Think about it: how often have you celebrated a big product release only to realize later that your customers barely used it? In “output-first” product cultures, we rack up new features and hit deadlines, but forget to ask the most important question—are we actually helping our customers do something they care about? If that question makes you squirm, it might be time to rethink your approach.
I sat down with Jeff Gothelf (author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and the fresh-off-the-press Who Does What by How Much) to talk about shifting from output-driven cycles to an outcomes-focused mentality. OKRs are one of the best goal setting frameworks for product teams to do just that.
He summed it up perfectly: “Key results are outcomes—measures of human behavior.” For example, it’s not just about shipping a new onboarding flow; it’s about seeing if new users can actually navigate your product more easily.
At the end of the day, product teams that care more about shipping things that actually influence customer behavior than hitting arbitrary deadlines are more likely to actually impact the bottom line.
Top Takeaways From Our Talk
1. Addressing The Universal Loathing of "Planning Season"
We’ve all felt the frustration: big offsites, hours lost in spreadsheets, the year-long product roadmap. Then reality hits, and half your “strategic plan” goes out the window. As Jeff bluntly put it: “Why does planning need a season?” He argues that waiting for an annual (or even quarterly) event to define everything doesn’t make sense. The market doesn’t wait, your customers don’t wait, and neither should your planning process.
Instead, Jeff suggests treating planning as a continuous, lightweight exercise—think weeks instead of months—acknowledging up front that your initial plan is just your best guess. That way, when something unexpected pops up (and it always does), you have the ability to change course and act on what you're learning.
2. Clear Strategy First, Then the OKRs
Too often, teams jump straight into setting OKRs in a vacuum. No wonder they struggle. Jeff introduced his Lean Strategy Canvas to help clarify your direction: identify the big internal goal, the obstacles blocking you, your “where to play” market focus, and how you’ll win.
OKRs that don't flow from your bigger picture strategy are bound to disappoint.
As Jeff said, “If we set goals in that way [customer-centric key results], it fundamentally changes how the organization works and functions.” The key is starting with a long-term objective (“become the easiest way to onboard a new team member”), then defining measurable behavioral changes that prove you delivered value (“increase the percentage of first-time admins who set up a new user flow without support”).
Without a strategy (where you'll play and how you'll win) to anchor those OKRs, you’re just picking numbers and hoping for the best.
3. Actionable Key Results Should Measure A Change In Behavior
Let's back up a step. Every successful new product, feature, or improvement causes some change in user behavior:
- they use your product more often
- they (in aggregate) get through some workflow at a higher rate
- they complete a core workflow faster
- they report higher levels of satisfaction
- etc.
Good Key Results focus on this change in behavior. The formula Jeff proposes for Key Results is that they answer 3 questions:
- Who?
- Does What?
- By How Much?
It’s not shipping a feature by Q2 or rolling out a fancy new widget. Instead of celebrating that you launched a mobile app, measure how many customers actually complete a key workflow after using it. Objectives describe the future state you want to create for your users, and your KRs spell out how you’ll know you got there.
Measuring this change in behavior can be harder for early-stage products. It’s fine if your data’s a bit fuzzy at first. Use leading indicators, talk to a handful of users every week, run small experiments. Over time, you’ll refine these metrics until they’re solid indicators of whether you’re delivering value. It’s better to start with a rough hypothesis of what matters than to keep shipping features blindly, hoping something sticks.
4. Acknowledge The Uncertainty Of It All
Here’s the kicker: even well-crafted OKRs can flop if your culture punishes learning. Too often, product teams know they’re off track but stick to the plan anyway because admitting they were wrong feels unsafe. This is where Jeff’s experience hits home. “If we’re going to do discovery work, we’re going to learn that we were wrong about some stuff,” he said. If your leadership can’t handle that, you’re never going to see the true benefits of OKRs.
Side note: this is why if you are going to have a longer-term roadmap, it's better to use a now/next/later roadmap that emphasizes "problems to solve" in the Later column instead of features.
