OKR 终极指南 | Christina Wodtke(斯坦福)
OKR 终极指南 | Christina Wodtke(斯坦福)
Transcript
Christina Wodtke: ……人们不够重视庆祝活动。我曾遇到一些 CEO 说:“当时正值季度中间,所以我们没有启动 OKR,但我们确实开始了周五庆祝活动,天哪,一切已经在发生变化,一切已经在变得更好。“仅仅是聚在一起说一句:“你这周遇到最棒的事情是什么?市场部最棒的事情是什么?设计团队这周做了什么最棒的事?“就能让人们感觉自己是一个特别集体的一部分,这非常令人振奋。
Lenny: 欢迎收听 Lenny 的播客,在这里我会采访世界级的产品负责人和增长专家,从他们在打造和发展当今最成功产品过程中积累的宝贵经验中学习。今天的嘉宾是 Christina Wodtke。Christina 是多本著作的作者、演讲者,也是斯坦福大学的讲师,教授产品管理、游戏设计等课程。她还为公司的产品开发流程提供咨询,尤其是 OKR 流程。在进入教学和咨询领域之前,她曾是 LinkedIn、MySpace、Zynga 和 Yahoo 的产品负责人,也是三家不同公司的创始人,还创办了一家名为 Boxes and Arrows 的在线杂志。
在我们的对话中,我们将深入探讨 OKR——OKR 的原子单元是什么?你的 OKR 流程可能存在什么问题?为什么你可能想要推行 OKR,或者改变你使用 OKR 的方式。此外还有:最优秀的公司如何利用 OKR,OKR 出问题最常见的根本原因是什么,健康的 OKR 节奏包含哪些要素,OKR 如何与使命、愿景、战略和路线图相配合。我们还会谈到讲故事的技巧,她也会分享她对新产品经理应该关注什么这一问题上最具反共识的观点。Christina 知识渊博,非常有趣,我知道你会从她那里学到很多。
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Lenny: Christina,欢迎来到播客。
Christina Wodtke: 谢谢,Lenny。我非常高兴能来这里。我听人提起你很久了,能亲自来这儿真是太酷了。
Lenny: 你能来上播客我更激动。我有点把你看作 OKR 之女王。我不知道你是否喜欢这个头衔,但在我心目中你就是这个地位。部分原因是据我所知,你在帮助人们使用 OKR、理解 OKR、修复他们的 OKR 流程方面,做得比我认识的大多数人都多。我确信你知道,很多人不喜欢 OKR,对 OKR 有些反感,在 OKR 上有过不好的体验。我今天想通过我们的对话,试着改变那些可能反感 OKR 的人的想法,也帮助那些 OKR 用得还行的人优化他们的流程。听起来怎么样?
Christina Wodtke: 听起来很好。不过我得说,在科技行业,要当女王有点太容易了。也许等我当上终身皇帝的时候,那才是我的头衔。
Lenny: 也许在这期播客结束时,我们就会为你加冕终身皇帝。
Christina Wodtke: 太好了。
OKR 的力量与成功案例
Lenny: 好的,这将是我们的目标。那么作为第一个问题,我想给大家一种信心:OKR 可以带来出色的产品和巨大的成功。你能分享些什么,让人们感受到——有多少公司在 OKR 上用得很好,如果你推行或优化 OKR,它对公司能产生怎样的影响?
Christina Wodtke: 我见过很多公司用 OKR 取得了非常好的效果,但我也得说,并非所有公司都能成功,这是肯定的。真正用得好的公司是那些——我想我可以稍微说句粗话——那些把自己的事情理顺了的公司。
Lenny: 完全同意,百分之百。
Christina Wodtke: 第一步就是把自己的事情理顺。他们有战略,有被充分授权的团队,有心理安全感,然后 OKR 是那层额外的助推力,让他们更上一层楼。所以我说 OKR 更像是一种维生素,而不是药。如果你用 OKR 的时候想的是”哦,这会修复你所有的问题”——不,那不会发生的。它只会暴露你公司所有的问题。但如果你已经做了让公司变得强大的艰苦工作,OKR 的效果会令人惊叹。它在创业公司中效果非常好,在跨职能产品团队中效果也非常好。我一次又一次地看到这种情况。我没有得到所有客户的许可来谈论他们,但我现在正在合作的一个客户,它是一家为特定使命而生的公司——换句话说,它存在的意义就是让客户的生活更好、更健康、更幸福。
他们用 OKR 真正创造了这样一种令人惊叹的聚焦:让每个人的生活更健康意味着什么?在应用 OKR 的过程中产生了一个很棒的想法——他们把机器人引入仓库,不是为了取代人工,他们保留了所有人,而是为了减少员工的腰背问题。员工们现在从事更复杂的任务,思考库存管理和如何提高效率,而机器人负责搬运重物。
Christina Wodtke: 他们的业务一直在疯狂增长。OKR 就是这样一种非常简单的方式,让你能够聚焦于真正重要的事情,确保你不会在日常生活的混乱中遗忘它们。所以,如果你清楚自己想做什么,OKR 就能帮助你实现它。它让整个公司对齐。我觉得 OKR 很像减肥建议——“少吃多运动”。这真的很简单。这个方法对我有效,我就是靠少吃多运动减了 25 磅。但天哪,这很难,真的很难做到。我就是这么看待 OKR 的。你只需要坚持下去,保持坚定和投入,它就会发挥作用。
OKR 的核心益处
Lenny: 你刚才说的很多内容我都想跟进聊聊。
Christina Wodtke: 好啊。
Lenny: 我先从你提到的 OKR 的好处开始。如果一定要你提炼一下——OKR 作为一个公司、一个组织,到底能为你做什么——你会怎么说?在你自己的公司里,OKR 最大的好处是什么?
Christina Wodtke: 最大的好处在于,OKR 能带来大量具体的行动,而这往往是战略做不到的。战略往往更长一些,也更模糊一些。而当你拿到 OKR 时,你会说:“这个季度我们实际要做的事情是这些,这些是我们真正要推进的数字。” 这真的很好。它创造了一种推进的节奏,这极其有价值。它创造了对齐。公司里最重要的一件事是什么,没有任何疑问——前提是你做到了”激进聚焦”,而不是每个季度搞 20 个 OKR。呃,不想想那种情况。最后,还有一点我很少见人谈到但我觉得非常棒的——因为 OKR 让你聚焦一个季度,然后在季度末你会给 OKR 打分。
我们做得怎么样?什么东西阻碍了我们?它创造了一个学习循环。于是你可以拿这些信息说:“下个季度,我们接下来该尝试什么?” 我认为时间是很多领导者真正难以深入思考的东西。但如果你真的聚焦了——比如连续一个季度、两个季度专注于留存,然后转过去说:“好了,我们来攻克获客。” 你不会把关于留存学到的东西忘掉。不是的,你是在不断积累知识、积累知识、积累知识,这意味着你的公司会持续变得更聪明、更高效。
Lenny: 我很喜欢这个。所以总结一下,主要好处就是:聚焦你、对齐、创造节奏、创造学习循环。也许一种简单的理解方式是,它就像一个即插即用的产品开发流程。你不需要从零开始发明一切。有这样一个现成的东西存在。我知道这不是它的全部,但是……你在点头,我很好奇,当我这么说的时候,你脑子里在想什么?
“犯新的错误”
Christina Wodtke: 是的,我想你必须得有一个产品开发流程,因为否则你就是在到处乱撞、像无头苍蝇一样。但 OKR 让你避免一次又一次犯同样的蠢错误——这也是我人生中的一个目标。我的座右铭是:“犯新的错误。” 所以,通过聚焦于真正重要的事情,不要把自己摊得太薄——就像 Yahoo 那封著名的”花生酱”备忘录,不过那已经是很久以前的事了,不是所有人都记得。但公司有一种倾向,就是试图在同一时刻做所有的事情。于是每个人在这件事上投入 1%,在那件事上投入 1%,又在另一件事上投入 1%。而 OKR 让你说:“好,这就是我们要搬动的大石头。这就是这个季度要发生的大事,其他那些东西你想折腾也行,但这个必须推进。”
然后下个季度,下一个大石头被搬动,以此类推。它极大地加速了你取得成就的速度,简直令人惊叹。实际上过去八到十年我也一直在用 OKR 管理我自己的生活,因为我有 ADHD,总是到处分散注意力。所以每周一我会看看自己的 OKR,说:“好,我这周要写书吗?要搞教学吗?要把注意力放在哪里?” 它改变了我个人,就像它改变了我的客户一样。
Lenny: 能举个例子说说你的个人 OKR 吗?你提到写书,那可能是一个?
Christina Wodtke: 哦我倒希望是,但其实不是——是健康。长期管理自己 OKR 的一个好处是我发现了这样一个规律:每当事情变忙的时候,我就会完全停止照顾自己。这真的很糟糕,因为如果我身体健康,我就能陪伴孩子、陪伴学生、陪伴同事。所以这个季度重点是建立健康的习惯,就像我说的,我对目前的进展非常满意。
OKR 的原子单元
Lenny: 太棒了,我之前没听过这种做法。你觉得 OKR 的”原子单元”是什么?人们常说”我们在做 OKR”或”我们没做 OKR”。那”我们有目标和计划”跟”我们真正在实践 OKR 这个概念”之间的分界线在哪里?
Christina Wodtke: 天哪,原子单元是什么?这真是一个很棒的问题。我会说:“这周我在做什么来向我们的目标靠近?” 如果你能回答这个问题,你完全可以放弃所有 OKR 的那一套东西。但如果你只是问这个问题——“这周我们在做什么来向我们的战略目标、长期目标靠近?” 这才是它的核心。因为存在一种”明天”问题——就像我孩子会说”我明天做作业”,但明天永远不会来。永远是明天、明天、明天。那么我们现在在做什么?我发现把它跟时间锚点联系起来非常有用。
所谓时间锚点,是指生日、新年、周一、季度这些本来就已经存在于世界中的时间节点。于是我们搭上这些节点的便车,说:“好,Q1 了,砰,我们停下来。喘口气,看看全局,然后说:‘我们到底需要做什么?’” 从嘈杂中抬起头来审视全局,非常关键。“然后这个季度,记住我们在那边有一个使命,有一个愿景,有一个战略。好,这个季度的重点是什么?” 然后你朝着那个方向前进。
我知道现在有很多关于成果(outcomes)的讨论,我觉得这绝对是对的。思考成果非常关键,因为那给了你解决问题方式的灵活性。但最重要的问题是:为什么?我们每天早上为什么起床?我们到底想做什么?我们有没有在产生影响?如果你能说:“这周我要做这件事”,然后在周末说:“哦,这有效”或”那没效”,然后你可以尝试新的东西或继续推进。这就是无价的。
Lenny: 这真的很有意思,你的回答不是”成果”或者”某些关键结果”或者”70% 的达成率就是成功”,而是某种更根本的东西——就是非常清楚你下周应该做什么、我们现在应该聚焦什么。而这正是 OKR 流程最终所呈现出来的样子。
Christina Wodtke: 哦,没错。我能讲个小故事吗?
Lenny: 当然。
个人 OKR 的真实故事
Christina Wodtke: 所以,这是个人 OKR 的例子,但它适用于所有其他场景。聊个人 OKR 总是更方便,因为我不需要跟自己签保密协议,这一点先说声抱歉。但我跟三位女性组成了一个问责小组,至少有五年了,每周一我们会互相发送自己的 OKR,我的方式就是按照书里写的那样来做。另一位成员,她采用的是 Getting Things Done 的方法,会列出完成百分比、正在做什么之类的,非常详细。然后还有一位成员,她的态度就是:“呃,我也不知道。我大概在想……我在想什么来着?哦,也许我应该想想自己要不要离开产品管理这个行业。”
Lenny: 然后呢?
Christina Wodtke: 结果呢,那位非常精确的成员基本上消失了。我觉得她就是无法长期维持那种程度的严谨。而那位总是含含糊糊的成员,实际上从产品经理转型做了顾问,又做了人生教练,赚了很多钱,而且真的非常开心,还买了新房子。所以我真心认为,一切的核心就是回答那个问题。
Lenny: 那个问题是什么?
Christina Wodtke: 我这周在做什么,才能走向我真正想要的成果?她的成果就是不为钱发愁,并且享受自己正在做的事。她每周一就这样问自己:“我到底在干什么?我到底想要做什么?“然后就真的奏效了。
每周追问的核心问题
Lenny: 这个框架真的很棒。所以你每周问自己的问题是:“我今天做的事情,是否在帮我离我的成果更近?“是用”成果”这个词吗?
Christina Wodtke: 对,没错,就是成果。在她的情况中,成果就是不为钱发愁、有一套房子、在工作中获得快乐。我觉得很多人会纠结于”我是不是想当作家?""我是不是想做这个职业?“而实际上,我们只是想获得满足和幸福。企业也是一样的。我们会陷入这个或那个细节中,但你需要回头去想:“我们的使命是什么?“你想想看,公司有多少时候会真正讨论自己的使命?通常是设定了就忘了,写得非常模糊,毫无用处。
使命与每周行动的力量
Christina Wodtke: 与其如此,不如这样想:“我们创立这家公司的时候,或者转型、扩张的时候”——不管你追溯到哪个节点,总有一些关键的时间点——“为什么?我们当时觉得什么会奏效?让我们回到那个有意义的时刻,重新与之连接,然后把它落实为我们每周的具体行动。“我倾向于每周一次而不是每天,因为现实是我们还是要做进度复盘、做账务之类的事情,但如果每周都往前推一点点,日积月累就会发生令人惊叹的事情。
使命、愿景、路线图与 OKR 的协作框架
Lenny: 我想深入聊聊这些概念,具体谈谈使命、愿景、路线图和 OKR 是如何配合在一起的,想要比较实操性的内容。那么作为产品经理或创始人,你推荐怎样的流程来依次梳理使命、愿景、OKR,然后是路线图?
