actually like, Wayne, [00:10:00] I got to go.

I only blocked out half an hour, but I actually have another meeting coming in and then Wayne says, Ben, I forgot just how valuable it is to take a step back and think about. What am I doing? And how will we know we’re on track and all that? This has been incredibly useful. And he actually then brought me in as an analyst to join his business intelligence dashboard team.

Really? So I really knew that OKRs was valuable at that point. I didn’t monetize it until a few years later when the Google ventures video came out. It went public in 2014. Guess what? Google does OKRs. This saved me because. Now I could actually say the work that I wanted to do, I could do it because people heard about it.

And so that was really 2014 was when I really started to do OKRs coaching. So it’s been over 10 years. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And how is OKR, how have OKRs changed as a way of working in that time? 

Ben Lamorte: Yeah, look, there’s been a lot of change. So I would say in the early days, going back to 2014 when Google came out and said, hey, guess what?

We do OKRs. A lot of organizations started adopting OKRs around then, [00:11:00] but it wasn’t mainstream. So what I mean by this is most of the organizations that adopted OKRs in 2014, 2015, 2016, most of them were pretty successful with OKRs. They did it in a way that made sense. There were some that weren’t because they tried to, in the famous example of Sears, which is no longer even a company in the United States, but they actually, the CEO saw the Google video and just said, Oh my gosh, let’s do it, let’s roll it out.

Now, company OKRs, team and OKRs. I want 250 departments to have OKRs by the end of the month. And, and so this is not following the best practice of crawl, walk, run, which is to deploy OKRs slowly but surely. So sure, some organizations made mistakes in those days, but for the most part, for every win, there was a loss.

OKR is this kind of tricky thing to do right, but what happened was in 2018, we have the book Measure What Matters. And this book, you probably have heard of it. It’s really a big time bestseller. It’s probably sold a thousand times for every one book that I sell. There’s about a thousand matters to tell.

And so that’s the book that most people read, especially executives. [00:12:00] And this book literally is a sales pitch to anyone reading it, that you should do OKRs. In fact, I challenge any CEO to read that book and say, I don’t want to do OKRs. By the time you finish this book, you’re like, it’s inspirational.

You’re like, I got to do this now. And you have stories from Bill Gates and Bono and all these huge people that just, it’s an incredible book. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. I remember reading the book and then thinking, Oh, wow, if this is where we’re going, this makes a lot of sense. And we need to make sure that ProdPad is built in around this.

So that’s it had that effect. 

Ben Lamorte: Not only that, but I think the author John Doar talks about superpowers. And by the time you finish it, you almost think you can fly. You’re really excited. And that book got people so excited. I think some people might say that they just started doing OKRs and usually what would happen is the CEO would give the book to everybody on their executive team and they’d say, yeah, let’s do this after all the CEO said, let’s do it.

So yeah, of course I agree, but I dare you to not agree because it was so exciting, right? Don’t you want these superpowers? And then [00:13:00] somebody, the OKRs project lead, some mid level person would be on point to go implement OKRs to make this happen. And they would often fail because they didn’t have the resources they needed.

They just had this idea that we should do this, but I don’t know how to do it. And so mostly they would fail if it was, let’s do it now and get it done very quickly. So we saw a lot of adoption of OKRs around, not 2018 because the book came out, probably more like 2019, 2020, we saw a lot of adoption of OKRs.

And I would say OKRs now, it’s becoming more of a household term. When I first started, no one seemed to have heard of OKRs. Now almost everyone has heard of OKRs. And I think there is a problem, right? So many organizations have tried to deploy OKRs recently, and they have failed for various reasons.

That OKRs, like in the hype leading up to our webinar here together, Jen, it was like, yeah, there’s some things like, have you failed with OKRs? Does OKRs put a bad taste in your mouth? What do you think of? Does it get you, are you dreading your next OKR? I think a lot of people are.

Which of course is too bad, but what I would [00:14:00] say is, because you’re doing it wrong. I think if you’re doing OKRs right, this is going to be like a tautological statement, right? If you’re doing OKRs right, then by definition, it’s good. But if you’re not, then by definition, it’s bad. And so I would challenge anyone who’s doing OKRs and not feeling like they’re getting value from their OKRs program to start to reflect on, wait, what are we doing wrong?

Because we’re not doing this right. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. 

Ben Lamorte: And if you’re doing OKRs and you’re getting a lot of value out of it, Ooh, what are you doing right? Keep doing it, right? That’s exciting. And of course, if you are doing OKRs and doing it right, and you have tips, obviously, we want you to chat those in. Tell us, hey, this is what’s working for me.

We’d love to hear about those stories. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. So you talk about how some companies struggle with it. And obviously there’s a lot of companies who do really well with it. What are the sort of key elements? What are the prerequisites for making sure that you’re setting the groundwork for OKRs to work?

Are there certain champions that need to be involved or is there a certain type of business that it works well with? Talk to me about that. Yeah. 

Ben Lamorte: Great point. So first of all, yeah, there is a certain type of business that it works well with. It has to be a business that [00:15:00] wants to grow.

I have a story in my book. It’s a funny story in a way, but it’s a true story. So true and funny. I love those. And it’s literally like this one guy in Napa Valley where we make wine. He said, Oh , we should do okay. Or does it sound really cool? Went up, had a glass of wine, started talking, realized that the goal is to maintain the business exactly at 50 million, cases a year or whatever it was 50 million worth of wine or whatever it was every year.

And so there is no growth goal. So we don’t need OKRs because OKRs are not about keeping things the way they are, right? OKRs are about moving the needle. So after we realized we didn’t need OKRs, we had another glass of wine. So it was a success, but it was not OKRs. 

Janna Bastow: That’s a really good point. And actually, you know what?