True product discovery means giving teams the freedom to explore, iterate, and pivot without fear. This isn’t just about psychological safety; it’s about making your entire organization more agile and resilient.
Stop clinging to the illusion of certainty that comes from a 12-month roadmap. Your natural commitment/consistency bias will cause you to see it through, even if you discover there are more impactful problems you could be solving.
Instead, embrace continuous discovery. Update your OKRs as you gain insights. Measure the changes in user behavior that actually matter. Trust your team to adapt as the world around you shifts.
Stop waiting for “planning season” to change course.
Full Transcript
Steve Klein
Yeah, just wanted to say hi to everyone and welcome to the special event we're doing all about aligning product teams with OKRs. So 2024 is wrapping up, which means it's planning season for most people. So I'm sure everyone's some mix of maybe you're already finalizing a whole year worth of goals.
Maybe it's your company's first time actually trying OKRs specifically. Unfortunately, I'm sure some of you are probably Grumbling about the exec team coming back from an offsite with a roadmap of a bunch of features for you to build. But whatever the case today, we're actually going to be making the case for implementing a system of setting goals and keeping your company focused on achieving them.
I guess today is Jeff got health. He's an up and comer in the product management space that I recently discovered. Kidding. You'd have to be living under a rock to not have heard of Jeff. He's one of the leading voices and thought leaders on customer centric product development. He's the coauthor of some really incredibly popular books for PMs, "Lean UX", "Sense and Respond" just released who does what by how much, which is actually a guide for implementing OKRs.
And a quick intro about myself. I'm Steve Klein, one of the co founders of Vistaly . Vistaly is a continuous discovery platform built specifically for product teams. It's really, it's a purpose built tool for working in opportunity solution trees, integrating customer interview notes and product feedback right into your prioritization process.
But most importantly, tying all of that day to day work up to your key results and business metrics that you're trying to influence. And actually a prominent influencer in the product management space. One said, this really helps product teams put outcomes first, better than any other tool out there.
And that person was let me check my notes. It was actually Jeff who's luckily enough. One of our advisors and we're stoked to have him. Okay. So enough rambling. I want to get started with a bit of a hard hitting question. Like we were talking about, it's planning season. There's plenty of people out there that are bitching and moaning on LinkedIn about, the time and effort of the planning process.
And you get people on the product management subreddit. They're calling OKRs a sham or, Oh, it didn't work for us. As a huge proponent of OKRs yourself, who's helped tons of teams really adopt this in a way that's really helped them out Can you set the record straight here a little bit, talk to me about how you see the value, like we all know, of course it takes some time to, to go through this process.
Let's talk about the value of this process.
Jeff Gothelf
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I wrote a blog post a while back and you said it a couple of times, the term a couple of times, and it reminded me called, why does planning need a season? And it's true. Like I, I stand by that question. Like, why does planning need a season?
Anything that we're spending a season doing is generally speaking. And especially if it's at the beginning of an initiative, it's going to be filled with a bunch of risky assumptions, and so we're going to spend all this time negotiating and hammering out a plan and goals and a roadmap. Like you said, and. And then we're going to start working and a good chunk of that is going to fall apart and it's not going to fall apart because we're idiots. Or dumb people put those goals or roadmaps together. It's going to fall apart because we can't predict the future and reality is going to set in as we move forward.
And it's going to break some of those assumptions and we're going to need to adjust course. So that's my first sort of challenge here is, and I know organizations go through this. So I, in some ways I know I'm preaching to the choir, but realistically Why do we need a season? Why can't we put a plan together in two weeks, right?
A plan that is admittedly a set of assumptions and admittedly is going to change as we start to work, right? And I think that if we can start the conversation, sadly, the conversation typically starts from budgets or from features. We're going to build X next year, or we'll get, or we have a million dollars next year.
