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

“I mean I can tell you, I can repeat everything I said, but instead I'll just say speed. People read Measure What Matters 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 say 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, okay, ours 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 and it fails every damn time. And I think it's.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team, you know, and it could be the CEO, but it could actually be some weird group dynamics. And you've got to focus on that. I really love Patrick Blentione, five dysfunctions of a team. It's his most famous book. And I would recommend that if you like the fable style book. But it's the same thing. It's like you got to fix things at the top. You got to work on do your own work. And then everything else runs a little better.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What to do, and you're like, Well, I'd have a strategy. I told you what my strategy is, and they don't know how to make decisions. It means some things wrong with the strategy or you aren't being clear, you know, because the conversation always has two people. I love, there's an old joke that I think about a lot, which is if during the day you meet one asshole, he's probably an asshole. But if all day long you meet nobody but assholes, you might be the asshole. And I think that's very true. If your entire company is confused, you might be the asshole. 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, you know? So a lot of times your okay is breaking or speaking to something else happening and you're okay or 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?”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the symptom is really wrong. It means that you're in the weeds, man. You're fiddling with little tiny bits. You got to let go of those. You have to trust your people. So if we do the five whys, okay, why don't you trust your people? Is it you? Or are you hiring horribly? Okay, if you're hiring horribly, why are you hiring horribly? Is it because you can't find the right people? Is it because you're rushing through it? You know, you have to keep chasing it down. OKRs are 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 somebody doesn't know.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The meeting level at the right place. I'm sorry, I wandered off in a different direction. I get really nerdy around learning theory.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm a teacher. I'm related to learning theory. So there's a really big concept, which is about repetition and retrieval practice. So retrieval practice means that I put a fact in your brain and I keep asking you to go back and get it again, like qualitative research is really useful for understanding the psychology of your users. And 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 a big rush, you don't want to like go through a bunch of paper to try to find what were OKRs. You just go, boom, this is what we should do. I know what we're trying to do and I know how to make a decision about that.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all about those conversations about Is our current strategy not just at the company level but at each departmental level are these strategies working? Are they moving us forward towards our goals? And so looking through OKRs, I tell people, you know, when you first start, if I take a half hour, but after that, 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? Like you don't want to be drunk down with that. You got a job. CEOs got to figure out what's coming up down the line, not fiddling over everybody's tasks. So you set the OKRs and then you ask in the meeting, you know, what are the top three initiatives you're doing towards them? And, you know, or two or five, whatever, it's going to vary a little bit. You want to keep it small. You only want to look at the most important stuff and just trust your people to take care of everything else. And then you can say, well, why do you think that's important, right? What do you think that's going to do? Or I've been seeing that for weeks. Like, are you going to try something else anytime soon? You know.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 at anyway? And then you start getting the weird ideas. And often out of those weird ideas are really good insights. So I recommend some pretty long brainstormings on the key results. But the objective is sort of a manifestation of the strategy at a one-quarter level.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like 10 minutes brainstorming every single way you could possibly measure that outcome because”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Weak, let's go for weekly active users. Okay, so they're going to like.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which has a lot of presuppositions, like we have to get people to like, we have to understand their patterns of behavior. And that's when we can start to go to OKRs. We can say, okay, so we have this online magazine. 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. It's like starting to collect profiles of people's passions. And that sounds kind of exciting. Okay, great. We're going to do that. We're going to create a profile of people's passions. Awesome. So how would we know? How would we know if we were successful? Oh gosh. Well.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's try to keep it fairly concrete. Your online magazine selling interior design ideas. So what are you trying to do? You're trying to get strong leads out to your advertisers. And that's really important. And you're doing it because you believe that people deserve to have homes that are warm and wonderful. You have this mission. So anyone want to make money while you do it. 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 the nitty grade. Well, what does that actually mean? Are we going to really work on recommendations passionately? Are we going to really create various markets and throw down on advertising where we think these people are? That's when your strategy comes in play because you're making all these interesting choices. So let's say we're going to double down on recommendations.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 KRs.