Most of the companies, pretty much all the companies I work with, they all want to grow, right? We don’t deal with a lot of businesses who just have business as usual. But a question that I often get asked is how do you differentiate between stuff that you need to track as Business as usual versus what goes into the OKRs.

Ben Lamorte: Yeah. And that’s it. Tracking business as usual should be [00:16:00] done in a separate system. It’s not going to be done with OKRs. And the whole point is OKRs should be, where do we want to focus on making improvements now? So it’s not, what are we going to do? One of the problems I have with the book, Measure What Matters, is at one point when I’m reading it, it says objectives are, what are we going to do? And then key results are how we’re going to do it or something like that. And really that’s absolutely not at all true. That’s just a, it’s just like saying a banana is something you find in a grocery store. Any questions? It doesn’t tell me anything.

It’s wow. But I do want to actually stop here and do a plug for the measure of what matters because of the program because. I’m sometimes critical of it and I will argue right, rightly but they’ve got this new thing at whatmatters. com. I’m not affiliated with this. I don’t get any revenue from this, but I just watched their new OKR certification video, which is a course era class.

It’s like 40. So there’s nobody making any money here. But this actually features John Doerr doing a fireside chat with you and you’re going to get the OKRs, latest thinking from whatmatters. com. [00:17:00] And I think they’ve spent a lot of money producing this video because I watch some of these videos and I’m like, wow, this is good.

This is good stuff. And that just came out recently to my knowledge and it seems to me like it’s going to be a really good place to go to get updated information on what’s going on with OKRs. 

Janna Bastow: Oh, that’s not really viable. 

Ben Lamorte: If you want to 

Janna Bastow: get a certification, yeah. What was the site for that again? 

Ben Lamorte: I think it’s what matters.

com and we can maybe put it in the show notes or email people. But I think if you just go whatmatters, return to Google, you’re going to, you’re going to get it. 

Janna Bastow: There we go. And as if on cue, our audience is dropping those links into the chat, so really appreciate that. 

Ben Lamorte: Thank you. Yes. Audience. We love you guys.

So yeah, I haven’t been certified yet, but I did go through some of the videos and I did what I saw. What was the question again? I went off on a tangent. 

Janna Bastow: So we were talking about what are the key elements? What does a team need to have in place to make sure that they’re setting off in the right direction?

So yeah, they need to be aimed at growth growth, 

Ben Lamorte: right? Yeah. You want to grow. And so let’s just fine print that for a minute. So for example, if you’re a legal team and you’re [00:18:00] just trying to get through the year, you’re probably not going to benefit from OKRs, you’re more reactive as opposed to proactive.

If you’re a product team, OK. Most likely, by definition, we’re a product team. We’re trying to develop products. We’re trying to grow, right? Like you were saying, I think you’re going to find that OKRs can be useful from that perspective. Now there’s another component though. What do we need to do and what do we need to make, set the stage for success with OKRs?

Spoiler alert, read the OKRs field book, right? Which is the book I just wrote recently. But I will say that the one thing that happened to me that was really a turning point was in the first hundred projects I did, some of them were good. Some of them weren’t, all over the place, and I reflected on them, and I came up with this idea that I’m super excited about.

This is why I wrote the book, which is the three phase approach to an OKRs program. And this approach works. The fine print is you have to do it, right? You can’t skip the steps. So the first step is deployment parameters, which means we answer the questions that must have answers, okay, before we launch [00:19:00] OKRs.

And these are going to be things like, why are we doing OKRs? At what levels will we set OKRs? Will we set OKRs only at the company level? Will we set OKRs at the squad level or a department level? Spoiler alert, go with squads. What you’ll find is that at the beginning, people would think that OKRs should be set based on the org chart.

So you’d have here’s the company, there are these departments, like in the org chart structure, you report to that person, okay this box will set OKRs and that box will set OKRs, doesn’t work. I think I’ve seen it work maybe once, and it was with a really small company, but I’ve seen it not work like hundreds of times.

This is not a good way to do OKRs. And ultimately I found this out. I’m not going to go too far off tangents. The point is these deployment parameters, right? Those questions you need to ask. If you don’t have those answers in place, and then you go to try to deploy OKRs. You’re going to fail. That’s just how it goes.

And I’ve seen it happen over and over again. Like I’m talking about basic things. Should the O’Kara cycle be a quarter? So by default, it’s a quarter because that’s what they say in measure what matters, right? It’s a quarter. So that’s what it is. We were working with [00:20:00] PayPal. I think that’s probably fine for me to mention them.

They actually have a super cool engineering team. And one of the things that they did was they had their engineering team. I don’t remember exactly, but it was something like trimesters, which would be instead of doing three or four quarters, they did three, four months. Cycles because that was more in tune with their release cadence.

That worked for them, right? We did 

Janna Bastow: the opposite here where we actually ended up splitting up our quarters into it was more like six or seven week sort of cycles because a quarter is too long for a company that moves as fast as we do, right? If you’re a bigger company, it makes sense to have a longer 

Ben Lamorte: run at it.

Bingo. You nailed it. That’s perfect. So in other words. Tuning the OKRs program to be like a foundation of what’s going to work for your organization is absolutely essential. One of my favorite examples of this is how stretched to write your key results. If anybody talks to you about OKRs, one of the key characteristics is, hey, we set these stretch goals.

This is one of the visions of what makes OKRs so cool. But, if you write only these stretch [00:21:00] goals and you don’t achieve any of them, you’re going to walk away saying, I hate this OKRs thing. We’re not making, we’re not achieving these things. So what people have done is they’ve overcorrected and written OKRs that just look like checkbox things that we know we can achieve.

And so that’s not going to work. So you want to come up with a sort of standard way of writing OKRs at a certain level of stretch. And I think what I’ve seen to be the best practice is something that came out of a book called Radical Focus. Who is my colleague Christina Vodka, and she came up with this idea.