And so what are we going to make, right? Those are the conversation. What if we started the conversation from customer problems, what problems are we going to solve next year? And if we define success in terms of objectives and key results, customer centric key results, right? Now, look I tend to spend a little bit too much time on Reddit as well.
I'm on the product management subreddit. I just read, I lurk there, but honestly, like I find Reddit to be overly negative. I feel like it's a place where people just go and a thousand percent, they just, whatever it doesn't have to be product management, whatever the topic is, they're like, it's terrible.
Like I'm on the Barcelona subreddit and they're like, Barcelona is awful.
Steve Klein
Yeah. What are you talking about? Yeah.
Jeff Gothelf
It's amazing.
Steve Klein
Bunch of naysayers.
Jeff Gothelf
Yeah, exactly. But look, okay. Like any other process. We, I saw that, look I've done this now for a bit over 20 years. When the agile wave came in, the same exact thing happened, right?
People were like, Oh, agile. It's terrible. Oh, agile sucks. Oh, we tried it. It was horrible. And so that's it, like we're done with it forever because your one attempt at. At your company failed. And so this is a terrible idea. No your one attempt was probably just a terrible attempt.
And you should have probably tried to improve it. So let's so let's get back to the actual thing. OKRs goal setting framework for teams and customer centric. OKRs, which is our strong opinion in this book, right? That one of the, it's the defining.
feces of this book is that everyone has a customer. So you make a thing that gets consumed by a human being at some point at work and that the way that we know we've delivered value to that customer is when we see meaningful, positive changes in their behavior. So your key results are outcomes, their measures of human behavior.
If we set goals in that way, and I guarantee you that your organization is struggling to do that because it sounds easy, but it's not right. If we set goals in that way, it fundamentally changes how the organization works and functions. After that, or it should at least change how the organization moves forward. If we can make if we can agree that our OKRs are our best guesses, there are assumptions of what we know right now about next year and what we'd like to achieve, right? Then. It allows us the flexibility, the bandwidth, and frankly, the agility to adjust course as new information comes in. It's a lot, and it's a lot less painful, right?
Then spending three months coming up with a plan and a budget and goals and Gantt charts and roadmaps and deadlines and all that, and having a good chunk of that breakdown is why did we spend three months hammering that out? So what if we could put together a relatively lightweight approach that says, look, strategically, here's where we're going in 2025, right?
Our measures of success are these high level KPIs, right? Revenue, profit, retention rate, customer satisfaction, whatever it is. Okay. To achieve that, we're going to solve these three, four or five customer problems. And here are the OKRs that are associated as the measures of success for having solved those problems.
Let's get to work, right? And let's see where we were right, where we were wrong, what's working, what's not, and when the inevitability of something new coming along, whether it's something you've learned along the way, something that happens in the market, a new competitive threat, a new technology, maybe some geopolitical instability, whatever it is, we are not only capable of adjusting to that new thing, but we're willing to do it because the level of investment that we put in the upfront planning was low, right?
It hurts a lot less to adjust your plan when you spent two weeks on it or three weeks on it, as opposed to three months. It hurts a lot. To break the plan that took three months in the offsites and the retreats to make it happen.
Steve Klein
Yes You talked a lot. In there just about being agile changing course figuring out where were we right?
Where were we wrong? And a lot of that to me sounds do we have the right strategy in the first place? You released this lean strategy canvas. And it's actually an integral part of the OKR process because I think it answers a few questions that you need to know before you can actually even effectively use OKRs.
Can you talk a little bit about this Lean Strategy Canvas and its relationship or how you would use that in conjunction with setting up yours.
Jeff Gothelf
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the, one of the key conversations that happens a lot when we kick off with a new client usually is we ask, we say, what's your strategy for the coming 12 to 18 months?
Sometimes. They're like, here's the strategy. And you're like, wow, that's cool. And most of the time there's a lot of like strategy. What's I don't know what it is or our favorite question isn't that what OKRs do? And look, the bottom line is this there. And I'm going to, I'm going to tell you what it is, what we believe it to be right now.
