Claire Hughes Johnson: belief

Transcript context

…So again, pointer to that. Okay, so that's the founding documents. The next piece is operating system. Maybe we go there, just what fits into an operating system for a company? What are the components of that? I think a lot of the components we've sort of touched on, which is do you have some sort of goals? This is now goes back what we were just talking about. For Stripe, we have an annual set of numeric targets that we put together, we have a system of goals or OKRs, objectives and key results, but sort of like what is your structure for setting milestones that you want to achieve, whether they're numeric or more like a binary, we got this thing launched, we didn't? And then QBR, so quarterly business reviews. How do we review parts of the business? What is the cadence? Well, first, what is the form by which we do that? Which would be this... I share examples in the book of this might be the template you fill out if you're a team and your reporting on how it's going and versus your strategy and your goal. And then there's also getting into metrics and dashboards. What are things that you look at internally to measure progress, the input metrics and the output metrics? And I give some examples of that. And then mostly, I think there are other... As I said, there could be less frequent forms you use, like a user event or a launch, a way of launching products, et cetera, but it's really simple. It's mostly goals and how do you review the business. Planning. I talk a lot about planning, which is. You said this earlier, and you and I think both agree, which is there's no perfect process to plan for the next year or the next two years, but you still need to fight your way through having something, especially after a certain stage. And every COO I meet with, we sort of ring our hands together. We're like, oh, planning and everyone hates us, too burdensome, but you still got to keep trying. You got to do it. And so we talk about planning processes and what they might look like and how you set them up. And then that's how you'd use goals and QBR to measure against the plan, right? So those are some of the operating systems. And then the cadence is just how often do you do these things? Actually, one of our big lessons, I think companies that are moving quickly and that are younger tend to resist some of the calendar based cadences of more mature companies because they seem slow. You're like, really? You're going to just achieve that goal in three months? Or are you artificially restricting yourself to some lowest common denominator of time? And so I get that fear, and I would say your cadence doesn't have to be one quarter or one six month, or even 12 months. Stripe, we did sort of six month processes for a while. So instead of a year, we did it in six months. Still, there were things that took, by the way, a year or longer, but I think that play around with the timeframe and don't feel restricted by what other companies do. But one of our lessons on the QBR was sometimes those quarterly, because that stands for quarterly, those quarterly business reviews were too infrequent, especially for new product areas. They we're still in development. ns on the QBR was sometimes those quarterly, because that stands for quarterly, those quarterly business reviews were too infrequent, especially for new product areas. They we're still in development. They were still getting a lot of feedback, launching a lot. And so we just said, okay, they're not quarterly anymore. They're like every six week business reviews. Fine, change your cadence. The point is to have one, because then it's predictable for teams. They know what they're marching toward, they know when they're going to be reporting out, and they can set their goals in a way that makes sense to make progress in that timeframe.…

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