Christina Wodtke: 我认为使命非常重要,但人们会很焦虑,因为他们觉得使命是永久的,所以为了能做任何事,就把使命写得超级模糊。但反过来想,如果使命的周期是五年,你希望五年内看到什么发生?比如可以是”我们要打造令用户愉悦、让我们自豪推出的精彩游戏”。这就可以是一个使命,“好的,接下来五年我可以做这件事”。然后总会有一个节点,你可能想要再次调整。
以游戏公司为例的季度规划
Christina Wodtke: 那么具体意味着什么?什么叫”自豪”?什么叫”令人愉悦”?真正去深入讨论这些,触及细节。然后从中会产出你的战略——比如”今年是我们的探索之年”,前提是你有足够的资金这样做。或者”今年我们要把现有游戏做得更好一点”。我今天满脑子都是游戏,因为我刚跟一个客户聊过。所以你确定了方向,好,现在我们对今年要做的事有了大致想法。接下来聊季度。OKR 可以用于年度规划,但我认为季度才是 OKR 发挥最大威力的地方。Spotify 曾谈到做季度绩效评估,因为一个季度足够长、能完成一些事情,又足够短、不会忘记自己做了什么。我觉得这完美概括了 OKR 的节奏。
Christina Wodtke: 一旦你知道自己的方向,知道自己这一年要做什么,就可以说”我们希望在四个季度分别实现什么?“我把它称为一种”半成品战略”——太多战略会把你绑死,太少战略又让你对所有事情都被动反应。所以你说,好,假设你在做一款新游戏。Q1 的重点是搞清楚它是什么、什么对用户有吸引力。Q2 则是推出早期原型、验证概念。Q3 是大规模构建,Q4 是推向市场,大概这样。你可以把这些逐步拆解成你的成果。很多以风投为导向的人不理解成果、目标——抱歉,目标、成果,怎么说都行。
Lenny: 这两个词听起来都很糟糕。
Christina Wodtke: 目标应该是能激励人心的东西。比如 Q1:“我们对这款游戏有了推动我们前进的愿景。“我也不知道,我在即兴编,所以肯定不完美。不过我确实要提醒大家,不要在措辞上过于纠结,我们可以花好几个小时打磨字眼。然后就可以问我最喜欢的问题了:我们怎么知道?我超爱”我们怎么知道”这个问题。这是你通往成果的路径。
“我们怎么知道”——从目标到关键结果
Christina Wodtke: 比如说,拥有一个我们相信会成功并符合使命的产品愿景,这意味着什么?具体是什么?我们怎么判断?可能需要一些用户测试。也许做一个落地页,看看有多少人对概念感兴趣。也许做一些技术验证,看看能不能真的做出来。有哪些东西能告诉我们”是的,继续推进”?我们可能对 VR 很兴奋,但怎么知道 VR 对我们来说是否盈利?所以一旦我们回答了那几个”怎么知道”,就可以确定到三月份我们能拿到所需的结果。我们总是会尝试构想最好的可能未来,就是那种登月式思维,我是这种思维的粉丝。但现实是,我们做这些估算的原因是为了让自己擅长估算。每个人刚开始的时候都很不擅长估算,很多人觉得这是天赋或者黑魔法之类的。但其实不是,这是一项可以学习的技能。你练习估算,就会越来越擅长,越来越好。而擅长估算作为一种商业技能,价值极高。这就是你的 OKR。至于 Q2,我们还不知道 Q1 会怎样,所以先把目标放在那里,但不急着细化到具体的 OKR 和关键结果——关键结果容易在团队中引发争论,追踪起来也很耗时。先看看 Q1 怎么样再说。这样你的战略就有足够弹性来应对新信息。
Lenny: 你提到的那个问题——“我们怎么知道”——这是用来确定目标还是关键结果的?
Christina Wodtke: 关键结果。
Lenny: 明白了。你刚才说的是目标。好的。
Christina Wodtke: 是目标。我的错,我没提前说清楚我切换了话题。不好意思。
目标的本质
Lenny: 哦,好的,明白了,说得通。
Christina Wodtke: 目标就是这个季度的愿景,是我们在这一季度要努力达成的方向。然后关键结果回答的是那个问题——我们怎么知道自己成功了?
Lenny: 那你刚才提到的把战略转化为目标的技巧是什么?怎么从战略过渡到确定本季度的目标?
Christina Wodtke: 哦,战略其实位于使命和 OKR(目标与关键结果)之间。说到战略,我最近真的很震惊,我发现很多公司似乎根本没有任何战略,这让我匪夷所思。如果你把战略看作一个坚定的假设——关于如何在市场中取胜并实现我们的愿景,那你就可以说,“好吧,我们的使命是这个,或者说愿景是……”我基本上把这两个词混着用,因为我觉得它们确实可以互换,我不会去纠结那些咬文嚼字的语义问题。但战略真的很重要,因为它说的是,“我们认为自己在通过什么方式来履行’连接人与人’这个使命?”
市面上有很多不错的产品战略方面的资料,但企业需要回答很多问题:我们要做实体产品吗?要做数字产品吗?要做成服务吗?要做订阅制吗?战略就是要回答这些问题。比如,“我们要做一款游戏,放在 Apple Arcade 上。我们有一个假设,认为这会帮助我们——我们在那里深耕,建立用户群,从而获得品牌知名度,然后再在其他平台上加以利用。“这就是战略层面的东西。然后我们说,“好的,你有了愿景,那我们具体要做什么?这对我们今年、这个季度、乃至这周到底意味着什么?“
OKR 的形式
Lenny: 对于最终产出的 OKR 来说,是不是就像 OKR 的模板那样简单——一个目标加三个左右的关键结果?你有没有推荐大家使用的其他内容?
Christina Wodtke: 没有额外的了。简单的东西反而给你更多调整空间。我觉得每次看到人们搞出特别复杂的方法论,他们就会过于纠结规则,反而不去思考我们到底要做什么。所以,简单更好。
Lenny: 那你对关键结果的数量有什么经验法则?
Christina Wodtke: 我喜欢三个。我把它想成三角定位。我总是希望有一个硬核的数字指标,有一个稍微软一些的——比如质量方面的,确保你不会忽略它,然后通常还希望有一个带美元符号的。但这当然取决于你具体的目标是什么。比如发布一个新产品——你可能想达到一定的收入,想有一定的覆盖面,然后还要有那个令人愉悦的指标。到了令人愉悦这个维度,你可以说,“用 Metacritic 评分?用问卷调查?还是用 NPS?“你可以找出最适合自己的那个。
衡量用户满意度
Lenny: 这个话题很有意思。在衡量用户幸福感、满意度、愉悦感方面,你有没有发现什么好的方法?对于那些比较”软”的指标,你见过什么效果最好的?
Christina Wodtke: 我知道现在对 NPS 有很大的反对声音,但我觉得它还行。其实很有意思,因为你可以做出一款让人们玩起来感觉很糟糕的游戏,却照样大获成功;你也可以做一个人们讨厌使用的产品,却极其成功。比如 Zoom——你听过多少人对 Zoom 破口大骂?所以问题是,如果我都在赚钱了,为什么还要在乎这个?我的回答是——你想不想持续赚钱?说到底就是留存率的问题。
Lenny: 对。
Christina Wodtke: 所以,任何能给你强烈留存信号的东西,我觉得都是值得获取的好信号。这些信号来自定性研究,没有比这更好的了。如果你的团队里没有定性研究员,我觉得你应该招一个。你需要一个懂得区分人们说的和做的、以及其中真相的人。然后把这些洞察应用到你的战略决策中,让满意的用户替你推销产品,对吧?满意的用户会留在你的产品上,满意的用户愿意发邮件告诉你哪里做得不好。你需要的是真正投入的用户,他们太重要了。
OKR 的常见错误
Lenny: 关于 OKR 文档本身还有一个最后的问题。你觉得人们在撰写目标或关键结果、确定内容的时候,最常见的一两个错误是什么?
Christina Wodtke: 目标方面,人们把它写得太虚了,以至于毫无意义。目标应该是一个真正的目标——我们做这件事是因为我们想看到这样的结果,这很重要,我们想让用户感到愉悦。有时候人们写得太虚,有时候又写得太无聊。比如,“我们要发布这个东西。“这不会激励任何人。你的目标应该让你在闹钟响起、睁开眼的那一刻觉得,“对,我今天在改变世界,我在做一件很酷的事。“而不是让你想按掉闹钟继续睡。所以我觉得目标应该有激励性,但不能荒谬。
然后关键结果方面,最常见的错误就是把任务放进去了。人们总是在关键结果里放任务,这确实容易混淆。有时候某个东西看起来像任务——比如你需要通过产品评审,那就是一个二元结果,要么通过了要么没通过。但仔细想想,它其实也是一个成果(outcomes),因为让产品评审委员会点头同意本身就非常困难。所以,确保你有真正能推动前进的成果(outcomes),我觉得这是人们在写 OKR 时犯的最大错误。
Lenny: 对。我知道你刚才随口举了几个例子,但你能不能再想一个——“这里有一个很好的成果(outcomes)的例子”?我觉得关键结果比较好写,就是把这个指标提升 10%,或者达到——
Christina Wodtke: 我们尽量说得具体一些。假设你是一家在线杂志,销售室内设计方案。你要做什么?你要给广告主提供高质量的销售线索,这非常重要。你做这件事是因为你相信每个人都值得拥有温暖而美好的家。你有这样的使命,同时你也想赚钱。那么你的战略就是关于”把人和适合其生活方式的品牌连接起来”。好的,这很棒。然后到了具体层面——这到底意味着什么?我们要全力投入推荐系统吗?我们要创建各种细分市场,在我们认为目标用户所在的地方投放广告吗?这时候你的战略就发挥作用了,因为你在做各种有趣的选择。假设我们决定在推荐系统上押注,这背后其实包含了很多预设前提。
我们需要让人们——我们需要理解他们的行为模式,然后就可以开始着手写 OKR 了。我们可以说:“好的,我们有这个在线杂志,那我们就努力让尽可能多的人从普通浏览者变成注册会员,这样我们就能开始了解他们喜欢什么。” Q1 可以主要围绕这件事——开始收集人们的兴趣档案。这听起来还挺让人兴奋的。“好的,太棒了。我们要做这件事,我们要创建人们的兴趣档案。” 那么,怎么判断我们成功了没有呢?“天哪,我们可能需要很多人来做这件事,但真的需要所有人吗?也许 30% 的受众转化过来就行——也许对,也许不对。” 如果你不确定,那就先定一个数字,到 Q3 结束时你就会知道自己是不是犯傻了,没关系,继续前进就好。
好的,很好。那他们应该做多少操作呢?收藏、标记喜欢、点赞……用”点赞”怎么样?好的,那也许他们每周需要点赞一定数量的产品。我们用周活跃用户这个指标吧。所以他们每周要点赞三样东西并呈现出来。好的,现在我们有了几个不错的数字。怎么知道他们是真的喜欢呢?也许你可以做一些用户座谈,我们用用户座谈来衡量,把用户请进来,让他们跟我们聊聊,我们每两周做一次,听听效果如何,了解更多情况。
好了,现在我们有了一些 OKR。关于关键结果,我总是建议大家花 10 分钟做头脑风暴,把你能想到的每一种衡量那个成果(outcomes)的方式都列出来。因为做头脑风暴的时候,你总是先把所有显而易见的东西想出来,然后就没什么想法了,就拿着便利贴坐在那里想:“10 分钟到底有多长啊?” 然后你就会开始冒出一些奇怪的想法。而那些奇怪的想法里往往蕴藏着非常好的洞察。所以我建议大家在做关键结果时做比较充分的头脑风暴,而目标本质上是战略在一个季度层面上的具体体现。
Lenny: 太棒了,这个例子非常好。你刚才提到 OKR 最后变成……抱歉,是关键结果最后变成了很多人的任务清单。这让我想起我们请过 Figma 的 CPO 来做播客,他讲了他们曾经在某个阶段放弃 OKR 的故事,因为他们发现自己坐在会议室里,审阅那些庞大的电子表格,里面有几百项任务——
Christina Wodtke: 天哪。是啊。
Lenny: ——那些基本上就是各个 IC(个人贡献者)手头的任务,他们有点搞不清这一切到底有什么意义?作为一家公司,你们到底想做什么?所以他们放弃了 OKR,后来又重新采用,并修复了这些问题。那么,你觉得有什么迹象说明你的 OKR 流程出了问题,需要花时间改进和重新思考?