I don’t know if she was the one that came up with it, but she popularized it, which is, what key results should be written as 50 fifties, they should be 50%. In other words, it should be very difficult to achieve it, but it should also be very realistic. It’s right in that sweet spot of, wouldn’t it be great if it happened?

It’s very possible, but it’s also possible. It won’t, it’s in that gray area. And that’s where the uncomfortableness is, right? So it’s a stretch, but it’s very realistic. But then again, I really like that model because then at the end of the cycle, you should achieve half of your key results.

And if you achieve 80 percent of them what’s up with that? Are we setting them high enough? If we achieve 10 percent of them, wait a minute, [00:22:00] what’s going on? And anyway, so having those rules of the road, think of it that way, with those deployment parameters in place, and it doesn’t take a long time.

This could be done in two or three hours of talking through it with your team. Okay, that’s the first part. 

Janna Bastow: And, just to add to that, in my experience, it sometimes takes a few goes at it, a few quarters or cycles of these OKRs to get good at setting those goals. It’s sometimes really hard when you’re sitting here going, I don’t know how many new users we could get if we do all this stuff.

Honestly, it’s better to just come up with something. And then, you reflect on it the next quarter to say, Oh, did we do well? Okay. No, we were way overshot. I 

Ben Lamorte: plan on the first couple cycles being learning cycles. And usually I say the third time’s a charm. Usually when you get to that third cycle, you’re going to be starting to stabilize and figure out what’s working.

And similarly, I just told you, we have to have the answers to these deployment parameters before we launch. After the first cycle, we can change them. It’s not like this is how they are. So help me God. But what I’m trying to say is you have to align on them. So everybody knows, think of an [00:23:00] FAQs document, right?

I just got hired at this company. We’re doing no cares. Wait a minute. How long is the O’Kara cycle or wait. Are we supposed to write these things as moonshots or rooftops or like what all of that, right? So we have to have answers to those questions. And then once we have that in place, we can do training.

And this is the good news. There’s not much more than an hour of theoretical training on OKRs. Okay. So sorry, certification people over what was with what matters. I think maybe their training is like 20 hours. I don’t know. I don’t know the exact number, but what I’m trying to say is. Really, you don’t need 20 hours of training, okay, in my opinion, I can do a training with you and in one hour, you’ve got enough what you the way you really learn OKRs is you do OKRs, that’s probably true with everything in life, but I think especially true with OKRs, I wouldn’t spend more than an hour like when I do an OKRs training workshop, the absolute maximum theoretical training is one hour.

And I’m not kidding you, we often do 15 to 20 minutes. Christina, I’ve actually sat in on some of her workshops and she just blows me away. She’s like, all right, here’s the training objectives are this and key results are that. All right, go. [00:24:00] Her training is like literally 30 seconds. And I think people really learn by doing, and then you reflect on what you’re doing and then you’re learning in the context of developing OPRs.

So that’s actually a, I think Christina has taken this to the next level, like 30 seconds of training or whatever. Let’s just get in and do it. 

Janna Bastow: And that’s actually the really key thing is that, how they work depends on the context of your team. How is your team organized? How, what sort of levels do you have?

How detailed do you need to go depending on the type of team that you have? So many different factors like that. 

Ben Lamorte: I’ll give you one last thing about the deployment parameters. Just to show you how I was thinking. So at the time, when OKRs were presented by Google, it was like, company, department, individual.

And I think that’s, I’m blaming Google to some extent, although it’s probably not just Google’s fault. But somehow everybody thought OKRs were just departmental structure things, right? Based on the org chart. So I’m working with this company and the product team and the engineering team have different bosses.

And the product team says so are we going to do OKRs? In our product team without the engineers. And I was like I saw your org chart. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. Cause you know, there’s different boxes. [00:25:00] And that failed, I failed. I learned from the school of hard knocks that you cannot develop OKRs in the product team without the engineers in the room.

It’s just a waste of time because practically every single key result is highly dependent. On the engineering team. And they’re saying we can’t do this without the engineers in the room. So that was the beginning of my sort of opening up the possibility. I think I mentioned it earlier to the idea of the squad model, which is becoming mainstream, right?

Where you have cross functional teams that have product people, engineering people, finance, people, marketing, people, whatever, forming a little squad. And now they can write OKRs together. And wow, does that work better? This is a much better system if you happen to already have such things. Like pods or squads or what have you, cross functional teams.

Boy, OKRs can be amazing for those. 

Janna Bastow: So are those squads formed around the objectives? Are they formed around functional areas? Or does it not really matter, but it’s just that you’re using this cross functional team? 

Ben Lamorte: I would say it probably doesn’t really matter. It’s that you’re using the cross functional team.

But it would be like, and God said there will be cross functional teams, and it was [00:26:00] good, at least from an OKRs perspective, because so many times when you’re starting with OKRs, the conclusion of the first couple cycles as well, we can’t really do this because of these dependencies. And, in fact, some of the organizations I’ve worked with out of the OKRs project came to the realization that we should create squads.

And they did that. I was like, wow. And then they maybe couldn’t sit, okay. It was the first cycle that they’re doing squads. You’re forming these things. You don’t want your OKR to look like a squad and like staff the squad and that doesn’t really look like a good set of OKR.

But once you have these things in place, and once you’re trying to tackle a problem, and you’ve been doing that for a while, at least, three to six months, and you have some kind of a track record. Now, the OKRs can add value for those at that level. 

Janna Bastow: So how granular should these OKRs get?

We’ve heard about going down to the individual level versus team versus squads. Should they be something that measures up everything you’re doing day to day, or should it take a broader scope? 

Ben Lamorte: Yeah, great question. And I will say, historically, companies wrote OKRs at the individual person level.

