YouSaid · the spoken record

Christina Wodtke

lines on the record: 97
first: 2023-03-16
most recent: 2023-03-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Radical focus get the second edition team the bench itself and pencil me in those are my three books that are out there right now you can get them pretty much anywhere I do believe but definitely I mean Amazon rules us all so they're definitely there”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 gonna 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”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they want to learn more, I've been blogging at eleganthack.com, like a hack writer since 2000. So there's like it's where I've dumped my thoughts for a long time. So it's always a good place if you want to go Splunking about anything. If you want to attempt to hire me, you know, seewoodkey.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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think of all my clients, the best cultures all seem to be very small companies working in strange little corners of the world. They're not the big sexy guys. Everybody's there because they want to make dog food or they want to make, you know, this kind of financial software. And they're amazing. I think we treat scale like it's a virtue when it's merely a tactic and it might be a bad tactic as well. I think there's something really sweet around 250 people working on something that everybody agrees is important.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are human. We are social. Yeah. And I think moving people around every year or so, everybody hates it. Nobody wants to change desks. But do it to them anyway. It's always, it always makes things better.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And preferably with walls walls are really underrated. If you can just give them a war room where they can put stuff on the wall, or I hate to say cubicles, like I'd rather see offices, but if you can give people walls, it becomes part of your memory. And then you're not using your short-term memory to remember stuff. You're using it to think. And so the war room becomes like a living memory. So you can make connections. I mean, it's one of the hardest things I have to teach my students too, is that some things are just better done analog. And that's okay.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will never forget when people stop sitting with their disciplines and started sitting with their teams, I think that we in tech want everything to be tech and be remote and everything blah blah blah. And there are definitely jobs that are wonderful remote, but if you're trying to innovate, there's nothing like getting the product trio to sit together.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say I like Zoom better than you might think. It's like the work, it's terrible, but it's better than everything else. Slack, when I saw it, I was like, this is not going to get rid of email. This is just going to be another channel of nonsense. And that showed up. But I do use it. God knows. I use it. The Google Suites, I got to say, the Google Suite is pretty amazing. Most people think that the students go to Stanford are all rich, but like 70% of them have huge amounts of financial aid. And so I'm always looking for things. Oh, so many of them are first generation, the first student who's gone in their family here. So having the Google Suite and being able to have free slides, free docs, everything interconnected. Drive is sort of a gift, right? So I love those.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I hate all technology. That's what the problem. If you've been a product manager and a designer, all you can see is the flaws.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What questions should I have asked you? I've been using that one forever, whether I'm interviewing somebody or being interviewed, because the person is an expert in themselves. And if you say what question should I have asked you, a lot of times they'll be like, oh, they'll be knocked off base and then they'll give you a really honest answer.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we just saw Wakanda forever, and it's a very different movie than Black Panther, and my kid and I spent quite a bit of time talking about it and what it meant. It was a lot deeper than I expected, and I'm very passionate about the May people because I live in Belize part of the year, and I don't know, the Mayans are just the OGs of everything, infected zero writing. They're just so amazing.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ugh, 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. Rest is better.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'd love it, but I love everything. I mean, I just. I fell in love with the web and I haven't stopped, even though it's now mostly on phones and stuff. It's just, it's an exciting space. But yeah, you got to step up and do the hard stuff.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 know, you got to have hustle. You got to talk to people. You got to always have your eye on the bottom line. And maybe you don't want to be a product manager. Maybe it's much more fun to leave work every day at six o'clock and be a designer and think about how all the systems work and how where the error message is going to come in is blue the right color you know all the combinations of that that's fun or maybe you want to be an engineer and solve puzzles all day like product manager is probably the worst job if unless you love you know talking to everybody and connecting them and and stepping into the mess”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I agree with my friend Ken Norton on this in that you shouldn't probably start in product. Go be an engineer or be a designer, you know, work, get to know businesses. 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. I'm very, I'm very, it's funny because I'm at Stanford, which is all fancy with a degree and stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, just read up. Go hang out with people. Get a job figured out because that's very much how I did it. And I think that if people want to get into product, I'd ask why. Why do you want to be a product? Do you want to be in charge? 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ain't none of'em yet old enough to have product sense. I mean, seriously. Chronic Sentence 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 most thing you could do is learn. You know, you've got to learn what models work and why they work. And just intuition is overvalued and under exists.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And feed itself. And, you know, 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 subscription or if you want to just do one-off sales, if you don't understand why you 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, you got a business is a real thing. It has a long history of knowledge and understanding and go do that.