OKR 流程出问题的迹象
Christina Wodtke: 我觉得如果那些会议很无聊,那就是一个很好的信号。OKR 还有一个我没提到的好处——它的扩展性非常好。创始人面临的最大问题之一就是他们自己很难规模化,但如果你能设定一个好的 OKR 并让大家围绕它工作,那你就不用去决定所有那些细碎的 IC(个人贡献者)任务了。你不想被这些东西拖住。你有自己的工作。CEO 需要思考的是未来会怎样,而不是去摆弄每个人的任务。所以你设定 OKR,然后在会议上问:“你们在朝着这些目标推进的最重要的三个举措是什么?“或者两个、五个,具体看情况,但要控制在少量范围内。你只想看最重要的东西,剩下的信任你的团队去处理就好。
然后你可以说:“那你为什么觉得这个重要?你觉得它能达到什么效果?“或者:“这个我已经看了好几周了,你打算什么时候换个方向试试?“核心就是这些对话——我们当前的战略,不仅是公司层面的,也包括每个部门层面的,这些战略是否在发挥作用?是否在推动我们向目标前进?所以在复盘 OKR 的时候,我告诉大家:“刚开始的时候可能要花半小时,但之后应该只需要 10 分钟。“就是那种——“我觉得这个有问题,我们需要谈谈。“或者:“没问题,看起来基本正确,继续吧。谁还有其他想法?“然后就可以进入议程的其他部分,不管是指标回顾,还是讨论一个新的合作,该干嘛干嘛。
OKR 的节奏与提取练习
但这种持续的回顾就像摸一下口袋里的幸运石,它会提醒你:“哦对,还有这件事,还有这件事。“这种节奏……我是老师,我对学习理论很着迷。学习理论中有一个非常重要的概念,叫做重复和提取练习(retrieval practice)。提取练习的意思是,我把一个知识点放进你的大脑,然后不断让你回去把它取出来。定性研究(qualitative research)对于理解用户心理非常有用。
我会问:“那我们怎么理解用户的心理?“你就会说:“哦,我听过这个。“好的,我把它提出来。其实在每周例会中也是一样的,你在练习提取你的 OKR,过一段时间它们就进入了长期记忆,你不用费力去想,就已经掌握了。而当你在匆忙中做决策的时候,你不想翻一堆文件去找我们的 OKR 是什么,你直接就能说:“行,我们应该这样做。我知道我们想做什么,我知道该怎么决策。”
Lenny: 所以我听下来,很多问题归根结底就是——如果会议没有意思、很无聊,那就改变你开会的方式。不要把所有东西都过一遍,也许只挑最有趣的部分来讨论。你不需要逐一审阅每个关键结果。
Christina Wodtke: 把会议保持在合适的层级。抱歉,我刚才扯远了。我一聊到学习理论就容易变得特别极客。
Lenny: 不,我很喜欢。我也很喜欢学习”如何学习”这个话题。随时欢迎你分享更多。好的,所以……我在想 Figma 的例子,我猜他们可能也尝试过改变会议的形式,但我觉得可能存在更深层次的问题。这也是我下一个问题想聊的——你觉得 OKR 出问题的根本原因是什么?
OKR 出问题的根本原因
Christina Wodtke: 天哪。
Lenny: 也许会议无聊只是一个表象,对。
Christina Wodtke: 对,这个表象确实说明问题很严重。意思是说你陷在细节里了,纠结于那些微小的事情。你得放手,你得信任你的团队。如果我们做”五个为什么”(five why’s)的分析——好,你为什么不信任你的团队?是你自己的问题,还是你招的人太差?好,如果你招的人太差,为什么招得差?是因为找不到合适的人?还是因为你赶进度敷衍了事?你得不断追问下去。OKR 是一个很好的诊断工具,因为它会告诉你哪里出了问题。如果你的 OKR 走偏了,那说明更深处有什么东西坏了。还有一个问题是心理安全感(psychological safety)。你需要你的团队能够说:“这行不通,我们换个方向。“而不是只能说:“这行不通,请告诉我们怎么修。“
反思领导者的责任
Christina Wodtke: 人们跑来找你说:“这个问题我们该怎么修?“公司内部出了问题。作为领导者,你一定做错了什么。你得想一想,如果有人不知道该怎么做,而你觉得:“我有战略啊,我告诉你我的战略了。“但他们仍然不知道怎么做决策,那要么是你的战略有问题,要么是你表达得不够清楚。因为对话永远涉及两方。有一个我经常想起的老笑话:如果你白天遇到一个混蛋,那他大概就是个混蛋。但如果你一整天遇到的全是混蛋,那你可能自己才是那个混蛋。我觉得这个道理非常正确。如果你的整个公司都一头雾水,那你可能就是那个混蛋。你得想一想,我怎样才能表达得更清楚?如果人们总是拿鸡毛蒜皮的小事来找你,不是因为她们胆小,而是因为你让人害怕。
所以很多时候,OKR 出问题反映的是其他更深层的状况。如果你的 OKR 流程运转不畅,你就得退后一步想:“好,我得深入到什么程度才能搞清楚管理团队到底哪里出了问题?“问题可能出在 CEO 身上,但也可能是一些奇怪的团队动态,你得把精力放在这上面。我非常喜欢 Patrick Lencioni。《团队协作的五大障碍》是他最著名的书,如果你喜欢寓言体的风格,我非常推荐。但道理是一样的——你得从顶层开始修复,得先做好自己的功课,然后其他一切才会运转得更好一些。
OKR 失效的常见原因
Lenny: 回想一下,根据你的经验,最常见的问题通常出在哪里?是高层的问题?是某个中层管理者做错了什么?还是对 OKR 的使用方法存在误解?你觉得 OKR 运转不佳通常是什么原因?
Christina Wodtke: 我可以把刚才说的再重复一遍,但我换个说法——是操之过急。人们读了《衡量什么最重要》这本书,就兴奋得不行,恨不得马上给所有人上 OKR,但他们其实没有真正把整本书读完。你大概翻了翻,并没有真正理解它的运作机制,然后就直接实施了。或者你让人力资源负责人去实施,实施完了大家一开始很高兴,然后就很沮丧,最后就把它抛弃了。然后你就说:“好吧,OKR 不管用。“这种情况我一遍又一遍地看到。从来没有人打算引入 OKR 的时候来找我问建议。他们总是在已经搞砸了之后才来找我,每次都是这样。
我想这大概就是所谓的”知识的幻觉”吧?如果我现在问你,自行车是怎么工作的,或者圆珠笔是怎么工作的?你会说:“这个我知道。“但如果你真的试着把它写出来,你写不出来。反正我写不出来。圆珠笔是怎么工作的?好吧,里面有个弹簧,还有些墨水。具体我也不太清楚。所以,认真思考一下 OKR 在整个公司层面应该如何运作,是非常有价值的。正因为你作为领导者没有那么多时间,你应该做的就是把我的书交给你最优秀的团队,说:“我们在考虑引入 OKR,你们看看是否可行。“三个月后再去找他们看看:“你们搞清楚了什么?“就这样。
因为最优秀的团队永远想变得更好。我很喜欢在最优秀的团队里做试点,但他们同时深深植根于你们的企业文化,所以他们能发现 OKR 在你们的文化里哪些地方不合适,哪些地方有帮助。然后他们可以把结果反馈给你,你就有了模板,可以推广到另外两个团队,再推广到另外两个团队。也许你可以逐步让管理团队也采纳,一点一点来。这就是我告诉人们如何开始使用 OKR 的方式。就是找出你最好的跨职能团队,说:“你们先开始,然后告诉我们结果。“
关于《激进聚焦》
Lenny: 现在可能是聊一聊你那本书的好时机,给那些正打算推行 OKR 或试图修复 OKR 的人。能不能谈谈这本书是什么、在哪里能找到、叫什么名字,还有其他相关信息?
Christina Wodtke: 好,书名叫《激进聚焦》(Radical Focus)。我本可以叫它《OKR 指南》,但我认为真正重要的是学会如何聚焦于最重要的事情并让它落地。它是一本商业寓言,讲的是两个创业创始人的故事——他们在寻找聚焦点的过程中经历的挣扎,以及 OKR 如何帮助了他们。然后下半部分——现在出的是第二版——篇幅翻了一倍,因为我开始和大公司而不仅仅是初创公司合作,需要弄清楚大公司意味着什么、它们会面临什么样的困难。
我觉得前半部分不错,因为读故事本身就很有趣。但我认为它真正好的地方在于,正如你所注意到的,当我带你走过这家公司摸索自己 OKR 的过程时,一切变得清晰了许多。我认为这也是故事的力量之一——看到一个具体的案例。而后半部分则几乎可以随便翻开一页,对照你自己的问题——“哦,我的问题出在战略上”或者”我的问题出在任务与成果(outcomes)的区分上”——然后翻来翻去,找到你需要解决的那个环节。
Lenny: 大家在亚马逊上搜索 Radical Focus 就能找到?
Christina Wodtke: 哪儿都有,宝贝。
Lenny: 好的,太好了。
Christina Wodtke: 而且已经被翻译成八种语言了,挺酷的。
Lenny: 哇,哪个语言的译本是你最喜欢的?
Christina Wodtke: 中文版,因为它卖得特别疯狂,因为 apparently 某位中国女演员说她很喜欢这本书,然后它在那边的销量就超过了其他任何地方。
Lenny: 所以中国女演员在用 OKR,这是什么情况?
Christina Wodtke: 脑洞大开。再一次证明了,生活永远比你想象的更令人惊讶。
讲故事与绘画的力量
Lenny: 关于 OKR 我还有更多问题想问你,但你刚才提到了讲故事、寓言这些话题。你还写过一本关于绘画的书——虽然我们不打算逐一讨论你的所有著作——但你确实写过一本关于绘画和绘画力量的书,而且你也一直坚信讲故事是一个极其强大的工具。所以我很想听听你的看法:为什么讲故事如此强大?为什么绘画技能对于产品领导者来说如此重要?
讲故事与绘画的力量(续)
Christina Wodtke: 我认为有些东西是根本性地属于人类的,是刻在我们基因里的。讲故事就是其中之一。如果把人类全部历史比作一座时钟,我们开始把事情写下来是在晚上十一点,所以人类历史的大部分时期都是口述传统,我们通过互相讲故事来传递知识。比如,千万别靠近那只长着大牙的大猫,因为你会死的;或者别吃那些红色浆果,因为我爷爷吃了之后吐了三天然后就翘辫子了。当然,我们讲故事比这讲得更好。篇幅较长的故事往往包含更多冲突,也会被认为蕴含更多信息。所以,如果你运用讲故事的方式,你就是在和人类大脑中最古老的部分对话,你会赢得注意力、理解力和记忆力。这不就是教师的”三位一体”嘛。所以我热爱故事。它们行之有效,能抓住人们的注意力。
我还读到过一个让我大开眼界的说法:如果你给别人讲一堆事实,他们会忘掉大部分,尤其是那些与他们既有认知模型不符的事实。但如果你把这些事实编织进一个故事里,他们就会记住。你看 TED 演讲,人人都爱 TED 演讲,但它们基本上就是故事,事实只是撒在故事里面而已。所以我认为故事非常强大,图像也非常强大。文字是高度抽象的。如果我说”椅子”这个词,你脑海中浮现的是什么?是一把宽大的安乐椅?还是一把硬邦邦的木椅?我们使用这些词语时仿佛所有人都知道我们在说什么,但事实并非如此。
在我的从业经历中——我先后待过 Yahoo、LinkedIn、Zynga、MySpace 这些公司——我发现如果我在白板前面画得特别粗糙,而且我觉得画得差几乎是重要的,随便画几笔、画几个方块,就会有人过来说,“不对不对不对,不是这样的,把笔给我”,然后自己上手画起来。这样你就能极快地就”事情应该是什么样”达成共识。我知道设计师们花大量时间做线框图,我总觉得那是最无聊的时间浪费。弄几块白板,拉上你的工程师一起进房间,开始一起画几笔,效果就是更好。
我还发现在美国,人们似乎认为画画是一种天赋,只有少数天选之人才行。但其实跟其他事情一样,就像弹钢琴,你只需要稍加练习。所以那本书主要就是教一些非常简单的画法,然后告诉你如何在商业场景中使用它们。我想做一本比《餐巾纸的背面》更简单的书——那本书很棒,但很快就变得相当深入。
Lenny: 关于讲故事这件事,我觉得大多数人的态度是:“对对对,我知道讲故事很强大。“但他们不知道该怎么做。你能不能分享一个建议?就是如何在讲故事方面稍微进步一点,或者如何把讲故事融入到产品领导者或创始人的日常工作中?
Christina Wodtke: 你说只给一个建议,那真是把我限制住了。我会说——
Lenny: 你可以给两个建议,如果那样更容易的话。
Christina Wodtke: ……当你讲完一个故事的时候,如果你是对一个值得信任的人讲的,就问一句:“我有什么地方可以讲得更好?“你会发现,我是不是啰嗦了半天没完没了,还是细节给得不够?如果你只打算做一件事,获取反馈永远是答案。第二个建议是关于结构的:故事有开头、中间和结尾。用一个钩子来吸引人,一个悬念,这就是开头,对吧?一个谜团、一个秘密、一个意外。中间部分,你可以讲一点具体内容,这是你嵌入信息的地方。如果你在推销什么东西,就把你的产品悄悄塞进去,诸如此类。结尾则一定是成功和庆祝,因为你的目标是让人们为你的故事感到振奋,或者记住这些信息。所以,脑子里有这样一个基本结构,就能带来很大的不同。
Lenny: 对,我很喜欢这个建议。这是一个非常实操、非常直接的提升方法——直接问别人”这个故事怎么讲会更好”,好主意。你说的第二点让我想起了 Minto 金字塔。你了解这个吗?你用过吗?Minto 金字塔原理?