And this [00:27:00] wasn’t very often, but it was the case that in the Google video, they recommended individual person level OKRs. After all, that’s what they did at Google. Google went on to retract that and say, don’t do that. And now I, yeah, good to know. And so I would say as a general of thumb, whatever you don’t set individual person level OKRs.

There’s so many reasons for that. I had one, one organization that I was working with. Who is no longer called what they are. And now they’re called this, let you figure out what company that is. I don’t even want to mention it. It’s a taboo word over here, but anyway, that particular company, they had achieved all their individual, like almost every one of their individual person level OKRs was like achieved, but almost all of their team level OKRs not achieved.

And the CEO could care less about the individual level OKRs. And so the CEO said, we’re not doing those anymore because of individual behavior, let’s face it, it’s CYA, right? Cover your, you know what? And what they would do is at the end of the cycle, they would say, Oh, there are these OKRs. Okay. I’m going to quickly do all the stuff that I said I’m going to do and whatever the team gets their [00:28:00] stuff done.

That’s great. But I’m not going to be the one in the spotlight for that. That’s human behavior, or human instinct or whatever you want to call it for many of us. And so individual level OKRs often tend to look like a to-do list and you really, really break down the point of OKRs is all about, which is to try to drive toward outcomes, which inevitably require not only multiple people, but at many times multiple functions.

In order to be achieved. So you really want to get, okay, is it that sweet spot? Typically it’s at a higher level. And so you would start at a relatively high level and then maybe go down to a lower level. I was working with this one organization. They wouldn’t mind if I called them out by name, it was called Zalando.

They’re a super cool company in Berlin, but they had, I told them, don’t go down to the individual person level and they kept on going down and down, and they said that’s true, but it was a very, they said, we are German, we have to scientifically prove that we, so they went down to the individual level and they said, okay, you’re right.

They came back up. They were going to try to force it down, get to a point where they said, Oh, it’s too far and bring it back up. And that’s actually not a bad idea, but they were open minded. They didn’t just say, we will do it at the individual level. Any questions? [00:29:00] That’s not the approach that you want to take.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Okay. That’s a really good insight. And so actually going back up to the more strategic, a couple of questions here Caroline asked in the chat, is there a difference between strategic goals and OKOKRsRs? And Matthew Smith asked to explain how strategic goals slash intents and OKRs can live together.

So what are these strategic goals and how are they different? 

Ben Lamorte: Strategic goals and OKRs. Okay. So look, here’s what I imagine a pyramid, right? I’m not going to show a slide because it’s pretty obvious. Here you have your sort of mission, vision, strategy. These are grandiose statements. That is pretty much timeless, or at least they go on for five years.

So they’re relatively long term and then you have gone far down enough. And pretty soon you’re talking to agile sprints and you’re talking about tasks and things like that. In between, you might have a budget and don’t get me started with that. But that’s typically an annual budget and somehow that’s, existing between the strategy and the action items that you’re doing.

Okay. Ours are typically in that sort of gray area of time. What we find is that a lot of organizations have pretty good strategies. Okay, a lot of them don’t to be fair, but a lot [00:30:00] of them have, at least they’ve defined strategies and they know what they are. And then a lot of organizations have pretty good task management systems, whether they’re using a sauna or whatever, and where they miss it is that three, four or five, six month, two months, a thing.

Like what are we trying to achieve? Or even like you said, six weeks, something like that. A little bit longer term, but not super long term in that kind of gray area. And that’s where OKRs come in. So OKRs are like a bridge from the strategy statements into the actual work that we’re going to do.

And one of the critical things to do is whenever you write an objective at that level of like the objective is typically like maybe six to 12 months out it’s not five years out. It’s also not like in the next month, we’re going to focus on this. It’s in that sort of six to 12 month, I’m giving you a range, but where do we want to focus to improve?

And by the way, now you’re going to tell me why it’s important and you’re going to educate me on why it’s important and when you do that, you should connect it to the overall strategy. There should be some way in which this objective is important because and then something about it helps us to achieve this part of our strategy.

If not, you [00:31:00] scratch your head and say wait a minute. Is this the right strategy? It’s one of those iteration things. Maybe this objective is really important. We need to change our strategy, but usually that’s not the case. So we validate our objective and then we do the why now.

We create urgency and we say, here’s why this objective has to be focused on right now because there are many possible objectives that could help us get toward our strategy. So why is this the one that we’re focusing on now? And that’s those two questions, the why and why now? It is very important to align on that with the leadership team.

And this part of the conversation is so important because now I’ve seen, in many cases, I’ve seen us throw out the objective by doing this, right? One of the stories I have is the QA team for one of my organizations. I said, what’s your objective, optimize regression testing. And I was like, really, why is that important?

And they just said that’s what we do. That’s not a good answer, right? We have to be able to say. And then I said are we not doing a good job? Is it not optimized as we are at risk? I said no, we’re doing fine. Oh, okay. Then that’s not an objective. That’s just what we do, right?

That’s not what we’re doing here. [00:32:00] We had to come up with a better objective than that. We ended up coming with work better with the engineers. And I was like, why is that important? Everybody starts laughing. I’m like, what’s so funny. And then it got emotional because they’re like we’re having these problems, the tier one things or whatever.

And so it drove an objective and we had really good why statements and why now. And it was, to be better focused, whatever. Then we brought the engineers in the room, we did the key results. So having that question that was asked is such a good question because you do have to tie your objectives to your strategy.

Janna Bastow: Excellent. That’s a really good insight. And actually some more questions around the timeframes for objectives and key results. So you’re talking about objectives being like nine ish short of months. Probably some variation there. Are key results more time bound to like the quarter or do they also have different time?

