Christina Wodtke: recommendation

Transcript context

…... that were basically just tasks for ICs that they're working on, and they kind of lost sight of why does any of this matter? What are you even trying to do as a company? So, they moved away from OKRs and then they came back to them actually later and fixing some of these issues. So, maybe just as a question, what do you think is a sign that your OKR process is busted and that you need to spend some time improving and rethinking the way it works? 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. You don't want to be drug 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, "What are the top three initiatives that you're doing towards them?" Or two or five, whatever. It's going to vary a little bit, but 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? What do you think that's going to do?" Or, "I've been seeing that for weeks. Are you going to try something else anytime soon?" 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, "When you first start, it might take a half hour, but after that it should just 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... I'm a teacher, I'm really into 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. Qualitative research is really useful for understanding the psychology of your users. 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 in a big rush, you don't want to go through a bunch of paper to try to find what were our OKRs? You just go, "Boo, this is what we should do. I know what we're trying to do and I know how to make a decision about that." So, what I'm hearing is, a lot of this comes back to, if the meeting is not interesting and boring, change the way you run the meeting. Don't go through everything. Maybe just pick the things that are most interesting and focus on that. You don't have to review every single key result.…

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