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Objectives people make them so fluffy that they don't have any meaning. They really should be a proper goal. Like, we're doing this because we want to see this happen. It matters. We want to delight our customers. Sometimes people make them too fluffy and sometimes they make them too boring. You know, it's like, oh, we're going to ship this thing. That doesn't inspire anybody. Your objective should make you, when your alarm goes off and you wake up, you go, oh yeah, I'm changing the world today or I'm doing something really cool. You shouldn't be like snooze. So I think an objective should be like 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. Like sometimes it feels like a task. Like you have to get it passe 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 research 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Like, how many times have you heard Zoom get cussed out? So the question is, why would I care about that if I'm making money? And I would say the answer is, would you like to keep making money? It's always about retention.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like three I think about it as triangulating, you know I always like something that's like really hardcore numbers I like something that's a little squishier you know like quality you know make sure you don't forget about it and I usually like something that involves a dollar sign but it's really gonna be specific to what objective you're trying to do right launch a new product well you probably want to make a certain amount of money want a certain amount of reach and then you want that delight thing and then when you get into the delight thing you can say well is it going to be metacritic is it going to be a survey is it going to be nps you know you could figure out what one makes the most sense for you”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. So simple is better.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we're like, oh, great, you have a vision. What are we doing? You know, what does that actually mean for us this year, this quarter? And then eventually this week.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the 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, you know. I think that there are a lot of good product strategy pieces out there. But businesses have a lot of questions to answer. Are we going to ship physical products? Are we going to ship digital products? Are we going to be a service? Are we going to do a subscription? Strategy answers those questions. They say we're going to have a game. It's going to be in Apple Arcades. We have an 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is kind of like blows my mind, right? So if you think about strategy as a strongly held hypothesis about a way to win in the market and fulfill our vision.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My bad. I didn't signal when I turned Objective is that vision, like for the quarter. This is what we're driving towards in this quarter. And then the key results answer the question, how do we know we succeeded?”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us, you know, so once we answered those three, how would we know that we can know that by March, we have the results we need. And we're always going to try to think about the best possible future. You know, the whole moonshot thing, which I'm a fan of. But the reality is the reason we do that estimating is so we get good at estimating. Everybody sucks at estimating when you first start. And a lot of people think it's like black magic or something you're born with, but no, it's a learned skill. You practice estimating, you get good at estimating, you get better and better and better. And being good at estimating is incredibly valuable as a business skill. So there's your OKRs, right? And then for Q2, we don't know how Q1's going to go. So we're just going to leave the objective there, but we're not going to get to the nitty KRs. Key results cause a lot of arguing among the team. It takes forever to track them down. Just wait and see how Q1 goes. And that way you have enough play within your strategy.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really something inspiring. Okay, we have a vision for this game that will drive us forward. I don't know. I'm making stuff up, which means it's going to be imperfect. Although I do warn people not to get too caught up in wordsmithing, we can spend hours doing that. 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. You know, 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?”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sort of building an extensive, and Q4 is about marketing and throwing it out. Like something like that. And you could then turn them into your outcomes. A lot of people who are very metric driven don't understand outcomes. But objectives, excuse me, objectives, outcomes, potato potato.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Once you know where you're trying to be, and once you know what you want to do with your year, you can say,”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, into the world. That could be a mission. And it's like, okay, I could do that over the next five years. And then there'll be a point where you probably want to change again. So you're bringing, what does it mean? Like, what does it mean to be proud? What does it mean to delight people? We can really talk about that, you know, and get into the nitty gritty. And then out of that would come your strategy, right? Which is this is going to be our year of exploration if you have enough money for such a thing. Or this is going to be your year of making our current games a little bit better. I'm in a very game mindset today because I was talking to a client. So you get into that. Okay, now we have this sort of idea of what we're doing with our year. Now let's talk about the quarter. And that's, you can use Ores for the year, but the quarter is where they have the most impact, I believe. Spotify.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really important to have a mission. And people get freaked out because they think the mission's forever. And so they make them super vague so they can do anything. But instead, if you think about it, if a mission lasts for five years,”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was our mission? I mean, think about how often do companies ever talk about their mission? It's like they said it, they forget it, it's super vague, it's useless. And instead, it's good to think, okay, when we started this company or when we changed this company or grew this company or whatever you want to go to, 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? And the reality is we just want to be satisfied and happy. And with a business, it's the same thing.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, can I tell you a little story? This is personal KRs, but it works for everything else. It's always easier to talk about personal KRs 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, right? 