Christina Wodtke: 我有一阵子狂热地研究过 Minto,但后来转向了其他东西。我了解的。
Lenny: 我记得是个三角形。
Christina Wodtke: 是的,但我现在没法给你复述了。我确实记得。
Lenny: 我正想问,因为它其实是个相反的思路,就是你先说结论,然后再讲你是怎么得出这个结论的。
Christina Wodtke: 我觉得这个方法很好。你想,钩子的作用是什么?就是让人兴奋。那你怎么让人兴奋?你可以从结论开始——“我们将获得成功”——哦,快告诉我更多,我也想成功。也可以用一个谜团——“发生了什么事?我想参与其中。“也可以用一个秘密——“有件事发生了,我不会告诉别人,但我告诉你。“吸引人的方式有很多,但它们都在做同一件事,就是让人们真正去听你说,而不是假装在听、在那儿点头。所以反向操作也可以。但我敢打赌,即使是 Barbara Minto 自己,她开篇可能也是以一个成功开场,以一个成功收尾——我愿意为此下注——以此来提醒人们,这是一个美好的结局,这个故事值得跟下去。
Lenny: 这个视角真的很有意思,因为在我原本看来,这两种方式是截然相反的——一种是制造悬念,然后揭晓答案;Minto 方法是先给答案,“这是我们要做的事情,这是原因,这是我为此做的所有工作”。但你的观点是,那其实也很有吸引力——“哦,你怎么做到的?”
Christina Wodtke: 讲故事的方式太多了。别让你的用户感到无聊就好。
OKR 的节奏与仪式
Lenny: 好建议。好的,我想回到 OKR 再问几个问题。可能没有讲故事那么有趣,但希望更实用。我想听听你的看法:一个健康的 OKR 流程应该是什么样的节奏?涉及哪些仪式、会议和邮件?我知道你有一种每周状态邮件的做法。你怎么描述 OKR 流程的整套体系?
Christina Wodtke: 天哪,我很高兴你问了这个问题,因为我认为节奏可能是整个 OKR 体系中唯一最有价值的部分。每个星期一,因为星期一是一个很好的时间锚点,审视你这一周,然后想:“好,我这周要做什么来推动进展?“这可以是发给老板的邮件,可以是发给你的问责小组的邮件,可以是发给整个团队的邮件,也可以是站着开个站会。很简单。OKR 的仪式是建立在敏捷仪式之上的,所以它们之间有很多关联,这很好。
所以就是,周一做出承诺,周五进行庆祝。人们对庆祝的价值严重低估。我遇到过一些 CEO,他们说:“季度已经过了一半了,所以我们没有启动 OKR,但我们确实开始了周五庆祝。天哪,情况已经在改变了,事情已经在变好了。“仅仅是聚在一起说一句:“你这周发生的最棒的事是什么?市场部这周最棒的事是什么?设计部这周最棒的事是什么?“就能让人们觉得自己是某个特别集体的一部分,这非常令人振奋。
状态邮件的真正价值
Christina Wodtke: 所以你就有了这样的首尾呼应的仪式,我觉得如果你只做这件事,情况大概就已经很好了。状态邮件这个东西,我大半辈子都深恶痛绝。我在 MySpace 带一个很大的团队,我的项目经理会把所有人的状态邮件汇总成一封巨大的状态邮件,然后由我发给我的老板。我当时忙得要命,就直接转发过去了,心想应该没问题。结果后来我仔细一看,发现里面有一件非常糟糕的事情,这本不该出现在我的状态邮件里。
我当时心想,“完了。“然后等着老板的回复,什么也没有。显然他也没在看这些东西。所以我当时就想,“这破东西到底有什么意义?“后来我在 Zynga 的时候,我们用 OKR,格式非常简短。就是:“你的关键结果信心指数是多少?上周做了什么?下周打算做什么?“这个”上周、下周”的格式非常好,因为它让你开始记录是什么阻碍了你把事情做成。我必须说,这里面蕴含了大量的学习。我试着做这件事,但出了什么状况?是我生病了?是有人对我有意见?是有人不愿和我配合?还是我们没有这个关键数据库?所有这些——“我上周试着做这件事但没做成”——其中的学习价值飙升。
那种节奏就是只设三个 P1,你不能有超过三个 P1。P2 想要多少都行,P3 如果你真觉得需要也可以有,但 P1 你可以一扫而过……扫一眼就过了,对吧?很快就能看完。我们都会发到邮件列表上。你可以订阅邮件列表,这意味着我可以读到公司大多数人的状态邮件,了解正在发生的事情,快速判断我应该去找谁聊聊,应该把谁和谁连接起来。所以那些邮件价值非凡。我现在很多客户改成在 Slack 里做了。效果也很好,只要你有一个固定的地方发布状态,大家就能快速浏览——扫一眼,扫一眼,扫一眼。“哦,好的,我得去找那个人谈谈。“所以说,这极其有价值。
OKR 规划应该花多长时间
Lenny: 假设你已经有了 OKR 文档,上面写着”这是我们本季度的成果,这是我们的三个关键结果”。你每个季度做一次规划。对于花多长时间来规划 OKR,你有什么建议吗?
Christina Wodtke: 我的目标始终是尽可能少花时间。你在规划上花的时间就不是在交付上花的时间,而且最好的敌人是足够好。所以在理想情况下,你会在季度末的最后一周,也许是倒数第二周,来评估你的 OKR,具体取决于实际情况。如果你需要整整一周来设定 OKR——我希望不需要,但也难说——然后在最后一周设定下一季度的 OKR,就这样。
Lenny: 好的。
Christina Wodtke: 搞定。如果你能在……通常你总共用四天就能搞定,除非你的组织层级非常深、规模非常大。不过即使那样,我有一个东西,我想跟你分享一下,因为我觉得没什么人谈论这个。审批流程会拖死你。我一次又一次地看到这种情况。我和一个客户合作时,我们想出了一种不同的审批流程,效果非常好,基本上就是:不让你的老板来审批,而是你写好 OKR 后,找三个——我很推崇”三”这个法则,因为我是个讲故事的,不过你也可以多一个或少一个——找三个和你合作足够多、了解你在做什么的团队来过一遍,他们只需看一遍,24 小时内回复。
他们会说:“这个看起来没问题,但我觉得这个不太现实。“他们给你反馈,然后就结束了。这就是整个审批流程,非常快,效果非常好。这意味着如果有人请你做更多,你可能不得不说”不”——如果有 10 个团队让你审阅他们的 OKR,你得拒绝一些。你想保持在一个合理的数量内,但如果你每天看一个,一周就能完成。
Lenny: 我在想我离开时 Airbnb 那个规模的公司,要这么快做完很难想象。部分原因是顶层战略要与各个团队的路线图和依赖关系对齐,还有平台团队之类的。所以我估计公司规模大了以后确实很难做到。但我认同把时间压缩到一周内搞定这种驱动力。
Christina Wodtke: 嗯,我的意思是,到底谁真正需要审批,而且如果你搞错了代价是什么?所以,如果技术团队看了,如果战略部门的人看了,如果销售部门的人看了,不管怎样,该看的人看过了,基本上就没问题了。如果你做得不对,你会在整个季度中逐步发现,下个季度做得更好就是了。我们必须学会放手,否则就会被这些破事拖入泥潭。
OKR 流程总结
Lenny: 我很喜欢。我刚才有点跑题了,不过为了给 OKR 这个话题做个收尾——你有这份文档,上面有你的目标、你的成果、你的关键结果,然后你的建议是每周发一封邮件。这个意思是每个团队成员都向团队其他人发这封每周邮件或 Slack 消息吗?
Christina Wodtke: 如果可以的话,发给全公司。
Lenny: 哇。好的。
Christina Wodtke: 关键就在这里,Google 即使作为一个庞大的公司,每个人的 OKR 和每周更新都在内网上。你随时可以查阅,那为什么不呢?
Lenny: 明白了。我们会在节目笔记里链接你博客上的模板。而且我想书里也有这个模板,但本质上就是你的 OKR 信心指数、上周做了什么、下周打算做什么。
Christina Wodtke: 如果需要的话再加几条备注。
Lenny: 在你的经验中,这能替代站会吗?
Christina Wodtke: 可以。我从不去告诉工程团队该怎么把事情做完,但如果他们觉得两者在功能上是重合的,那就可以合并。
Lenny: 好的。那还有别的吗?在你看来,这就是 OKR 的全部流程了吗?
OKR 的评分与复盘
Christina Wodtke: 还有一件事我想提一下,就是关于”评分”这个词。很多人会试图把评分做得非常数值化,比如 0.8,意思是我完成了 80%,但很多时候关键结果是定性的。比如,你怎么量化”让产品委员会批准了这个”?所以其实无所谓。真的无所谓。别纠结。别试图做到非常精确。直接说:“嗯,大概差不多,80% 就行了。“真正重要的是,为什么是 80%?要把注意力集中在学习上。所以我们差一点就达到了——如果我们再多两天就能达到,那没关系,基本上就算达到了,我们知道自己在做什么。如果我们差得很远,那出了什么问题?
这一切都围绕着复盘。确保你的评分从属于复盘,这是我想说的最重要的一点,因为那才是真正有价值的东西。你可以花无数个小时去搞出一套虚假的度量体系,但永远不够准确,纯粹浪费所有人的时间,而你本可以更快。我就是对速度着迷。你可能已经注意到了。
Lenny: 我记得是 70%,还是说 80% 算成功?这是 OKR 的经验法则吗?
Christina Wodtke: 大概是 70%。有些人用 80%,有些人用 0.75,我不知道。我的感觉是,一个好的目标应该让你感到有些不舒服但不至于绝望。你会觉得:“哇,这有点挑战,会比较棘手。好吧,我们冲一下。“这就是我希望关键结果落在的那个位置。
OKR 的”70%成功率”真的适合所有公司吗?
Lenny: 我之前有一期 newsletter 采访了 Coda 的 Lane Shackleton,他提出了一个观点:OKR 是 Google 创造的,而 Google 拥有历史上最不可思议的商业模式——他们简直是在印钱。对他们来说,没达成目标没关系,70% 就够了,没关系,反正钱赚得够多。所以他的看法是,对大多数公司来说,把目标设定成”达成你设定的目标的70%就算成功”其实并不合理。你对这个怎么看?
Christina Wodtke: 我觉得,除非你尝试去做一些你不确定能不能做到的事,否则你永远不会知道自己有多大能力。
Lenny: 我同意。我发现设定比你自认为能立刻达成的更高的目标,反而真的会推动你去实现它。
Christina Wodtke: 学术文献也支持这一点。大量研究表明,有挑战性的目标确实非常有激励作用——除非你觉得自己注定完蛋,那才会适得其反。
Lenny: 这个我也见过。好,还有两个 OKR 相关的问题。一个是,我之前记下的一个点,现在回过头来问。关键结果之间有一个平衡——就像你之前说的,一方面要非常精确、数据驱动、聚焦;但另一方面你也提到,有时候关键结果可以稍微模糊一些,比如质量和愉悦感,后者更难衡量,也很难让人负责。你有没有什么建议,关于如何找到那个恰当的平衡——既能让人有明确的问责依据、推动业务前进、让大家知道做得好不好,又不会变成”这就是个大概的方向,尽力就好”?
Christina Wodtke: 嗯。我和朋友最常争论的一个话题就是:我认为一切事物都可以在一定程度上被衡量。不一定非要精确,但你可以得到一个足够靠谱的估算值,能够派上用场。所以,通过尝试去衡量事物,你会开始学会如何衡量事物。比如你可能试试 NPS(净推荐值),然后发现”嗯,这其实不太准,或者怪怪的”。很多东西不去试就不会知道。当然,我的背景是精益、敏捷和设计,这些方法论都是迭代的——都是先试一下,学点什么,再据此做点什么。这也是为什么我如此痴迷于迭代。所以我认为,当你遇到那些模糊的东西时,就得开始尝试各种衡量方式,并信任团队能够判断到底有没有起效。
收入很容易衡量——现在赚多少,可能赚多少。或者你现在还没收入,那就去找一些上市公司的公开数据之类的。这不难。DAU 也很容易。获客数据也容易。但当问题变成”用户会不会留下来""用户到底喜不喜欢这个”——这就更难了,但并非不可能。很多用户研究员一直在努力研究如何衡量这些东西。所以你可以直接用现成的方案,比如 NPS(净推荐值),也可以更深入地挖掘,找出对你公司真正有意义的指标。我觉得很多人不愿意做那些更难、更花时间的事,但恰恰是那里藏着最大的价值。那才是你成为下一个 Netflix 或 Amazon 的途径。所以你真的需要问自己:“我们怎么才能了解自己的产品?市面上有哪些方法?哪种对我们来说最合理?“
如何在公司推行 OKR
Lenny: 最后一个 OKR 相关的问题。假设有人听了这期节目,觉得”太棒了,我想在我们公司也搞这个——我们有聚焦的问题,有对齐的问题,需要更清楚地知道自己在做什么”。除了买你的书、读一读、分享给大家之外,你会建议他们迈出的头几步是什么?开始在公司推行 OKR 流程的旅程该怎么走?