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's talking about business and user experience and technology. So if products over here messing with the user experience or products over there, you know, messing with the engineering, who's taking care of the business? I think it's absolutely critical product managers. They say they're the mini CEO, but that just means they want to be in charge, you know, 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 like if you have a company it needs to survive and all money is is oxygen and lets the company keep going unless people are being greedy assholes which definitely happens but you know it's okay to care about the health and well-being of the company's ability to make money”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I taught it in 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 I mean, it's good that they take a lot from UX, and it is important to be people centered. But the reality is the product manager serves the business. That's their role. You know, when we, Teresa Torres talks about the product triad, right? Trio.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, Because they're smart, they're capable. And if anybody's going to figure out how to make it work, they will. If you try to fix a bad team with OKRs, you'll make everybody hate OKRs and make the bad team worse. So just don't do that. It's not a medicine, but that's high performing team. They're going to be the ones who go, oh, well, okay, our stand-ups like this, so we should add this to stand up. And then instead of emails, let's just have a brag channel on our, like I've seen people do the coolest stuff with OKRs, totally changing what I recommend, doing wonderful things with it just because they're smart and they messed with it till it worked.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess that finding someone to coach you is really high value. But I also think it would be okay if just read a book or read a bunch of blog posts and start experimenting. It's not rocket science. You've got like you just listen to this podcast, right? Listen to it again. Take lots of notes, you know, Google around, see if you can learn a little more about some of the concepts that you didn't fully understand or you want to know more about and then just run a tiny pilot and say, okay, what does this mean for us? You don't even have to call them OKRs. You could just try, we're going to do outcome focus this quarter and let's see where it takes us, you know. But just try it because that's where you learn stuff and try it at a small, safe level where you don't think it's going to hurt too many things.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, okay, our sounds like Smarkles or whatever. I'll just use that. Or it's hot. And so I'm going to figure it out by reading some articles. I would ask for references. I think that's a good one.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know? So you really got to say, how will we know about our product and what are the approaches that are out there and which one makes sense for us?”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, there's a lot of stuff we don't know until we try them. And of course, you know, my background is in lean and agile in 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. Like revenue, it's easy, right? Like 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. You know, that's easy. DAU, you know, it's easy. Acquisition numbers, it's easy. But when it comes to will people...”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the literature agrees, like there's a lot of literature that shows ambitious goals are actually quite motivating unless you feel you're doomed, at which point then they're demotivating”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, oof, 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that never is quite accurate and dissuasive time when you could just be faster. I'm just obsessed with speed. You may have noticed that.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only other thing I would bring up is thinking about the word grading. So a lot of people think about trying to make something really numerical like 0.08. I got 80% of the way there. But a lot of times they're qualitative. So how do you think about that like getting approved by the product 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 hand wave, hand wave, 80%. What matters is why 80%. Really focus on the learning. So we almost got there. Well, if we would have gotten there if we got two more days, that's fine. We basically got there. We knew what we were doing. If we didn't, if we were really far away, what went wrong? It's all about the retrospectives. Like make sure your grading is secondary to retrospective is the biggest thing I would say because that's what's going to be valuable. And you could spend so many hours trying to come up with some fake measurement system.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's the thing is like Google, even as a huge company, everybody's okay ours and their weekly updates are on their intranet. You can look stuff up. So why not?”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Like we have to let go or we will get mired down in all this crap.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's so fast, and it works so well. And that means, you know, you might have to say no to somebody, you know, if they're asking you to do more than like if you had 10 teams asking you to look over their OKRs, you have to say no. You want to keep it down to a reasonable number. But if you could do one a day, it could be done in a week.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a very hierarchical, huge, deep bench, and even then, like I have something. I'm going to share this with you because I don't think many people talk about this. The approval process will kill you. I've seen it happen over and over again. So I was working with one of my clients, and we came up with this different kind of approval process. It'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 threes, I'm a storyteller, but you could do less or more, I guess. Teams that work with you enough to know what you're up to to look them over. And they just look them over 24-hour turnaround. They say, this looks right, but I don't think this is possible. They give you that feedback and you're done. That's it. That's the entire approval process.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My goal is always as little as possible time you're planning is not the time you're shipping and the best is the enemy of the good so in an ideal world you would grade your OKRs like week at the end of the quarter maybe second to the last week of the quarter depending on it if it takes you a whole week to set OKRs which I hope it doesn't but who knows and then the very last week you set your OKRs for the next quarter and that's it Boom. If you can do it, usually you can do it in like four days total”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning goes through the roof. And that rhythm of just having like three P1s, you can't have more than three P1s. You can have as many P2s as you want. And P3s if you really think you should. But you can scan 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. You know, if you have this place where you're putting your status in and people will quickly go, you know, skim, skim, skim, skim. Oh, okay. I got to talk to that guy. So hyper valuable.