Ben Lamorte: Great point. When I say OKR is cycle time, like if I say the cycle time is three months or the cycle time is four months, by the way, the most common times are three months, four months and six months. Those are my three personal favorite times, fine print. You might be better off with two months.[00:33:00] 

You got to figure that out. I would say the theoretical maximum, this is a book I did in 2016 with my buddy, Paul Niven, who’s a balance scorecard expert. So shout out to Paul Niven. He’s a, if you’re doing the balance scorecard, if the reason we wrote the book together was he was finding a balance scorecard, not so popular, okay, I was gaining in popularity.

So Hey, let’s work on this book together. But what I’ll tell you is what they would say. A year, okay, is the theoretical maximum for a key result. You shouldn’t be writing key results five years out. It just doesn’t make any sense. The whole point of the Ocare cycle is to have a rapid cycle in which we can develop our goals, throw them away, and start over.

So key results should have a life cycle of typically three, four, or six months. Whatever our cycle time is, it’s like this objective will be achieved or we will have made progress on this objective as measured by this key result, which must be before on or before this date. So if I have a six month cycle, please don’t write key results for 10 months.

This doesn’t make any sense. You can write it for six months, but fine print in some cases you will write it for a smaller amount of time because there may be some good reason [00:34:00] why that key result has to be measured by, four months into the cycle instead of six. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And so Maura has asked a really good question here.

What are the top reasons why teams fail to meet their OKRs? 

Ben Lamorte: Are there any 

Janna Bastow: stories that you can share around this? 

Ben Lamorte: Yeah. I’m going to give you a couple of basic ones, right? So the most, this is a funny story where there was no name next to the key result. So the team would write the OKRs.

They got all excited, but there was, here’s the key result. Here’s the key result. No name. So absolutely no accountability. So that’s called a key result champion. So you need somebody to be on point who’s going to update the team, manage that key result, alert the team if there is. Blockers, whatever.

So putting a name or a key result champion next to the key result. See, it seems obvious, but some people fail to do that. Also, what’s a bummer is what we call set it and forget it. Probably about now, some of you recognize new year’s resolutions in January, we make them. Now we’re getting near the end of January.

Does anybody even remember what their new year’s resolutions were? Does anybody want to give us an update? So what we do is we try to write these things down, we get all excited and then we just go back and live our lives. And usually we can maybe get through [00:35:00] January and know what our goals are, but then we get to February, March, and we didn’t check in.

And so what we want to do is avoid the set and forget it. Pitfall and actually one of our deployment parameters is at what cadence will we review progress on these OKRs? And the tip there is to do it once in the middle of the cycle. So if you have a quarterly or three month cycle, you should have one formal check in.

Okay, in the middle of that cycle, just one, especially when you’re starting, that can go a long way. And the reason I say that is, in the old days, we used to start with having weekly meetings. So you would write your OKRs down. Every week, we’re gonna have a meeting about our OKRs and our progress. This kills your OKRs program.

It’s just too many meetings. I’ve seen it work a couple times, but we’re talking, most of the time, when we try to meet every week to talk about OKRs, it just makes you feel like, wait, we’re getting together for another meeting to talk about, we just did this. I haven’t even had a chance to make progress.

You’re basically shining a light on the fact that I’m not making any progress and I’m really getting [00:36:00] upset about this. So you’ll see pretty much like bi weekly meetings. So if you do sprints, what you do is you bring the OKRs into your bi weekly sprint as part of your overall existing meeting. So you’re, you’re integrating as opposed to creating more meetings.

And so that’s a quick tip. I guess there’s probably a lot more, but those are the main reasons that I see. These OKR products are losing their momentum. 

Janna Bastow: All right. That’s a good insight. So Dom asked could those cause you’re talking about those check-ins, could those OKR check-ins be built into your sprint retros?

Ben Lamorte: I absolutely think they can. I’ve seen people do that. Taking it super far, you’ll actually have a key result champion and they’ll say for this key result. Here’s in JIRA, right? Here’s what we’re here’s the P one or whatever. That’s got to get done. And then we can talk about those in the context of a key result.

Right? Because in JIRA, you’re not writing outcomes, right? You’re not saying achieve 20, 20 percent increase in engagement or something that’s not a thing you do. And it’s really important to know that the key result is not a thing you do. It’s an outcome that you’re shooting for.

And there’s a bunch of things you’re doing, hoping that [00:37:00] these things, if we do these things, somehow it’ll move the needle. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Can you give any examples of really strong OKRs? 

Ben Lamorte: Yeah, I’m going to give an example of some bad ones to start. So a bad one would launch this feature, right? And I see things like this all the time, or release a product demo, or do a product demo.

These are actually, and what’s funny about this is I say these things, I laugh. These are examples of key results that I see in leading experts websites saying, Here’s how you do OKRs. And they actually write things like, Launch a feature as a key result. And if you talk to most of the OKRs coaches who are actually doing OKRs coaching with clients, like me, people like me, they’re just like, no, that’s not even close to being an effective key result. It’s just, it’s not even in the ballpark. Okay. It’s not, it’s you’re not even on the right playing field here. So you have to ask questions. What is the intended outcome of launching the feature? Or what is the intended outcome of a product demo, right?

How will we know it’s good? This is the so what question and the way that I [00:38:00] like to think about it is if I’m the CEO of the company and I’m walking down the hallway and somebody says we achieved the key result, if I’m like, yeah, whatever, or even worse, if I’m like, how much did that cost me? Like I’ve seen key results that are just, launch five blog posts.

Okay. If I’m the CEO and you tell me we launched five blog posts, I’m like. Okay. Was that good? So your key result should actually be something like successfully launching the feature as measured by, right? So now we have the magic words. This is what John door calls his magic words. So if you, and this is a super important takeaway is just, if you just take that really bad key result, like launch the feature, you secretly put in the words, successfully launched the feature, and then you put in as measured by.