Christina Wodtke: 我不太想说这话,但现在冒出来了很多顾问,有点吓人,因为其中很多真的非常糟糕。他们就是觉得”哦,OKR 听起来跟 SMART 目标差不多,我就用那个吧”,或者因为 OKR 很火,所以我去读几篇文章就自称懂了。所以我会建议你要求对方提供参考案例。这个建议比较靠谱。
Lenny: 所以你的建议是找一个人进来帮你把这个事情做好,并且找到对的人。
Christina Wodtke: 对,我觉得找一个教练来指导你确实价值很高,但我也觉得如果你就是读本书、读一堆博客文章然后开始实验,也完全没问题。这不是火箭科学。你刚才听了这期播客,可以再听一遍。多做笔记,Google 搜一搜,看看能不能多了解一些你没完全搞懂或想深入的概念。然后跑一个小规模的试点,问问自己”这对我们来说意味着什么?“你甚至都不用叫它 OKR。你可以说”我们这个季度尝试以成果为导向,看看会走到哪里。“去试就好,因为那才是学习发生的地方。在一个小范围、安全的层级上去试,别让它伤到太多东西。
Lenny: 你还说过要从高绩效团队开始。
Christina Wodtke: 哦,对。
Lenny: 这是个很重要的点。
Christina Wodtke: 因为他们聪明、有能力,如果有人能把这套东西跑通,就是他们。如果你试图用 OKR 去修复一个糟糕的团队,只会让所有人都讨厌 OKR,而且让那个糟糕的团队变得更糟。所以别那么做。OKR 不是药。但那个高绩效团队,他们会是那些说”哦,好吧,我们的站会是这样的,那我们把 OKR 加到站会里。然后与其发邮件,不如开一个炫耀频道……”我见过有人用 OKR 做出超酷的事情,完全颠覆了我的建议,做出了非常棒的实践——就是因为他们聪明,反复折腾,直到跑通为止。
给产品经理学习者的建议
Lenny: 太棒了。最后一个话题。你在斯坦福教产品管理。从你教年轻 PM 的经验来看,关于如何学习产品管理、如何进入这个领域、如何做好产品管理,你有没有什么出人意料的或者反直觉的观点?
Christina Wodtke: 我教了这门课之后,一批原本以为自己要当产品经理的学生意识到,他们其实想当的是交互设计师,根本不想做产品经理。我觉得当前很多产品管理教育和行业会议可能存在一个问题——它们从 UX 那里借鉴了很多东西,这本身是好事,以人为中心确实重要,但现实是产品经理服务的是业务。这是他们的角色定位。Teresa Torres 提到过”产品铁三角”的概念,对吧?铁三角。
Lenny: 铁三角。
Christina Wodtke: 铁三角。她讲的是业务、用户体验和技术三者之间的关系。如果产品经理跑到这边去搞用户体验,或者跑到那边去插手工程,那谁来照顾业务?我认为产品经理必须理解这一点。他们说产品经理是”迷你 CEO”,但这只不过意味着他们想当老大,而实际上没人能真正当老大——关键在于团队协作。所以他们需要理解商业模式,需要理解如何做目标市场定位,什么是目标市场,为什么那个目标市场是值得追求的,它将如何增长,以及正在发生哪些趋势会改变这门生意。
产品经理要服务商业
Christina Wodtke: 产品经理需要为业务服务,这并不是什么坏事。如果你经营一家公司,它需要活下去,而钱就是氧气,让公司能继续运转——除非有人在贪得无厌,这种情况当然有。但关心公司赚钱、养活自己的健康与生存能力是完全可以的。不要做不道德的事,但要把注意力集中在这些问题上。如果你不懂商业模式,如果你说不清为什么要做订阅制而不是一次性销售,如果你不理解为什么移动端有那么多应用内购买,那就去学。我真的非常震惊,有那么多产品经理只不过是一些关心用户的聪明人,就这么跑过来说,“好的,我来当产品经理。” 不行,商业是一门真学问,它有悠久的知识积累和认知体系,去学吧。
Lenny: 我听下来的感受是,在你看来,产品感可能被高估了。
Christina Wodtke: 他们之中还没有任何人年纪大到足以拥有产品感。说真的。产品感就是直觉,直觉是压缩后的经验,压缩后的经验来自于大量的经验积累。如果你年轻、经验不多,最明智的做法就是学习。你必须学习哪些模型有效、为什么有效。直觉被高估了,而且实际上根本没多少人有。
Lenny: 我想这对很多听众来说可能是一种解脱——他们会想,“天哪,我就是不知道自己有没有产品感。怎么才能学到产品感?” 诸如此类。你的意思就是,别担心。对于那些想进入产品领域的人,除了——很多人没办法去斯坦福跟你学产品——你还有什么其他建议?在你看来,他们还应该做些什么来帮助自己进入产品经理的岗位?
不要从产品经理起步
Christina Wodtke: 在这一点上我同意我的朋友 Ken Norton 的看法:你不应该一开始就做产品。去做工程师,或者做设计师,去工作,去了解商业。我进入产品领域之前,先是做了开发,然后做了设计,这两段经历给了我很多知识。但我真正转向产品,是从我的创业公司开始的——我必须学商业,不学就没法活。所以我的建议是,去一家足够小的公司工作,小到你可以四处探看、跟别人学习,学到了就动手做事。
说来有趣,我在斯坦福,顶着光鲜的学位和头衔,但我总是说,“不不不,多读书,多跟人交流,找份工作,自己摸索。” 因为我自己就是这么走过来的。如果有人想进入产品领域,我会先问,“为什么?你为什么想做产品?你是想当负责人吗?” 我学到的是,没有人是负责人。不管你做什么,你都必须依靠影响力,依靠人际交往能力。
你愿意在人际互动上下功夫吗?因为如果你不能开除一个人,如果你不能告诉某个人他的行为正在妨碍事情的推进,那就别做产品经理。如果你无法解决两个同事之间的冲突,别做产品经理。如果你不能在星巴克排队时走过去对人说,“嘿,我们正在做这个新东西,你觉得怎么样?“——那就别做产品经理。你得有冲劲,得跟人交流,得时刻盯着底线。
也许你并不想当产品经理。也许每天六点下班当个设计师,想想所有系统怎么运转、错误信息会在哪里出现、蓝色是不是合适的颜色,各种细节的排列组合——那才更开心。或者你真正想做的是当工程师,整天解谜题。产品经理可能是最糟糕的工作——除非你热爱跟所有人交谈、把他们连接起来、主动踏入混乱之中。
Lenny: 我非常同意。关于产品经理这个角色有多痛苦、多艰难,以及常常多么吃力不讨好,大家谈得太少了。
Christina Wodtke: 但我爱这个角色,不过我什么都爱。我爱上了互联网,至今没有停下,尽管现在大多是在手机上了。这是一个令人兴奋的领域。但没错,你得站出来,去做那些难做的事。
闪电问答
Lenny: 用这句话收尾太棒了。接下来进入我们非常令人期待的闪电问答环节,我准备了六个快问快答。你大概不知道问题是什么,那我们就一个一个来吧。准备好了吗?
Christina Wodtke: 我很期待。
Lenny: 你最常推荐给别人的两三本书是什么?
Christina Wodtke: 《The Fearless Organization》。我觉得那本讲心理安全感的书简直太棒了,真的非常好。小说的话,我喜欢《The Overstory》,是关于树的故事,令人震撼,非常精彩。就说到这里,少即是多。
Lenny: 我试着读过《The Overstory》,非常长,但很美。
Christina Wodtke: 很像《Cloud Atlas》。如果你喜欢《Cloud Atlas》,你也会喜欢《The Overstory》。
Lenny: 我想我看过那部电影。
Christina Wodtke: 不行,那电影糟透了。只看书。
Lenny: 同意。说到电影,最近最喜欢的电影或电视剧是什么?
Christina Wodtke: 我们刚看了《Wakanda Forever》,它和《Black Panther》很不一样,我和孩子花了不少时间讨论它的含义,比我想象的要深刻得多。我对玛雅人很有热情,因为我每年有一部分时间住在伯利兹,我不知道,玛雅人就是一切的开创者——发明了零、发明了文字,太了不起了。
Lenny: 好极了。下一个问题,你面试别人时最喜欢问的面试题是什么?
Christina Wodtke: “你觉得我应该问你什么问题?” 这道题我用了很多年,不管是面试别人还是被面试的时候。因为每个人都是自己的专家。如果你问”你觉得我应该问你什么问题?” 很多时候对方会一愣,“哦——” 被打个措手不及,然后给你一个非常诚实的回答。
Lenny: 你经常使用的、非常喜欢的五个 SaaS 产品或工具是什么?
Christina Wodtke: 哦,我讨厌所有技术产品。问题就在这里——当你做过产品经理和设计师,你眼里看到的就全是缺陷。不过我得说,我比你可能想象的更喜欢 Zoom。它很糟糕,但比其他所有东西都好。Slack,我第一次看到它的时候就说,“这不会消灭邮件的,这只是又一个信息噪音渠道。” 事实也确实如此。但我确实在用,天知道我有多依赖它。
Google Suite,我得说 Google Suite 确实很棒。大多数人以为斯坦福的学生都很富有,但百分之七十的学生拿到了大量的助学金。所以我一直在找那些免费的、不会让学生花太多钱的东西。他们中很多人是第一代大学生,是家里第一个上大学的人。所以能有 Google Suite,有免费的幻灯片、免费的文档,所有东西互联互通,Drive 简直是一份礼物。所以我得说我确实喜欢这些。
一个小改变带来大影响
Lenny: 很酷。我没想到这个问题会把话题带向这个方向,但我很喜欢。还有两个问题。在你合作过的公司中,有没有看到他们在产品开发流程中做了一个相对小的改变,却对执行和交付能力产生了巨大影响?
Christina Wodtke: 我永远不会忘记的一个变化是:人们不再按职能坐在一起,而是按团队坐在一起。我觉得我们科技行业想让一切都变成科技化的、远程的,诸如此类。确实有很多工作非常适合远程,但如果你想要创新,没有什么比让产品铁三角坐在一起更好的了,而且最好有墙。墙真的被严重低估了。如果你能给他们一间作战室,让他们可以在墙上贴东西,或者——我不太想说这个词——隔间,我更希望是独立办公室,但只要你能给人一面墙,那面墙就会成为你记忆的一部分。这样你就不会把短期记忆用来记住各种信息,而是用来思考。作战室变成了一种活的记忆,让你能发现各种联系。这也是我教学生时最困难的事情之一——有些事情就是用模拟方式做更好,这没什么问题。
Lenny: 这让我想起最近从一个朋友那里听来的故事。有一个团队坐在数据科学团队旁边,只隔着一张桌子,紧挨着。数据团队对他们正在做的东西有很多疑虑,不相信他们在做的事,觉得”为什么我们要在这些东西上浪费资源?“然后数据科学的负责人把一个数据人员放到了那个团队里,让他们就坐在旁边,隔一张桌子。一切都变了。他们立刻就说,“好,我们干吧。这很棒。我们要做出一些很棒的产品。”
Christina Wodtke: 因为我们是人。
Lenny: 仅仅这一个调整。
Christina Wodtke: 我们是人,是社会化动物。对,我觉得大约每隔一年左右把人挪一挪位置,所有人都讨厌,没人想换座位,但还是得做。每次都会让事情变得更好。
谁拥有强大的产品文化
Lenny: 最后一个问题。你认为哪家公司拥有真正强大而有效的产品文化?如果能说出一家的话,说不出来也没关系。
Christina Wodtke: 嗯,回顾我所有的客户,拥有最好文化的公司似乎都是些非常小的公司,在世界上各种奇特的角落里工作。不是那些光鲜的大公司。每个人都在那里是因为他们想做狗粮,或者想做某种特定的金融软件,他们非常出色。我觉得我们把规模化当作一种美德,但它充其量只是一种策略,甚至可能是一种糟糕的策略。所以,是的,我觉得大约250个人一起做一件所有人都认同其重要性的事情,这其中有一种很美好的东西。
Lenny: Christina,我尊你为 OKR 的终身皇帝。
Christina Wodtke: 哇哦。
Lenny: 你做到了。我为你感到骄傲。我觉得我们在改变人们对 OKR 的认知和使用方式上,已经产生了重大影响。
Christina Wodtke: 希望如此。
放慢脚步
Lenny: 非常感谢你来这里。最后两个问题。如果大家想了解更多或联系你,在网上哪里可以找到你?听众怎样才能帮到你?