OKRs and strategy, but you can absolutely have OKRs without strategy. right? It's just the risk is that there's no anchor. There's no foundation for the organization to anchor their goals in. So it's so this team's going to go this way, this team's going to go that way. You got a third team going that way.
One team going that way. And so that there is a fundamentally there's a lack of. clear alignment, someone's going to have to go back and wrangle all these teams in and say no, we're going this way. And so strategy is the foundation to which you anchor your OKRs and it becomes a whole lot easier to set OKRs and to evaluate the the validity, but the quality, let's just say of the OKRs that you've set.
If there's a strategy to, to reflect it through or to filter it through. And so the lean strategy canvas was designed to facilitate this exact conversation. So if we're trying to develop a relatively lean, strict strategy for next year, right? Cause again, strategy is one of those things that executives will go off.
And then three months later, they'll return with the strategy. When again, it's a hypothesis. So let's get our best guests down as quickly as possible and start working and then adjust course. So how do we get there? Step one in the lean strategy canvas is to identify the goal that as a company, you'd like to achieve.
Next year the internal long term goal, right? It could be a financial target Could be a growth or an expansion target, right? We'd like to we'd like to hit 5 million in arr next year.
Steve Klein
I think you might have it. Do you have that? The document pulled up? If you do, could you, there's a way to share screen at the bottom.
I think it might be easier to follow. Yeah.
Jeff Gothelf
How's that?
Steve Klein
I see. I think I just got to add it to stage here and bang. Yeah, cool. I think everyone could see that. Is that right?
Jeff Gothelf
I can see it as that is shared. So I'm going to go with yes. Yes. What's the goal? What's the goal you're trying to achieve in the next 12 months?
Let's just say 12 to 18 months, right? This is your long term internal goal. Again, financial target growth or expansion target, right? I want to be, I want to hit 5 million in ARR next year, or we want to expand into Southern Europe or whatever it is, or we want to expand into the financial services vertical.
Those are, that's the first thing we want to articulate. What is our goal? And that could be, look, you can use this for the company. You can use this for your business unit. You can use it for a program of work. You can use it for a product, right? You can use you can adjust the scope of this based on what you can influence.
Once you've got that down, right? We work as a team on this, right? So as a team, once we get, we have a sense of what we're trying to achieve next year. Let me talk about what's the obstacle, what's getting in our way from achieving the goal, right? And again, this could be anything, right? Competitive threats could be organizational challenges.
Look, we'd love 5 million ARR, but we're a 12 person company. We need to at least be a 30 or 50 person company to get there, whatever it is. AI is all the rage. Our competition is way ahead of us on deploying AI in a meaningful way in our vertical and we're way behind, whatever, whatever the obstacle is from that is keeping you or the most, and the way this works is you You list all of the potential obstacles, and then you identify the most significant one,
Steve Klein
Right?
Jeff Gothelf
What's the most significant obstacle. Then with those two things identified, we we really like Roger Martin, just all his work in general and his sort of lightweight or lean approach.
The strategy is a two question framework, which asks, where will you play and how will you win? So if we're going to overcome this obstacle. We're going to ask the question, where will you play? Where will you play is your target audience or market, right? So it can be a geographic region. It could be an industry vertical.
It could be a target audience segment, whatever it is, right? We're going to play in the enterprise enterprise SAS world or whatever it is, right? That's what we'd like to play. We'd like to focus on micro transactions in sub Saharan Africa, whatever it is, like what is the market that you're going to, you're going to target first to overcome your obstacle and achieve your goal.
Where will you play? And then the second question in Roger Martin's framework is how will you win? So what is your unique. differentiation, value proposition. What do you do differently than anybody else? What can you do better than anybody else? What competitive advantage do you have that no one else has?
And to be clear, this isn't a set of features like we will win by building a mobile app, right? We will win by making sure that our technology is accessible to as many people as possible. Using whatever, using the mobile channel or something along those lines. But we want to be clear about where we will play and how we will win.