Unfortunately, I’m starting to convince myself that AI is about to take over my job. Because I’m giving AI the instructions on how to write a key result. It’s super easy. You don’t even need AI, actually. We could do this with basic programming here from the 1980s. 

Janna Bastow: And so you have the as 

Ben Lamorte: measured by. [00:39:00] 

Janna Bastow: I hate to tell you that we’ve primed our CoPilot AI and the in app AI button.

In ProdPad to brainstorm key results that are meant to be more leading focused and success focused and outcome oriented. And it helps, it doesn’t replace the humans, but certainly helps remove some of the the qualms around figuring out the right way to phrase it. 

Ben Lamorte: Yeah. And so you’ll have something like as measured by, and then now is where the magic part comes.

This is where this is actually the key result now. So everything we’ve been talking about is that I want to launch this feature. That’s great. That’s what I want to do. Cool. I’m not saying don’t launch it. But we have to agree and we have to align on what success looks like, basic point, right? But here’s the thing a lot of times you’re gonna say we only have a quarter. We’re gonna try to look just even launching this darn feature. It’s gonna be really hard to get done in this quarter.

And so what success looks like we ultimately want to drive revenue. There’s no way we’re gonna say, you know I get a million dollars in revenue by the end of the quarter because of our feature like so Ben you’re wrong You can’t do it. So this is what we say. Okay, I get you. Let’s break it down okay, but what will success look [00:40:00] like if you imagine you’re at the end of the quarter or the end of the cycle and we’re looking around and we’re saying launch the feature and we’re saying, and it was great.

Why do, what can we point to that says, we know it’s great. And then they’re going to say something like, oh the checkout time takes 10 seconds instead of 20 seconds or something like that. Oh, okay. Then that’s the measurable statement that we can track and say, this is why we launched the feature. You’re starting to see some organizations get to the point where if you don’t know how to measure the impact of the feature, I don’t know why we’re doing the feature unless it’s like some compliance thing or Google’s making us do it because if we don’t do it, something bad happens.

Sure. But it really is a question that we have to ask. 

Janna Bastow: And that actually really aligns with what I call the so what test, right? So show me your OKRs and imagine yourself six months or a year from now and you’ve done all your OKRs. You did your roadmap. Congrats. So what? Do you have a whole bunch of new blog posts and features?

Or have you actually made an impact? And so what usually helps you articulate how those things that you’re going to do actually connect to something more important. 

Ben Lamorte: [00:41:00] Exactly. I’ve seen with a shoe company, believe it or not, they were doing auto shoe tying. Okay. This is like an app on your phone that can tighten your shoelaces.

I know it sounds like a joke. It was for NBA players originally, because apparently like they shoot better free throws if their shoelaces aren’t so tight, but then when they’re on the court, you can imagine these people like, on apps, Oh, Curry’s at the line. Let me just adjust his shoelaces.

Of course, fine print. Is this really a market? How many NBA players are there? And anyway, they ended up finding that these shoes were super popular with old people. All people can’t bend down to tie their shoes. They’re like, this is great. Flip my shoes on. I still have shoelaces, but the problem they had was the darn things took too long to charge.

Nobody’s used to even charging their shoes in the first place. So when you’re done with your shoes, put them on the charging station. That seems weird. What they came up with as a key result was. Reduce the amount of time to charge the shoes from, whatever x to y type of a thing.

And so then they can do a bunch of features and product tests and things like that. But ultimately are going to drive them toward reducing the time to charge the shoes. Now, again, figuring out what the ultimate outcome is you want is [00:42:00] great. And then backing into what is a leading indicator, some kind of a measurable statement that you can get to so that we know we’re on track.

I’m going to give you the fine print. And this one goes out to the great John Doerr himself. Oh, not when I, back when I was talking with John Doerr at a conference, because this happens all the time in product people, you know what I’m talking about? Look at the end of the quarter, we’re not even going to launch the product.

Okay. So the cycle time is three months. We were going to be spending 80 percent of our time working on this darn product. And it’s trying, we’re trying to improve the business, but how do I write a key result for this quarter, if in fact, we’re not even we know for sure we’re not going to launch it, like we’ll actually be, it’s Q1 now we’re going to be lucky to launch it in Q2 and probably we’ll launch it in Q3 so Ben, we can’t do OKRs and I’m like, okay, I hear you.

So I posed that question to John Doerr because I figured he has seen this before. And I loved his answer. His answer was. And Q1 is on track to release the product in Q2 as measured by the VP of [00:43:00] engineering says so, and the reason why I like that is. You can try to come up with what it means to be on track.

We’ve checked off 25 percent of the items on the roadmap or whatever. And that may or may not have anything to do with the release date. And at the end of the day, the VP of engineering, assuming the CEO trusts the VP of engineering, the VP of engineering expert opinion is what we’re going by. And so I want to point out that it is actually John Doerr saying you should do this.

And I’ve actually done this with some of our clients and it can be very effective because that’s really what we’re going for. So then it drives the right behavior because the team is trying to get the stuff done that keeps the V when you update the VP of engineering every week or two, are we still on track?

Yes or no. This is going to set us up. Okay, then let’s do something else so we can stay on track because that’s the focus that they need because of that, and this was based on a company that actually didn’t even have a product. So they have no history. So you can’t say increase this thing from X to Y or reduce the time for this.

There’s no history. We just got to get the darn product launched. And so in that particular case, setting a date for [00:44:00] launching the product, being on track to launch the product by this date, that actually can be effective. Okay. R so really there it’s really, it really does depend on your situation. I don’t want to say that, any OKR, not all OKRs need numbers.

In other words, I’m trying to say it’s possible to have a good key result, even if it doesn’t have numbers. And that is a controversial statement, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it. It should not be your default. But in some cases, you’re going to go with that. 

Janna Bastow: That’s really good advice. I love that.