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Did somebody, do we not have this critical database? Like the whole, I tried to do this last week and I failed.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the most awesome thing that designed it this week? It makes people feel like they're part of something really special, you know, and it's super exciting. So you have these nice bookends. And I think if you only do that, you're probably in good shape. I think status emails, I hated them so profoundly for most of my life. I had this huge team at MySpace and my project manager would gather everybody's status emails and put them together into this giant status email that I had to send 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? And what are you doing last week? What did you do last week? And what are you doing next week? And the last week next week.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh, I'm glad you asked because I think the cadence is probably the single most valuable piece of it. Every Monday, because Monday is a great temporal landmark, you say, look at your week and you go, okay, what am I going to do to move the ball forward? Right. And it could be an email to your boss. It could be an email to your accountability group. It could be an email out to your team. It could be standing there like stand up. I mean, it's very easy. OKR rituals were built on Agile rituals. 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 Market?”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's a good one. I mean, if you think about what's the job of a hook Like a hook just gets you excited. So, how do you get people excited? 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 has 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. Like, there's so many ways to hook people in, but they're all doing the same job because you want people to actually listen to you and not pretend and nod. So I think you can do it backwards as well. 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can tell them a little bit about it. That's where you get your message in, you know, if you're trying to pitch something product in, whatever. And the end is always going to be success and celebration, you know, because you're trying to get people excited about your story or remembrance information. So just a basic structure in your head really kind of make a big difference.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Like you're going to find out, do I just blather on forever? Or do I not give enough details? I mean, if we'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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody else would go, no, no, no, it doesn't work that way. Give me this pen, you know, and start doing it. And it gets you so fast to a shared vision of what's going on. I know designers spend all this time making wireframes and I'm like, that's the lamest use of time ever. Just get some whiteboards, go into the room with your engineers and start making some marks together. And that just works better. And I found that for some reason in America people seem to think that you have to be one of the chosen few and board a drawer, but it's like anything, you know, it's like playing piano. You just got to practice a little bit. So the book mostly just has some really simple things you can draw. And then it tells you how to use them in business. So I wanted to make something that was even simpler than back of the napkin, which is an awesome book, but gets pretty intense pretty quickly.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easy chair? Was it a hard wooden chair? You know, we use these words as if everybody knows what we're talking about, but people don't. So in my time in industry, you know, because I was at what Yahoo LinkedIn, Zynga, MySpace, stuff like that, I just found if I got up on the whiteboard and drew really badly. And I think it's almost important to draw badly, you know, make some marks, make some squares.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, like everybody loves a TED talk, they're mostly all just stories, right? And facts sprinkled inside those stories. So I think stories are very powerful. I think images are very powerful. Words are very abstract. If I say the word chair, what pops into your brain, was it a big...”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are some things that are fundamentally human that are built into our genes. Storytelling's one, if all of human history was a clock, we started writing things down at 11 p.m. So most of human history has been an oral tradition where we told each other stories to help pass on knowledge. And so like 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, you know. But we tell them better than that. Longer stories tend to have more conflicts and they tend to be seen as having more information. So if you use storytelling, you're talking to the 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”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Chinese, because it sounds like crazy, because apparently some Chinese actress said she loved it. And then it's been selling bigger there than anywhere else. So,”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's one of the powers of stories is seeing an example. And then the rest of it is really like you can almost open it to any page and look at your problem, go, oh, my problem's with strategy or my problems with tasks versus outcomes. And you could flip around and figure out what's the piece I need to solve.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a second edition that's out now. It's gotten twice as big because I started working with big companies as well as startups and had to work through what does it mean when you have a larger company and what 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 it is what you notice, which is when I talked you through this company trying to figure out what their OK arts were, everything became a lot more clear.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And 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. You know, little bit by little bit. That's how I tell people to start with OKRs. Just figure out your best multidisciplinary team and say, you guys start, let us know.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it the illusion of knowledge? Like, if I asked you right now, how does a bicycle work or how does a pen work? You'd like, I know how that works. And if you try to write it out, you couldn't. Well, I couldn't. Like, how does a ball pen work? You know, 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,”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source