Super super important to, to list that, right?
Steve Klein
Yes.
Jeff Gothelf
Now we have a goal, we have an obstacle of that goal and we have a strategic direction, right? So what we've done here is we've begun to constrain the space for the OKR conversation, right? So the question becomes, how will we know? That we are achieving the strategy and the answer to how will we know we're achieving the strategy is our objectives and key results.
Steve Klein
Right.
Jeff Gothelf
So the objective says, okay, if we achieve the strategy, what is the qualitative future state or benefit we'd like to create for our customers? We're the most accessible micro lending service in Sub Saharan Africa. That's great. By the end of next year, qualitative, inspirational, aspirational, right?
This is why we get out of bed. Terrific. Key results. How do we know, right? What measure of human behavior are we going to look at to tell us that we have become the most accessible micro lender micro lending service in Sub Saharan Africa, right? And you know that you've written a key result that answers that question, a customer centric, human centric outcome based key result when it answers the question, who does what by how much?
So the book is not coincidentally called that. This is how we teach it. We know that we've become the most accessible micro lending service in sub Saharan Africa by the end of the year, when 20 percent of new borrowers.
20 percent of 20 percent of new borrowers initiate their journey with us via mobile device, right? Something along those lines. And we're looking for again, who does what, by how much, right? So new borrowers that's the who does what initiate their lending journey with a mobile device by how much at least 20 percent of the time.
Now what we've done here is we have anchored our OKRs, and it could be other KRs there as well, right? We've anchored those KRs, those OKRs, as the goal for telling us that we're achieving the strategy, which in theory helps us overcome the obstacle.
Which drives us towards the ultimate long term goal that the company has in mind, right?
So that's the connection between this and so if you can get through one, two, three boxes, one, two, and three in this canvas and the prompts are clear and the relatively easy prompts the conversations might be rich the debates might be difficult but the prompts are relatively clear here Then you should be able to set pretty clear okrs This should not take three months, right?
That's the punchline.
Steve Klein
Yeah, for sure. It feels like a lot of this is almost like like Russian doll of the of similar ideas. It's like big picture. What are we trying to do? Big picture. How do we think we can achieve this? Smaller picture. What are we going to do now to take a step towards achieving this, right?
So it's like taking this, taking these big problems and breaking them down into like smaller more actionable, like bite sized things that you can actually work on for maybe a quarter at a time.
Jeff Gothelf
Yeah. And everything is in human language. Like we're going to write things that people understand and that makes sense.
And that doesn't have a, that doesn't have a ton of jargon in it. And yeah, exactly. We want to be very specific and clear because ultimately we have to start working off of this. And if it's super high level or full jargon, what do I do? What's the, where do I go for at least I don't even have a direction.
By working in this way, we've constrained the space, which makes it relatively clearer where the team should start focusing.
Steve Klein
Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. So we said, strategy is this, it's opinion and a opinionated and coherent approach to addressing an important challenge. It's our lens through which we're going to we're going to try and win this objectives and key results are like temporal.
How do we know we're on the path towards that? You covered a little bit of this but we breezed through a lot of that. I want to take a step back real quick actually and talk about, okay. When we go to, when we start, Yeah, when we sit down with our teams and go to actually write out these objectives and key results, talk us through a bit about what, what makes for good objectives and where do people go wrong?
And then we'll do the same thing for key results.
Jeff Gothelf
Sure. So objectives are they are the future state or benefit that we would like to create for our customers. So what is the what's a better version of what we have right now, or what is where a customer is struggling right now, what might be better in the future.
So again, I gave you an example of the most accessible micro lending service in Sub Saharan Africa might be the easiest way to shop for furniture online. The the most effective way to to book, The most cost effective way to book travel, by the end of next year or whatever it is, but always want to think about the customer benefit in this.