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, you know, super detailed. And then another woman was like, I don't know. I guess I'm trying to think about what am I trying to think about? Oh, maybe I should think about if I have to get out of product management or not. Well, now the woman who is very precise. has kind of disappeared. I think it was just something that she couldn't keep up, that level of diligence. Well, the woman who was handwavy, she actually has gone from a product manager to a consultant to”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here, and we have a vision, and we have a strategy. Okay, this quarter is all about what? And you move towards that. I know there's a lot of talk about outcomes, and I think that's absolutely right. It's really critical to think about outcomes because that gives you flexibility on how to attack the problem. But the biggest question is why? Why do we get up in the morning? What are we trying to actually do? Are we making a difference at all? And if you can say, this week I'm going to do this, and then the end of the week you say, oh, that worked or that didn't work. And you can try something new or keep going, that's just invaluable.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the atomic unit? That's a really lovely question. I would say. What am I doing this week to get closer to our goals? If you could answer that question, like you could give up all the okayr stuff, but if you just ask the question, what are we doing this week to get closer to our strategic goals, our longer-term goals? That is the very heart of it because there's the tomorrow problem. Like my kid will do his homework tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. It's always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. So what are we doing right now? And I find that it's really useful to tighten to temporal landmarks. By that, I mean that there are things like birthdays or new year's or Mondays or quarters that are already built into the world. And so we piggyback onto them and we say, okay, it's Q1, boom. We're going to stop. We're going to take a breath. We're going to look at everything. And we're going to say, what do we actually have to do? Raising your head above the noise is really vital. And then this quarter, you know, remember we have a mission.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wish, but no. It's actually been health. One of the great things about managing my OPRs for so long is I discovered this pattern, which is that anytime things get busy, I just stop taking care of myself completely. And that's really bad because, you know, if I'm healthy, I can be there for my kid. I can be there for my students. I can be there for my colleagues. So this quarter has been about setting up habits of well-being. And like I said, I've been really pleased at how it's been going.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it just accelerates the speed of your accomplishments so much, it's kind of mind-blowing. I've actually been running my life for the last eight, ten years on OKRs as well, because I'm ADHD and I'm all over the place. And so looking at my OKRs every single Monday and say, well, you know, am I going to work on a book? Am I going to work on my teaching? Am I going to work, you know, where do I want to put that attention? It just changes me personally just like it changes my clients.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess you have to have a product development process because obviously otherwise you're just running around like chickens with your heads cut off. But it keeps you from making the same stupid mistake over and over and over again, which has been a life goal in my life. 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, you know, companies have a tendency to try to do everything all at this exact moment. And so everybody's working with 1% on this, 1% on that, 1% on the other. And instead, you use the OKRs and say, okay, this is the big rock we're going to move. This is the big thing that's going to happen this quarter. And you can siddle 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take that information and say next quarter, what should we try next? 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 okay, or 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 oKs every quarter. 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, eat less and exercise more. That's really simple. It's worked for me. I've lost 25 pounds doing eat less and exercise more. But wow, it's hard. It's really hard to do. And I think about OKRs that way. It's like you have to just stay with it and be strong and committed. And that will help.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This amazing focus on what does it mean to make everybody's life healthier? And one thing that came out of applying OKRs was this wonderful idea. They're bringing robots into their warehouses not to replace their humans. They're keeping all the humans, but to reduce the amount of back problems their humans have. So the humans are doing much more complex tasks, you know, thinking about inventory and how to be more efficient and the 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.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and the first step is get your shit together. They have strategy, you know, they have empowered teams, they have psychological safety, and then the OKRs are that extra layer that supercharges them. 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. 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...”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I've seen so many companies do extremely well with it, and I would say that not all companies will be successful, period. Companies are really successful with it are companies that I think I can swear a little. They have the shit together. Absolutely.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sounds just fine, although I have to say in the tech industry, it's a little too easy to be clean. Maybe when I'm emperor for life. That might be my title”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People do not value celebrations enough. I've had CEOs who said, well, it was the middle of the quarter, so we didn't start OKRs, but we did start Friday celebrations. And oh my God, things are already changing. Things are already getting better. The simple act of getting together and saying, what was the most awesome thing that happened to you this week? What's the most awesome thing that happened in marketing? What's the most awesome thing that designed it this week? It makes people feel like they're part of something really special, you know? And it's super exciting.”
2023-03-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source