Christina Wodtke: 如果想了解更多,我从2000年起就在 eleganthack.com 上写博客了,像一个默默耕耘的写作者一样。那是我倾倒想法的地方已经有很长时间了,所以如果你想就任何话题深入挖掘,那里是个好去处。如果你想尝试雇佣我,cwodtke.com 也不失为一个好去处。我说”尝试”,是因为我在教书,所以时间不多。但你知道用户能做什么吗?用户可以放慢脚步。我真希望每个人都能深呼吸一下,想一想,“好,我们要采用这个东西。让我们先读一读相关资料,好好想想。哦,我们要做这个新产品?让我们做一下文献综述,做一下竞品分析,看看别人做过什么,从过去中学习。”
我觉得如果你能放慢脚步,最终会走得快得多。所以我想鼓励大家,如果你正处在焦虑和慌乱之中——我知道经济不好,世界也在着火——但在做任何事情之前,先深呼吸几口气,问问自己,“什么是好的做法?什么是让我向前推进的好方式?“我想鼓励大家这样做。
Lenny: 一个很美的结尾方式,但我也想确保你推介一下你的书。说一下你书的标题和人们在哪里可以找到它们,然后我们就……
Christina Wodtke: 《激进聚焦》,请买第二版。《The Team That Managed Itself》。还有《Pencil Me In》。这是我目前出版的三本书。我相信你在几乎所有地方都能买到,但肯定是,嗯,亚马逊。亚马逊统治了我们所有人,所以那里肯定有。
Lenny: 太棒了。Christina,再次感谢你来到这里。我们大家都去放慢脚步了。
Christina Wodtke: 非常感谢你邀请我来,Lenny,感谢你把你的听众分享给我。这是我的荣幸。
Lenny: 大家再见。非常感谢你的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅节目。另外,也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,这对其他听众发现这个播客很有帮助。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| ADHD | ADHD(注意力缺陷多动障碍) |
| agile | 敏捷 |
| Back of the Napkin | 《餐巾纸的背面》 |
| Barbara Minto | Barbara Minto |
| Black Panther | 《Black Panther》 |
| Cloud Atlas | 《Cloud Atlas》 |
| competitive analysis | 竞品分析 |
| Five Dysfunctions of a Team | 《团队协作的五大障碍》 |
| five why’s | 五个为什么 |
| Google Suite | Google Suite |
| IC (Individual Contributor) | IC(个人贡献者) |
| illusion of knowledge | 知识的幻觉 |
| Ken Norton | Ken Norton |
| Lane Shackleton | Lane Shackleton |
| lean | 精益 |
| literature review | 文献综述 |
| Measure What Matters | 《衡量什么最重要》 |
| Minto Pyramid | Minto 金字塔 |
| NPS | NPS(净推荐值) |
| OKRs | OKR(目标与关键结果) |
| outcomes | 成果 |
| P1/P2/P3 | P1/P2/P3(优先级分级) |
| Patrick Lencioni | Patrick Lencioni |
| peanut butter memo | 花生酱备忘录 |
| Pencil Me In | 《Pencil Me In》 |
| product trio | 产品铁三角 |
| psychological safety | 心理安全感 |
| qualitative research | 定性研究 |
| radical focus | 激进聚焦 |
| Radical Focus | 《激进聚焦》 |
| retention | 留存(率) |
| retrieval practice | 提取练习 |
| retrospective | 复盘 |
| SMART goals | SMART 目标 |
| temporal landmarks | 时间锚点 |
| Teresa Torres | Teresa Torres |
| The Fearless Organization | 《The Fearless Organization》 |
| The Overstory | 《The Overstory》 |
| The Team That Managed Itself | 《The Team That Managed Itself》 |
| Wakanda Forever | 《Wakanda Forever》 |
| war room | 作战室 |
| wireframes | 线框图 |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)
The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)
Christina Wodtke: … 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 design did this week?” It makes people feel like they’re part of something really special, and it’s super exciting.
The Power of OKRs & Success Stories
Lenny: 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 Wodtke. 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, MySpace, Zynga, 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 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 super interesting and fun, and I know you’ll learn a lot from her.
For example, with Miro, you can plan out next quarter’s entire product strategy. You can start by brainstorming, using sticky notes, library actions, a voting tool, even an estimation app to scope out your team’s prints. Then your whole distributed team can come together around wireframes, draw ideas with a pen tool, and then put full mocks right into the Miro board, and with one of Miro’s ready-made templates, you can go from discovery and research to product roadmaps to customer journey flows to final mocks, all in Miro. Head on over to miro.com/lenny to leave your suggestions. That’s M-I-R-O .com/lenny.
Christina Wodtke: Thanks, Lenny. I’m really excited to be here. I’ve been hearing about you forever. It’s so cool to be here in person.
Core Benefits of OKRs
Lenny: 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 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. As I’m sure you know, a lot of people just don’t like OKRs, are kind of anti-OKR and have had bad experiences with 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-OKR and to help people optimize their OKR process if they’re having an okay time with OKRs. How does that sound?
”Making New Mistakes”
Christina Wodtke: 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 a emperor for life, that might be my title.
The Atomic Unit of OKRs
Lenny: That might be by the end of this podcast, we will crown you emperor for life.
Real Stories of Personal OKRs
Christina Wodtke: Excellent.
Core Questions to Ask Weekly
Lenny: 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, “Here’s how many companies who 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.”
Power of Mission and Weekly Actions
Christina Wodtke: I’ve seen so many companies do extremely well with it, and I would say that not all companies will be successful, period. Companies are really successful with it are companies that… I think I can swear a little, they have their shit together.
Mission, Vision, Roadmap, and OKR Framework
Lenny: Absolutely. 100%.
Quarterly Planning: A Game Company Example
Christina Wodtke: And the first step is, get your shit together. They have strategy, they have empowered teams, they have psychological safety, and then the OKRs are that extra layer that supercharges them. 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 everything that’s wrong with your company. But if you’ve done the hard work of getting your company to be strong, it’s amazing how well it works. It works really well with startups. It works really well with multidisciplinary product teams. I’ve seen it over and over. I don’t really have permission to talk about all my clients, but I have one client that I’m just working with right now, and it’s a purpose built company. 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, thinking about inventory and how to be more efficient. And the robots are doing the heavy lifting.
They’ve been growing and growing like crazy. And the OKRs are this very simple way of allowing you to focus on what actually matters and making sure you don’t forget in the chaos of everyday life. So, if you know what you’re trying to do, then the OKRs just help that happen. It aligns the company. And I think they’re a lot like dieting advice, in that they say, “Eat less and exercise more.” Well, 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. It’s really hard to do. And I think about OKRs that way. You have to just stay with it and be strong and committed, and that will help.
Lenny: There’s a number of things I want to follow up on in what you said.
”How Do We Know”: Objectives to Key Results
Christina Wodtke: Sure.
The Nature of Objectives
Lenny: So, I’ll start with, you talked about the benefits of OKR. If you had to just boil down, here’s what OKRs can do for you as a company, as an organization, what would that be? What’s just the main benefit of OKRs at your company?
Christina Wodtke: 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 Muji Muji. And then when you get the OKR, you say, “This quarter is what we’re actually going to be doing, and these are the numbers we’re actually going to be pushing further.” So, that’s really good. It creates a cadence of progress, which is incredibly valuable. It creates alignment. There’s no question what the single most important thing to do in the company is, assuming you’re doing radical focus and you don’t have 20 OKRs every quarter. Ugh, 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 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.” You don’t forget all the things you learned about retention. No, you’re just building knowledge and building knowledge and building knowledge, which means your company will constantly get smarter and more effective.
The Format of OKRs
Lenny: I love this. So, just to summarize, the main benefits are focuses you, lines, creates a cadence and creates a learning cycle. And maybe a simple way to think about it is, it’s like a plug-and-play product development process. You don’t have to 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 mind?
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, I guess you have to have a product development process, because obviously otherwise you’re just running around 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 goal in my life. My motto is, “Make new mistakes.” So, by having this focus on really important things, not to spread yourself too thin, like the famous peanut butter memo from Yahoo, which I guess was long ago enough, not everybody remembers it. But 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 and 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 fiddle around with all the other stuff if you want, but this one has to move.”
And then the next quarter, the next thing gets moved and so on. And it just accelerates the speed of your accomplishments so much. It’s kind of mind-blowing. I’ve actually been running my life for the last eight, 10 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 saying, “Well, am I going to work on a book? Am I going to work on my teaching? Am I going to work… Where do I want to put that attention?” It changes me personally, just like it changes my clients.
Measuring User Satisfaction
Lenny: What’s an example of your personal care? You said writing a book maybe could be one?
Christina Wodtke: Well, I wish, but no, it’s actually been health. One of the great things about managing my OKRs 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 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’s been about setting up habits of well-being and like I said, I’ve been really pleased at how it’s been going.
Common OKR Mistakes
Lenny: 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 the line between we have goals and a plan, and we’re actually doing OKRs as a concept?
Signs of OKR Process Issues
Christina Wodtke: 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, you could give up all the OKR stuff, but if you just asked 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 tie it into temporal landmarks.
By that I mean that there are things like birthdays or New Year’s or Mondays or quarters that are already built into the world. And so, we piggyback onto them and we say, “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, remember we have a mission over here and we have a vision and we have a strategy. Okay, this quarter’s 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? And if you can say, “This week I’m going to do this,” and then at the end of the week you say, “Oh, that worked or that didn’t work,” and you can try something new or keep going. That’s just invaluable.
OKR Rhythm and Extraction Exercises
Lenny: That is really interesting that your answer wasn’t like its outcome or some key results and 70% of success is 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 OKR process ends up being.
Root Causes of OKR Failures
Christina Wodtke: Oh, yeah. Can I tell you a little story?
Lenny: Absolutely.
Reflecting on Leadership Responsibilities
Christina Wodtke: 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 had this accountability group with these three women for at least five years, and every Monday we send our OKRs to each other, and I do it the way I do it in the book. Another woman, she had the getting things done approach where it was like, “How percentage did I make and what am I trying to do?” And exactly, super detailed.
And then another woman was like, “Ah, 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 was very precise has kind of disappeared. I think it was just something that she couldn’t keep up that level of diligence. While the woman who was hand-waving, she actually has gone from a product manager to a consultant to a life coach, and she’s making so much money, 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.
Common Reasons OKRs Fail
Lenny: And what is that question?
Christina Wodtke: 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 fuck am I doing here? What am I trying to do again?” And it worked.
On “Radical Focus”
Lenny: That is a really cool framework. So, the question you ask yourself every week is, “What am I doing today that’s helping me get closer to my outcomes?” Is that the word to use outcome?
Christina Wodtke: 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 it. How often do companies ever talk about their mission? It’s like they set it, they forget it, it’s super vague, it’s useless.
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, 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.
The Power of Storytelling and Drawing
Lenny: So, I want to drill into some of these things, of just how mission, vision, roadmap and OKRs kind of 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 roadmap?
Power of Storytelling and Drawing (Cont.)
Christina Wodtke: 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, “We’re going to bring amazing games that delight our users and we’re proud to ship 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? Really talk about that and get into the nitty-gritty. And then out of that would come your strategy, which is this is going to be our year of exploration, if you have enough money for such a thing.
Or this is going to be our year of making our current games a little bit better. I’m in a very game mindset today because I was 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 you can use OKRs for the year, but the quarter is where they have the most impact, I believe. Spotify talked about doing quarterly performance reviews because it’s long enough to get something done and short enough to not forget what you did. And I think that sums it up perfectly for OKRs as well. So, 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 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 building extensive, and Q4 is about marketing and throwing it out, something like that. And you could venture them into your outcomes. A lot of people who are very venture driven don’t understand outcomes, objectives, excuse me, objectives, outcomes, potato, potato.
OKR Rhythm and Rituals
Lenny: And they sound horrid.
The True Value of Status Emails
Christina Wodtke: It’s really something inspiring. Q1, we have a vision for this game that will drive us forward. I don’t know, I’m making stuff up, which just 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. 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? How 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? 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, 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 OKRs, right? And then for Q2, we don’t know how Q1 is going to go, so we’re just going to leave the objective there, but we’re not going to get into the nitty-gritty OKRs. Key results cause a lot of arguing among the team, 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.
How Long Should OKR Planning Take
Lenny: The question you talked about of, how do we know? That’s to decide the objective or the key results?
Christina Wodtke: Key results, yeah.
OKR Process Summary
Lenny: Okay, got it. You’re saying objective. Okay, cool.
OKR Scoring and Retrospectives
Christina Wodtke: Objective. My bad. I didn’t signal when I turned. No.
Is the “70% Success Rate” for Everyone?
Lenny: Oh, okay, cool. That makes sense.
Christina Wodtke: Objective is that vision for the quarter. This is what we’re we’re driving towards in this quarter. And then the key results, you answered the question, how do we know we succeeded?
How to Implement OKRs in Your Company
Lenny: And so, what was the tip you gave of turning strategy into the objective? How do you translate from strategy to deciding your objective for the core?
Christina Wodtke: Oh, that sits between mission and OKRs. So, strategy, I’ve been really shocked lately. I’ve discovered that lots of companies don’t seem to have any strategy whatsoever, which just blows my mind. 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 they are kind of interchangeable, and I’m not going to get in semantics in the bitty bits, but the strategy is really important because it says, “We think we’re fulfilling our mission of connecting people, by what?”
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 Arcade. 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 platforms.” That’s the sort of strategic stuff. And then we’re like, “Oh great, you have a vision. What are we doing? What does that actually mean for us this year, this quarter, and then eventually this week?”