And I think a lot of places. So first of all, what do people do? Where do people go wrong? The benefit ends up being a corporate benefit, a company benefit, right? It focuses oftentimes on a high level KPI. So we want to make more money. We want to retain more customers, acquire more customers, that type of thing.
It's usually there. I've seen metrics in the outcomes. I see that a lot, right? We don't, it's a qualitative statement. We're not going to put metrics in a qualitative statement. So that's that's an issue that we see a lot. And I think that the other one we don't talk about as much is that.
The objectives tend to be lofty and unspecific, is that a word? Not specific. Not specific. And so let's say something like, the best bank in the world or something no, seriously, but it'd be like that. It'd be like, it'd be like, we want to be the best consumer bank in the United States by the end of next year.
Steve Klein
And you're like, come on Let's break that down a little bit. What is best, right? Because you should be in line with this, with the strategy, which should be more, has to be more specific or opinionated than just the best.
Jeff Gothelf
Yeah, exactly. And the mission and the brand promise of the organization as well.
Imagine it's I'm trying to think of a good example. Take the automotive, like cars, right? If you're going to go buy I guarantee you that like Lamborghini. If you, they're like, we want to be the best car company in the world. What does best mean to Lamborghini?
It means luxury. It means speed. It means performance. It means amazing styling, versus, a different company. There's this this Chinese electric car company, BYD. That's making inroads, particularly in Europe these days. I'm seeing a lot of these cars like they want to be the best car company in the world for them.
It's efficiency. It's sustainability, right? It's a completely different definition of best. So sharpening that objective to the point where it actually means something specific to your company. And it's aligned with your strategy, your mission, and your brand makes a huge difference.
Steve Klein
Okay, that leads to, okay, so we have these qualitative statements about where we're trying to go and key results are how we measure if we're making progress towards that can you talk a little bit more just about that?
What makes for good OKRs, obviously who does what by how much are some of the central tenets of that. But yeah any other kind of flavor you can add there or expand on why those three, why does a good key result need to answer those three questions?
Jeff Gothelf
So the key result, like you said, it's the answer to how do we know that we've achieved the objective?
The answer is because people. Specifically, the people that we serve, our customers, our users, our constituents, our whatever it is, our vendors, whatever it is, right? I've changed their behavior in a meaningful way to them as a result of the work that we've done because we've created this future benefit or state for them, right?
And so what we want to see is again, we want to see the name of the person. Who you're impacting, we want to understand the behavior change that you hope to see in them. And the amount of that behavior change, the quantity of that behavior change, that is meaningful to the business. I think and feasible, right?
I think. When teams propose their OKRs, sometimes the KRs are like we could do a F we, we could get a 5 percent lift on, the number of times per visit that a customer adds a product to cart, the percentage of visits that were a customer as the cart. And 5%, you're like 5%, I got to invest in a whole team for a year, fully loaded.
That's going to cost me a couple million bucks. If you're only looking at 5 percent lift, we should work on something else. So it's, it needs to be meaningful to the organization. It needs to be meaningful to the customer. And and again, specific, right? Who does what by how much, because that's how we know that we've actually delivered some value and we know that we're done, right?
Cause we can work and optimize on this stuff forever. What tends to happen in a lot of cases is that people will put output. in their key results, right? So we want to be the the most accessible micro Saharan Africa. Terrific. Key result is ship the mobile app by Q1, right? Launch them, launch the mobile website by Q2, push notifications in Q3, stuff like that.
And there's good reason why people do that. It's the way we've always done it. Number one it's super easy to measure that stuff. It's binary. Did you ship the mobile app? Yes, I did. No, I didn't. It's easy to measure. It's easy to manage. It's easy to reward. How are you doing towards a mobile app?
We're going to ship on Friday, right? That type of thing. The reality is that doesn't tell us that we've delivered any value. That only tells us that we've delivered a product or a service. Or an activity of some kind. Instead we want to see changes in human behavior that tell us that we chose the right thing to build and that we built it well, and that it actually met the needs of the customer, the people who have to use it.