And so you touched on how to handle objectives or OKOs for things that are going to take more than the cycle, like a, it’s going to happen next quarter. What about stuff that comes in sideways? And wants to disrupt your work with your OKRs. 

Ben Lamorte: Yes. Then you have to sometimes throw them out.

Like I was working with one company and they had a black Friday thing happen in the middle of their November sales. And it was like, Oh my God, everything’s shutting down. It’s just everybody throwing out your OKRs, all hands on deck, work on this. So you don’t want OKRs to necessarily take precedence over everything.

And I love the comment by Paul that it feels more like an output. Absolutely spot on. And so this is what I’m trying to say. A lot of OKRs coaches will say, every key [00:45:00] result has to reflect outcome, not output. I would say, yeah. Ideal world, right? If we live in a frictionless society. If I’m ice skating, I’m just going to go right off the earth.

And that would be super cool. Maybe not for me actually, but I’m not a very good ice skater. I probably would crash and die before I got off the world. Absolutely. It’s the goal to write key results that look like outcomes. And what you’ll find again is in the real world, it’s not going to happen. So you’re going to have some key results that look like output.

And I want to break this down. This is actually such an important point. Is that okay? Jenna, if I get into this for a minute, go for it. All right. I thought about this. So this is like a bad launch feature X by the end of the cycle. That’s definitely the output. And it’s, but it’s right for the outcome. Like even what’s even worse.

I’ve seen this happen as people say, Oh, I’ll put a number on it. Launch five features by the end of the cycle. Isn’t that better? No. So if you can write it as an outcome, then, so what do you do? So successfully launched the feature as measured by doing that. In some cases, like the example I gave you, you just can’t do it.

And it’s really frustrating. In some other cases, I’ll give you another one. We’re trying to sell houses, but we [00:46:00] can’t because it takes a long time to build the houses. And then I’m like okay. Can we at least get houses like listed on the market? There’s a certain number of houses available for sale.

No. We can’t even begin to build the houses. It’s illegal to put the houses on the market until we actually have the permit and the plans approved to even build them. So we can show them the approved plans. So I said, okay what does the thing look like? We have to send in the permit requirements, send the permit requirements to the town or something.

That’s not a good key result. That’s a task. Let’s agree. So this is where, again, I would agree with Paul. It feels more like output. I’m going to go do this. It’s something I can just go do, but then we make it. Obtain the permit from the town by the end of the quarter to build units in Portland or whatever.

That itself might be very difficult, like a 50, 50, as Christina would say. So that itself could be a key result. Is it an outcome? Yeah, I have a permit, but it’s also what I have a permit for. It doesn’t, but it’s setting me up for success later. So that’s the idea of an effective, what we call milestone key result.

That looks a little bit more like an outcome, but it’s again, we’re getting into philosophical arguments. [00:47:00] There’s no numbers there and so forth. But that’s what I want you to do is keep stretching yourself toward outcome oriented key results wherever that’s possible. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. So there’s a question here about Danielle’s asked this around do you have any magic words or magic questions to go from generic business goals like increased engagement to more specific product goals?

Ben Lamorte: Ooh, that’s a great question. I do think when you start with the objective and you really pull your hair out about why that objective is important and why it is important now, you’ll probably find that you refine the objective a little bit. We had one that was, shift business to the cloud, right?

That was the objective. And people said why is that important? But as we were talking about this, it became clear, wait, do we mean the public cloud, the hybrid cloud, this cloud? I don’t remember all the clouds, but it was, we started getting more specific about, whoa, let’s align on why it’s important.

And we were, we all agreed at first that yes, we should ship business to the cloud. As we started understanding, why is that important? We realized we had completely different understandings. Of what the cloud even was, and then it became, wait a minute, there are these other organizations that don’t [00:48:00] want to be in the cloud.

They want to be on premise solutions because of some international thing. So we need to exclude them. And so what are we going to do here with that? So the objective eventually got more specific and it was like moving to the hybrid cloud for non China or something like that. I don’t remember what it was, but it was a much more specific objective.

And then that set the stage and that conversation set the stage for much more specific key results as opposed to things like. Increased percentage on cloud from 20 percent to 30 percent or something like that. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. That’s some really good take there. Thank you. So actually a really good question here from Louise.

She asked about whether it makes sense to have everyone doing OKRs or is it okay if just the product team sets OKRs? How does it work with different shape teams like that? 

Ben Lamorte: Yeah, excellent point. Again, in an ideal world, you would want OKRs to be part of the overall corporate culture where their CEO has led the initiative and everybody’s getting it. And we’re, we’re doing, okay, fine print, even then not every team should be doing OKRs because like I mentioned earlier, there’s [00:49:00] cases where it just doesn’t add value. And I, R and D is often one R and D is let’s go out and figure out what we should do with this research money and go investigate things.

And it’s not like by the end of the quarter, we will have achieved this. They’re just trying to explore. They don’t know what they don’t know. So trying to write OKR just doesn’t make sense. Similarly with legal teams, a lot of times the joke is if everything goes well, we won’t need the legal team.

So we’re not really, we can’t make an OKR. The legal team doesn’t do anything, but that’s what success would look like. That means we didn’t have any problems. The legal team wasn’t even necessary. So we have but with product teams and things like that, that are pretty proactive. Absolutely.

You should start OKRs even if your organization as a whole has not adopted OKRs. I think it’s a great framework because I’m going to give you the definition of OKRs, right? A critical thinking framework, which means you ask questions. And those questions are why is this objective important? How we know we’re doing all that.

What is the intended outcome of the feature, right? I’m challenging you to say. If you’re not asking these questions, I’m wondering how you’re going to get a, how you can even effectively do your job. These are absolutely critical questions to [00:50:00] ask. So now I’m starting to sound like John Doerr. I’m like, you really have to do this, read my book, measure what matters, and you’re going to have superpowers.

