Ravi Mehta: evaluation

Transcript context

…So the biggest takeaway I think we both fully agree on is your strategy should come ahead of having goals and coming up with your goals and aligning on goals. No question. Speaking of goals, you also have some really interesting insights on just how to come up with goals and best practices for aligning and setting goals. I'd love to dig into that a little bit and then I have another topic I want to talk about. Yeah, that sounds good. So I've done a little bit of writing about goals, which came out of... I've been at multiple companies that have put OKRs into practice and had a really hard time with that. And I've talked to a lot of product teams who have had a hard time. So the question I started asking is, why are companies having a hard time with OKRs? What's happening that is preventing teams from being able to set goals that they really understand how to achieve and achieving those goals? And one of the things that I found, which I think was sort of a first principle that's happening at a lot of companies, is this idea of always focusing on outcomes over outputs and comes from a good place, which is ultimately, and I think this is the case, ultimately, a PM needs to measure their success based on whether or not they generate valuable outcomes for the business. But that doesn't necessarily mean that in this quarter we need to commit to a specific outcome or that we should commit to a specific outcome that we may or may not know how to move. And so I think ultimately the goal is to drive outcomes, but oftentimes there's things that come before that that need to be addressed ahead of time so that you can really understand what the plan for meeting those outcomes is going to look like. And so I refer to that as the frontier of understanding. There's a point at which what the team knows and what the team doesn't know. There's a junction point there, which is this frontier. And it could be actually we don't know what moves retention. If you ask me to remove retention, I can brainstorm 10 experiments, but I don't actually know why people are continuing to use our product. And so then it doesn't make sense to commit to a retention goal because you're going to sort of throw a spaghetti against the wall, have a bunch of experiments, [inaudible 00:49:16] will stick, and maybe you'll be able to move the metric, but you won't have understood exactly why, or you might move the metric in a way that is not tied to the strategy that you have as a business. So the first type of risk is really understanding risk. And if you don't understand how to move a particular metric, then the right goal is to set a goal to increase your understanding not to move that metric. Once you have an understanding of how to move the metric, your team may or may not be able to execute very well. It might not be able to execute those sorts of experiments. It may not have the resources that it needs to execute. And so then you might want to set an execution goal. So we want to hit 20 experiments this quarter, and if you can hit those 20 experiments, you'll know that you're executing really, really well. And even if those experiments don't work, that moves that frontier a little bit forward. And then finally the ultimate frontier is strategic risk. We understand how to move retention or we think we understand how to move retention. We're going to do a set of things to do that. it forward. And then finally the ultimate frontier is strategic risk. We understand how to move retention or we think we understand how to move retention. We're going to do a set of things to do that. And then either we'll learn that our understanding is correct, in which case we can pull that lever more, or we'll learn that it's not correct, in which case we need to go back to understanding and goal ourselves based on that.…

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