Advice for Aspiring Product Managers
Lenny: For the actual OKRs you end up with, is it as simple as just with the template of an OKR, is it just objective three-ish key results? Is there anything more to it that you recommend folks use?
Product Managers Must Serve the Business
Christina Wodtke: No. Simple things give you a lot more room to fiddle. And I feel like every time I see people make really complicated methodologies, they get way too caught up in the rules and they don’t think about, what are we actually trying to do? So, simple is better.
Lenny: And what’s your rule of thumb for number of key results?
Don’t Start as a Product Manager
Christina Wodtke: I like three. I think about it as triangulating. I always like something that’s really hardcore numbers. I like something that’s a little squishier, like a quality, 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. Launch a new product. Well, you probably want to make a certain amount of money, well you 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, could figure out what one makes the most sense for you.
Lightning Round Q&A
Lenny: That’s an interesting topic. Is there anything you find there to measure customer happiness, satisfaction, delight? What have you seen work best for that sort of squishy stuff?
Christina Wodtke: 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 can be incredibly successful with a product people hate using. Zoom, for example. 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? And I would say the answer is, would you like to keep making money? It’s always about retention.
One Small Change, Big Impact
Lenny: Right.
Christina Wodtke: 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, 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.
Who Has a Strong Product Culture
Lenny: 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 in deciding on what to go with?
Christina Wodtke: Objectives, people make them so fluffy that they don’t have any meaning. They really should be a proper goal. We’re doing this because we want to see this happen, it matters. We want to delight our customers. Sometimes people make them too fluffy and sometimes they make them too boring. 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.” It shouldn’t be like, snooze. So, I think an objective should be motivating but not ridiculous.
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. 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, I think that’s the biggest mistake people make in OKRs.
Learning to Slow Down
Lenny: Yeah. 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, here’s a really good example of an outcome? And I think your results are a lot easier, just move this metric 10% or hit-
Christina Wodtke: Let’s try to keep it fairly concrete. You’re a 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 lifestyle. Okay, that’s great. And then we get to the nitty-gritty, well, what does that actually mean? Are we going to really work on recommendations passionately? Are we going to really create various markets and throw down advertising where we think these people are? That’s when your strategy comes into play 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.
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, 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 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 we were successful? “Oh, gosh. Well, we 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? 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. 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 every two weeks to hear how it’s working and understand more about it.
Okay, now we have some OKRs. With key results, I always recommend spending 10 minutes brainstorming every single way you could possibly measure that outcome. Because with brainstorms, you always think of all the obvious stuff first and then you have no ideas and you’re just sitting there with your post notes going, “How long is 10 minutes 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 quarter level.
Lenny: 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 had 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 in these meetings reviewing these large spreadsheets of hundreds of tasks-
Christina Wodtke: Oh, god. Yeah.
Lenny: … that were basically just tasks for ICs that they’re working on, and they kind of lost sight of why does any of this matter? What are you even 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 think is a sign that your OKR process is busted and that you need to spend some time improving and rethinking the way it works?
Christina Wodtke: I think if those meetings are boring, that’s a great example. One of the other benefits, which I didn’t bring up about OKRs is that they scale really well. One of the biggest problems founders struggle with is they don’t scale very well, but if you can set a good OKR and get people to work on it, then you don’t have to decide all those little IC tasks. You don’t want to be drug down with that. You got a job. CEOs got to figure out what’s coming up down the line, not fiddling over everybody’s tasks. So, you set the OKRs and then you ask in the meeting, “What are the top three initiatives that you’re doing towards them?” 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? What do you think that’s going to do?” Or, “I’ve been seeing that for weeks. Are you going to try something else anytime soon?” 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, “When you first start, it might take a half hour, but after that it should just take 10 minutes.” It’s like, “I think that’s stupid. We should talk about that.” Or, “No, it looks fine, looks essentially correct, let’s move on. Anybody got anything?” And then you can get into whatever else you do, if it’s a metrics review situation or if it’s talking about a new deal, the rest of the agenda.
But that constant checking in 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… 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. Qualitative research is really useful for understanding the psychology of your users.
I’ll say, “Well, how do we understand the psychology of users?” And you’d be like, “Oh, I heard this.” 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 in a big rush, you don’t want to go through a bunch of paper to try to find what were our OKRs? 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.”
Lenny: So, what I’m hearing is, a lot of this comes back to, if the meeting is not interesting and boring, change the way you run the meeting. Don’t go through everything. Maybe just pick the things that are most interesting and focus on that. You don’t have to review every single key result.
Christina Wodtke: 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.
Lenny: No, 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, is what do you think are just the root issues of OKRs going wrong?
Christina Wodtke: Oh, my god.
Lenny: Maybe that’s a symptom of the meeting, they’re really boring, but yeah.
Christina Wodtke: Well, the symptom, it’s really wrong. Yeah, it means that you’re in the weeds, man. You’re fiddling with the little tiny bits. You got to let go of those. You have to trust your people. So, if we do the five why’s, 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 have to keep chasing it down. OKRs are a great diagnostic tool because they tell you something’s broken. So, if your OKRs are going sideways, something’s broken deeper. There’s also the problem with psychological safety. You need your teams to be able to say, “This isn’t working. We’re doing something else.” Instead of just saying, “This isn’t working, tell us how to fix it.”
People are coming to you and saying, “How do we fix this problem?” Something’s broken in the company. You’re doing something wrong as a leader. You have to think about, if somebody doesn’t know what to do and you’re like, “Well, I have a strategy. I told you what my strategy is.” And they don’t know how to make decisions, it means something’s wrong with the strategy or you aren’t being clear, because the 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’s confused, you might be the asshole. 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 your OKRs breaking are speaking to something else happening, and if your OKR process isn’t working, then you have to step back and go, “Okay, how far deep do I have to go before I figure out what’s wrong with my management team?” 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 Lencioni. Five Dysfunctions 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. You got to fix things at the top, you got to do your own work, and then everything else runs a little better.
Lenny:
If you think back to what most often is the issue, in your experience, is it something at the top? Is it a middle manager doing something wrong? Is it just misunderstanding how to use OKRs? What do you think is usually the issue with OKRs not working well?
Christina Wodtke: I can repeat everything I said, but instead I’ll just say speed. People read, measure what matters. They get their panties in a bunch, they get really excited. They’re just going to do OKRs for everybody, but they didn’t really read the whole thing. You kind of skimmed it and you don’t really understand how it works, and so you just implement it. Or you ask your head of HR to implement it, and it gets implemented and everybody’s really happy and then they’re really sad and then they spit it out. And then you say, “Okay, OKRs don’t work.” I mean, that’s what I see over and over again. Nobody calls me for advice when they are thinking about OKRs. They call me for advice when they’ve done it in sales, every damn time.
I think it’s… What is it, the illusion of knowledge? If I asked you right now, how does a bicycle work, or how does a pen work? You’d be like, “I know how that works.” And if you tried to write it out, you couldn’t. Well, I couldn’t. How does a ballpoint pen work? Okay, there’s a spring and there’s some ink. I’m not sure. So, really thinking about, how would OKRs work throughout the company, is valuable. So, because you don’t have time as a leader, what you should do is just 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 culture, so they’ll figure out where OKRs in your culture don’t fit. They’ll figure out where it’s helpful and then they can give it back to you and you have a template, and then you can take it to two more teams, and then you can take it to two more teams. And maybe you adopt it with your management team, little bit by little bit. That’s how I tell people to start with OKRs. Just figure out your best multidisciplinary team team and say, “You guys start and let us know.”
Lenny: 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 trying to fix their OKRs. Can you just talk about what it is, how to find it, what it’s called, anything else.
Christina Wodtke: 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 they 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 the 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 struggles they follow?
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 notice, which is when I talk you through this company trying to figure out what their OKRs were, 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 could almost open it to any page and look at your problem, go, “Oh my problem’s with strategy or my problem’s with tasks versus outcomes.” And you could flip around and figure out, what’s the piece I need to solve?
Lenny: And folks can find it on Amazon if they search for Radical Focus?
Christina Wodtke: It’s everywhere, baby.
Lenny: Okay, great.
Christina Wodtke: And it’s been translated into eight languages, which is pretty cool.
Lenny: Wow. Which one’s your most favorite language it’s been translated into?
Christina Wodtke: Well, Chinese, because it sells like crazy because apparently some Chinese actress said she loved it and then it’s been selling bigger there than anywhere else.
Lenny: So, Chinese actresses using OKRs, what is going on?
Christina Wodtke: Mind blown. Once again, life is always more surprising than anything you can imagine.
Lenny: I have more questions I want to ask you about OKRs, but you were talking about storytelling and fables and things like that. So, you also wrote a book about, 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 as a really powerful tool. So, I’d love to hear just your take on why storytelling is so powerful and why skilled drawing is so important for product leaders at the [inaudible 00:40:48].
Christina Wodtke: 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 11:00 PM, so most of human history has been an oral tradition where we told each other stories to help pass on knowledge. And so, don’t get anywhere near the big kitty with the 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. 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 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 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 that’s full of facts, they will remember it. And if you look at TED, everybody loves a TED Talk. They’re mostly all just stories, and facts sprinkled inside those stories. So, I think stories are very powerful. I think images are very powerful. 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, because I was at, what, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, MySpace, stuff like that, I just found if I got on the whiteboard and drew really badly, and I think it’s almost important to draw badly, make some marks, make some squares. Somebody else will go, “No, no, no, it doesn’t work that way. Give me this pen,” 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.
And I found that for some reason in America, people seem to think that you have to be one of the chosen few and born a drawer. But it’s like anything, 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, but gets pretty intense, pretty quickly.
Lenny: With the storytelling piece, I feel like most people are like, “Yes, I know storytelling is powerful.” But they don’t know how to do it. Is there one tip you could share? Just how to get a little bit better at storytelling or integrate storytelling into your work as a product leader or founder?
Christina Wodtke: If you say one tip, you’re really holding me down. I would say-
Lenny: You could do two tips if that makes it easier.
Christina Wodtke: … 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 you’re only going to do one thing, get feedback, is always the answer. The second tip would be structurally there’s a beginning, middle, and end. Intrigue people with a hook, a mystery. That’s the beginning, right? A mystery, a secret, a surprise. The middle is, you can tell them a little bit about it. That’s where you get your message in. If you’re trying to pitch something, sneak your product in, whatever. And the end is always going to be success and celebration because you’re trying to get people excited about your story or remember this information. So, just a basic structure in your head really, can kind of make a big difference.
Lenny: Yeah, I love that. That’s such a actionable, straightforward tactic for getting better, just ask people, “How could this have been a better story?” Great idea. Your second piece made me think about the Minto Pyramid. Do you know much about, do you work with that at all? The Minto Pyramid principle?
Christina Wodtke: I had a Minto binge for a little while, but I moved onto other stuff. I do.
Lenny: I think it was a triangle.
Christina Wodtke: Yes, but I can’t recount it to you. I do remember it.
Lenny: 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.
Christina Wodtke: I think that’s a good one. I mean, if you think about what’s the job of a hook, a hook just gets you excited. So, how do you get people excited? 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. Something happened and I’m not going to tell anybody else, but I’m going to tell you. 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. 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.
Lenny: That’s a really interesting perspective because to me, there were opposites of 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, and here’s all the work I did to get there. Your point is, that’s also really interesting. You’re like, “Oh wow. I don’t know how you got to that.”
Christina Wodtke: There’s so many ways to tell a story. Just don’t bore your users.
Lenny: Great advice. Okay, I want to come back to a couple more OKR questions. It could be less fun than the story maybe, but hopefully more useful. I want to just get your take on what is the cadence of a healthy OKR process? What are the ceremonies and meetings and emails that are involved? I know you have this kind of weekly status email practice. Do you recommend… How do you describe the system of an OKR process?
Christina Wodtke: Oh my gosh, I’m glad you asked because I think the cadence is probably the single most valuable piece of it. So, every Monday, because Monday is a great temporal landmark, look at your week, and you go, “Okay, what am I going to do to move the ball forward?” And it could be an email to your boss, it could be an email to your accountability group, could be an email out to your team, could be standing there like standup. 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 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 design did this week?” It makes people feel like they’re part of something really special and it’s super exciting.
So, you have these [inaudible 00:47:26] 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 to my boss. 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 from my boss, and nothing. Apparently he wasn’t reading them either. So, I was like, “What’s the point of the stupid thing?” And then when I was at Zynga, we were using OKRs and they were really short. They were like, “What’s your confidence level on your key results? What did you do last week? And what are you doing next week?” And the last week, next week is great because it allows you to start noting down what stops you from getting shit done. And that, I got to say, there’s so much learning in that. I tried to do this, but what? Did I get sick? Did somebody get mad at me? Did somebody not want to work with me? Do we not have this critical database? The whole, I tried to do this last week and I failed, learning goes through the roof.
And that rhythm of just having 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, 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, 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, skim, skim, skim, skim. “Oh, okay. I got to talk to that guy.” So, it’s hyper valuable.
Lenny: If you assume others, the OKR doc, you’re like, “Here’s our outcomes for the quarter. Here’s our three key results.” You make that plan once a quarter. You have any recommendation how long to spend on planning your OKR?
Christina Wodtke: 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 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.
Lenny: Cool.