So I do believe that the questioning part of it is the superpower. And so you can even ask those questions, even if you’re not formally doing OKRs, you can say what is the intended outcome of that task, et cetera. Those critical questions, the definition of OKRs, a critical thinking framework.

Okay, I covered that part and ongoing discipline, and I’m going to pause there and say the ongoing discipline part means we’re never done. So it’s not let’s be done with OKRs. OKRs is a verb, not a noun. So it’s not like I wrote my OKRs down. Okay, I’m done. No. It’s a critical thinking framework.

I’m asking these questions all the time, not just once a quarter. Not just at the end of the quarter. I’m asking them in the middle of the quarter. I’m asking them all the time. I’m going on a walk with my colleagues saying, we’re working on that feature, how we know if it’s a success, what is our confidence that we will be able to achieve the feature completion by the end of the quarter, wait, if we achieve the feature of completion, will that actually move the needle?

How confident, it’s here. I’m saying those are the kinds of questions. And then that seeks to ensure employees work [00:51:00] together. So OKRs seeks to ensure employees work together. So again, think about it. This is not your KPIs or your bonus system that we’re going to promote, or just keep between me and my boss.

These are things we should broadcast. So if we’re a product team and we want to write OKRs, we should publish those, make them visible even to people outside our team, and then try to ask, when we ask for help, we can say, like I did with the Jeff Walker conversation, right? I can go to the engineers and I can say, Hey.

Our objective is to fill in the blank. Here’s why it’s important. Here’s our key result, how we’ll know we’re successful. But we’re dependent on you. We’re going to need help from you in order to achieve this. Now they’re much more likely to say, Oh, that seems important. Or we had in our beginning of our call, how does this feature get prioritized because of the company goals?

If we have an objective why now key results story as context. And then we ask for help from the engineers. Guess what? They’re going to say yes. If we go in there like I would we got all this stuff going on, we got all these projects, but this one’s really important, and what we really want to do is reduce the time for this thing, and we’re going to get some engineers on this because we need your help.

What do you think? They’re just going [00:52:00] to look at you like going, I’m actually really busy. So the language of OKRs can be amazing. And then it’s the final part of the definition. Focusing effort to make measurable contributions. So now, we’re going to say by definition it’s an OKR, we’re going to agree, this is what we need to focus on.

And this is where we’re going to make measurable contributions. So this isn’t just what we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to do. That’s going to move the needle and the fine print here. And this is maybe the one thing that keeps me going, okay. It’s because I’ve been doing this for over 10 years.

I’ve never had a career for over 10 years. I’ve been a big believer in seven years. I’m done. I’m doing something else, but I’m still doing this. Okay. This gets back to the progress principle, which is, engagement at work is pretty low. But it turns out the thing that really increases engagement is that feeling of winning, making progress on meaningful work.

And when you come home from a day at work and you can point to something like we did this, it’s great. Obviously, if we were building houses, we can say, hey, honey, I built my three houses. Let’s go to the pub, right? And you can see it, but when you’re a knowledge worker, it’s not like that. A lot [00:53:00] of times you come home and it’s yeah, we got this feature launched, but then, Google is going to sue us because of this.

And, I don’t know, let’s just go to the pub. So if you don’t have that vision of what is the objective and the key results to see and track and monitor your progress toward moving the needle and heading in that direction, of course, the fine print is you actually have to then move the needle and actually make that progress, but boy, when you do that.

It makes you feel like, our work is doing something meaningful and it’s making some kind of an impact and it gives you that feeling of winning and that’s what makes work in some ways more meaningful and more, more I would say engaging. And so that’s what I think is keeping me going with this whole thing.

Janna Bastow: I absolutely love that. And that’s actually a great point to finish on. We have covered so much in this session. I really appreciate you diving in and sharing your experience on this. Just a couple of points to wrap up here. So we have a an ebook here that you can download, grab that QR code or we’ll we’ll drop that link to you afterwards, but basically it’s a place to capture, sorry, it’s a guy that we’ve written on some ready made OKR specific to the [00:54:00] product world.

That’s going to be really helpful for any of you still planning to set up your OKRs for this year. Somebody asked, are we, has this been recorded? Yes, it has been recorded. So you will get a copy of that afterwards. A further thing to follow up on is to come back and join us again.

We’re going to be talking. Ctod Lombardo is the chap who wrote the book on roadmaps relaunched. And we’re going to be talking about pitfalls of product roadmapping. So come on back for that. That’s going to be February 11th. Same time, same place. And Yeah, I want to say a huge thank you, Ben, for joining us here today.

Really insightful stuff. Great that you brought real examples and real stories about how this works. How we can be sending our OKRs more effectively. So thank you so much. And for anybody who wants to try out ProdPad, we do have an OKRs module in there. It connects your OKRs directly to your roadmap.

And as I alluded to earlier, there’s some Ahttps://www.prodpad.com/product-management-ai/I magic in there that helps you brainstorm and come up with stronger OKRs. Jump in. Try it out, get a demo and we’ll show you through. [00:55:00] And so on that note, we’re at the top of the hour. I want to say big thanks, Ben. I really appreciate you being here and everybody.

Thank you for jumping in on the questions in the chat and making this such a fun session. 

Ben Lamorte: Yeah. Great audience. Love the chat. Super good activity. And I’ll just put a plug in. If you want anything from me, just send me a note, Ben@okrs.com. Just mentioned this ProdPad demo thing or whatever the webinar.

And I will actually send you a PDF preview. Of the OKRs field book so you can have an electronic copy. It’s free. So that’s easy to do. Ben@OKRS.com. Listen, again, thanks for having me, Janna. And what a great group. What fun. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, this has been fantastic. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Ben.

See you next time. Bye for now.