Christina Wodtke: preference

Transcript context

…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? 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 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.…

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