Christina Wodtke: Boom. If you can do it at in a… usually you can do it in four days total, unless you have a very hierarchal, huge deep bench. And even then, I have something, I’m going to share this with you because I don’t think many people talk about this. The approval process will kill you. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. I was working with one of my clients and we came up with this different kind of approval process that’s working really well, is that basically instead of having your boss approve it, you write your OKRs, you get three… I’m a big fan of the rule of three, because I’m a storyteller, but you could do less or more, I guess, teams that work with you enough to know what you’re up to, to look them over and they just look them over, 24 hour turnaround.
They say, “This looks right, but I don’t think this is possible.” 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 might have to say no to somebody if they’re asking you to do more than… 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.
Lenny: I’m thinking about companies the size of Airbnb when I left, trying to do it that quickly. And it’s hard to imagine, partly because there’s top level strategy that has to align with individual team roadmaps and dependencies, and platform teams and things like that. So, I imagine it’s hard to do as the company’s scales. I like the drive to make it a week and be done.
Christina Wodtke: Well, I mean, who really has to approve it and what does it cost you if you get it wrong? 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. We have to let go or we will get mired down in all this crap.
Lenny: I love that. I went off track, but just to kind of put a ribbon on the concept of OKRs, you have this document with your object, your outcomes, your key results, and then your recommendation is do a weekly email. And is the idea everyone on the team sends this weekly email or Slacks to the rest of the team?
Christina Wodtke: To the rest of the company if you can.
Lenny: Wow. Okay. [inaudible 00:52:19].
Christina Wodtke: That’s the thing, is Google, even as a huge company, everybody’s OKRs and their weekly updates are on their intranet. You can look stuff up, so why not?
Lenny: Got it. And we’ll link to a template that you have on your blog post. And also I think in the book, I 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.
Christina Wodtke: And then a few notes if you need to.
Lenny: Does this replace stand-ups in your experience?
Christina Wodtke: It could. 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.
Lenny: Cool. Okay, great. And is there anything else? Is this the whole OKR process, in your experience?
Christina Wodtke: 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 getting approved by the product committee? So, it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. Don’t get fussy. Don’t try to make it really precise. Just go ahead and say, “Ah, hand wave, hand wave, 80%.” What matters is, why 80%? Really focus on the learning. So, we almost got there. Well, if we would’ve gotten there, if we got two more days, that’s fine. We basically got there. We knew what we were doing. If we didn’t, if we were really far away, what went wrong?
It’s all about the retrospectives. 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 wastes everybody’s time when you could just be faster. I’m just obsessed with speed. You may have noticed that.
Lenny: I thought it was 70%, is that 80% is success? Is that the rule of thumb for OKRs?
Christina Wodtke: 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. You’re like, “Woo, 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.
Lenny: I had a newsletter post with Lane Shackleton from Coda, and he made this point that OKRs were created by Google, which is 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 goal is fine, it’ll be fine, we’re making so much money. And so, his perspective for most companies, it doesn’t make sense to set the goal to be like 70% of this goal you set is a success. Do you have a perspective on that?
Christina Wodtke: 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.
Lenny: I agree. I find setting more ambitious goals than you think you can immediately achieve actually really pushes you to achieve them.
Christina Wodtke: And the literature agrees. There’s a lot of literature that shows ambitious goals are actually quite motivating unless you feel you’re doomed, at which point then they’re demotivating.
Lenny: I’ve seen that too. Okay, two more OKR questions. One is, I noted this from before so I’m just going to come back to it. There’s a balance with key results of, as you’ve talked about, being very precise and metrics-driven and focused. And then there’s, you talked a bit about 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 keep people accountable. Do you have any advice for just how to find that right balance of, this is what 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 that we think is success and it’s fine. Do your best.
Christina Wodtke: 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 NPS and you’re like, “Wow, this is not actually accurate, or weird, or not.” There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know until we try them. And of course, my background is in lean and agile and design and they’re all iterative. 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.
Revenue, it’s easy. This is what we’re making now, this is what we could be making. Or you’re not making anything now, so you can look up some numbers from public companies or whatnot. That’s easy. DAU, 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. 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. 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. So, you 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?”
Lenny: Final OKR-related question. Say someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “Wow, this is awesome. I want to do this at our company, we have a focus problem, 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 an OKR process at the company?
Christina Wodtke: I hate to say this, but there are a lot of consultants that have popped out of nowhere and it’s kind of terrifying because so many of them really, really suck and they’re just like, “Oh, OKR sounds 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.
Lenny: So, your advice is find someone to come in and help you figure out how to do this well and find the right person.
Christina Wodtke: Yeah, I guess I think that finding someone to coach you is really high value, but I also think it would be okay if you just read a book or read a bunch of blog posts and start experimenting. It’s not rocket science. You just listened to this podcast, listen to it again. Take lots of notes, Google around, see if you can learn a little more about some of the concepts that you didn’t fully understand or you want to know more about. And then just run a tiny pilot and say, “Okay, what does this mean for us?” You don’t even have to call them OKRs. You can just try, “We’re going to do a outcome focus this quarter and let’s see where it takes us.” But just try it because that’s where you learn stuff. And try it at a small, safe level where you don’t think it’s going to hurt too many things.
Lenny: And you said to start with a high performing team.
Christina Wodtke: Oh, yes.
Lenny: [inaudible 00:59:28] point.
Christina Wodtke: 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 high preferring team, they’re going to be the ones who go, “Oh, well, okay, our stand-up’s like this, so we should add this to standup. And then instead of emails, let’s just have a brag channel on our…” 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 till it worked.
Lenny: Awesome. Final question in 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 young PMs?
Christina Wodtke: I taught it and a bunch of students who thought they were going to be product managers realized that they wanted to be interaction designers and not product managers at all. I think one of the things that might be off with a lot of the product management education and conferences is, it’s good that they take a lot from UX and it is important to be people-centered, but the reality is the product manager serves the business. That’s their role. Teresa Torres talks about the product trio, right? Trio.
Lenny: Trio.
Christina Wodtke: Trio. She’s talking about business and user experience and technology. So, if product’s over here messing with the user experience or products over there, messing with engineering, who’s taking care of the business? And I think it’s absolutely critical product managers, they say they’re the mini CEO, but that just means they want to be in charge and nobody’s in charge. 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 and it’s not a bad thing. If you have a company, it needs to survive and all money is, is oxygen, it lets the company keep going, unless people are being greedy assholes, which definitely happens. But it’s okay to care about the health and well-being of the company’s ability to make money and feed itself. And don’t do anything unethical, but really focus on these questions. And if you don’t know business models, if you can’t talk about why you might want to do a subscription or if you want to just do one-off sales, if you don’t understand why you know have all these in-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, business is a real thing. It has a long history of knowledge and understanding, and go do that.
Lenny: What I’m hearing is, maybe product sense is overrated in your experience.
Christina Wodtke: Ain’t none of them yet old enough to have product sense. I mean, seriously. Product sense is intuition, intuition is compressed experience, compressed experience comes from having lots of experience. And if you’re young and you don’t have a lot of experience, the smartest thing you could do is learn. You’ve got to learn what models work and why they work, and just intuition is overvalued and under-exists.
Lenny: Imagine that’s kind of freeing to a lot of people listening, where they’re like, “Man, I just don’t know if I have product sense. How do I learn product?” All this. 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… 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 experience?
Christina Wodtke: 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, work, get to know businesses. And 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 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, figure it 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 in product? Do you want to be in charge?” 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 working on this new thing, what do you think?” Don’t be a product manager. You got to have hustle. You got to talk to people. You got to always have your eye on the bottom line.
Maybe you don’t want to be a product manager. Maybe it’s much more fun to leave work every day at 6:00 and be a designer and think about how all the systems work and how and where the error message is going to come in, and is blue the right color, all the combinations of that, that’s fun. Or you really want to be an engineer and solve puzzles all day. Product manager is probably the worst job unless you love talking to everybody and connecting them and stepping into the mess.
Lenny: I definitely agree. There’s not enough talk about how painful and hard the PM role is and how thankless it often is.
Christina Wodtke: And I love it, but I love everything. I fell in love with the web and I haven’t stopped, even though it’s now mostly on phones and stuff. It’s an exciting space. But yeah, you got to step up and do the hard stuff.
Lenny: 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 they are, so let’s just go through them and see how it goes. Are you ready?
Christina Wodtke: I love it.
Lenny: What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?
Christina Wodtke: 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, and it’s mind-blowing and so good. I’m going to leave it at that. Less is better.
Lenny: I tried reading The Overstory and it’s very long, but beautiful.
Christina Wodtke: It’s a lot like Cloud Atlas. If you liked Cloud Atlas, you’ll like The Overstory.
Lenny: I think I watched that movie.
Christina Wodtke: No, a terrible movie. Only read the book.
Lenny: I agree. Speaking of movies, what’s a favorite recent movie or TV show?
Christina Wodtke: We just saw Wakanda Forever and it’s a very different movie than Black Panther, and my kid and I spent quite a bit of time talking about it 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 OGs of everything, invented zero, writing. They’re just so amazing.
Lenny: Love it. Next question, favorite interview question that you like to ask when you’re interviewing people.
Christina Wodtke: What questions should I have asked you? I’ve been using that one forever, whether I am interviewing somebody or being interviewed, because the person is an expert in themselves. And if you say, “What question should I have 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.
Lenny: What are five SaaS products or tools that you just love and use constantly?
Christina Wodtke: Oh, I hate all technology. That’s what the problem is, 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 terrible, but it’s better than everything else. 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 who go to Stanford are all rich, but 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. 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. So, I’ve got to say I love those.
Lenny: Cool. I didn’t expect the question to go 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 crates?
Christina Wodtke: I will never forget when people stopped 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 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 it, cubicles, 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 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.
Lenny: 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 one table apart. They’re 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 on this thing?” And the head of data science put one of the data people on the team and had them sit just one table over with the team and everything changed. They’re just like, “Okay, let’s do this. This is great. We’re going to build some awesome products.”
Christina Wodtke: We’re human.
Lenny: Just that one move.
Christina Wodtke: 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 always makes things better.
Lenny: Final question. What’s a company that you think has a really strong and effective product culture? If you can name one, if not, that’s okay too.
Christina Wodtke: 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 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.
Lenny: Christina, I honor you as emperor for life of OKRs.
Christina Wodtke: Woo.
Lenny: You’ve achieved it. I’m very proud of you. I think we’ve made a big dent in how people perceive OKRs and will utilize OKRs.
Christina Wodtke: I hope so.
Lenny: Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to learn more, reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Christina Wodtke: If they want to learn more, I’ve been blogging at eleganthack.com, like a hack writer since 2000. It’s where I’ve dumped my thoughts for a long time, so it’s always a good place if you want to go spelunking about anything. If you want to attempt to hire me, cwodtke.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 wish everybody would take a deep breath and think about, “Okay, we’re going to adopt this thing. Let’s read up on it. Let’s think about it. Oh, we’re going to build this new product? Let’s do a literature review, let’s do a competitive analysis. Let’s see what’s been done. Let’s learn 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 economics 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.
Lenny: A 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 [inaudible 01:12:24].
Christina Wodtke: Radical Focus. Get the second edition. The Team That Managed 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.
Lenny: Amazing. Christina, again, thank you for being here. We’ll all go slow down right now.
Christina Wodtke: Thank you so much for having me here, Lenny, and sharing your audience with me. It’s been an honor.
Lenny: 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 lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| ADHD | ADHD(注意力缺陷多动障碍) |
| agile | 敏捷 |
| Back of the Napkin | 《餐巾纸的背面》 |
| Barbara Minto | Barbara Minto |
| Black Panther | 《Black Panther》 |
| Cloud Atlas | 《Cloud Atlas》 |
| competitive analysis | 竞品分析 |
| Five Dysfunctions of a Team | 《团队协作的五大障碍》 |
| five why’s | 五个为什么 |
| Google Suite | Google Suite |
| IC (Individual Contributor) | IC(个人贡献者) |
| illusion of knowledge | 知识的幻觉 |
| Ken Norton | Ken Norton |
| Lane Shackleton | Lane Shackleton |
| lean | 精益 |
| literature review | 文献综述 |
| Measure What Matters | 《衡量什么最重要》 |
| Minto Pyramid | Minto 金字塔 |
| NPS | NPS(净推荐值) |
| OKRs | OKR(目标与关键结果) |
| outcomes | 成果 |
| P1/P2/P3 | P1/P2/P3(优先级分级) |
| Patrick Lencioni | Patrick Lencioni |
| peanut butter memo | 花生酱备忘录 |
| Pencil Me In | 《Pencil Me In》 |
| product trio | 产品铁三角 |
| psychological safety | 心理安全感 |
| qualitative research | 定性研究 |
| radical focus | 激进聚焦 |
| Radical Focus | 《激进聚焦》 |
| retention | 留存(率) |
| retrieval practice | 提取练习 |
| retrospective | 复盘 |
| SMART goals | SMART 目标 |
| temporal landmarks | 时间锚点 |
| Teresa Torres | Teresa Torres |
| The Fearless Organization | 《The Fearless Organization》 |
| The Overstory | 《The Overstory》 |
| The Team That Managed Itself | 《The Team That Managed Itself》 |
| Wakanda Forever | 《Wakanda Forever》 |
| war room | 作战室 |
| wireframes | 线框图 |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py