That's critical. And but we'll always see output always ends up in the key results. That's a super common thing. Numbers, people avoid numbers
Jeff Gothelf
They're terrified of putting that, that bullseye on their back. Or they don't know where to get the numbers from or what a good number is.
That's a fair question. Sometimes that's tough to get.
Steve Klein
Yeah, we, okay. So we, a lot of Vista customers are earlier stage startup earlier stage compared to probably some of the, you tend to work with larger companies, but you can call it series, a series B tech companies. A lot of the key results they want that I think would actually be good.
Key results for them are, yeah, they're just hard to measure or there may be their kind of their sentiment about Are we making this process easier? It's just things that are hard to measure a little, just fuzzier. Any thoughts or tips specifically around those kinds of things?
Jeff Gothelf
So there's a couple of things. First of all, look, sentiment drives behavior, right? And this is the endless debate around customer satisfaction, right? Should we measure customer satisfaction? Should we care about it? We should absolutely care about it. Should we measure it? When we have a good way to do sure. But until then, let's ask the question. What do satisfied customers do, right? Satisfied customers use the product, pay us money regularly. Tell their friends, say nice things about us, right? What, increase the usage of the product, right? Buy more stuff from us, unsatisfied customers.
What do they do? They don't use the product. They complain. They write bad reviews. They unsubscribe, right? All of these things. And there's lots of predictors to all that stuff as well. So really looking at it. So sentiment drives behavior. That's number one. You may find yourself in a situation where it might take a while.
To get to your ultimate key result. So what are the leading indicators of that today? Can you measure that? If not, if you can't do it quantitatively, can you do it qualitatively? Can we talk to five potential prospective customers every week and show them iterations of our workflow and see how they react to it, what feedback they give us to it, how successful they are at completing it and using that as a leading indicator, because it's going to take us a while to actually put something out into production.
Steve Klein
Mmmm.
Jeff Gothelf
So what are some activities that we can do to drive some insight of some leading indicators? Can we break down the key result into its leading indicators and focus on those things first? So there's lots of opportunities. I think to do that. And you can use qualitative measurement techniques in the early days, right?
To give you some for example, we want to get at least, three out of five weekly test participants can complete the framework and understand every step in the process, something along those lines, eventually you're going to increase the fidelity of your of that experiment.
And you can change the key results until you get to the point where you can ship something into market, into the hands of people and start to really measure it quantitatively.
Steve Klein
Yeah as an example, one, one thing we struggle with people who sign up for Vistaly, it's it's a little bit difficult for people to get their workspace set up.
Sometimes maybe they maybe they're not already using OKRs or don't have defined outcomes, or they're unfamiliar with some of the terminology or. The UI frankly could use, a little bit of love. But you'd say it's, it would be a reasonable key result for us to set around literally just asking folks that sign up for kind of a qualitative description or Measure of how was how easy was it to get your Vista Lee workspace set up and actually use that as a key result.
Jeff Gothelf
You could write, but you've got running software, right? And so it was running software. You can you can measure time on task. You can measure completion rates. You can measure completion rates With requests for help completion rates without requests for help failure rates, abandonment rates all that kind of stuff.
I think before you've got actual product. You can build prototypes of those workflows and put people through them and say, and see what happens, right? We want to get at least, three out of five folks through the process as, as easily as possible or whatever it is. But yes, early, but don't stick to those like qualitative metrics too long.
We want to get to a point where we're actually putting folks through some kind of an experience as quickly as possible.
Steve Klein
Yes. Understood. Okay. Okay. So We have, let's say we have some well written key results objectives and key results. What are the most common failures of companies for adopting OKRs?
Even if they do like a good job up front of setting, setting ones that are aligned with a sound strategy. And the KRs hit all the points you talk about. Why do folks struggle to Continue to adopt and use them.
Jeff Gothelf
Look, we talk about OKRs in the book as three things as a goal setting framework, as a a new way of working and as a cultural intervention.
So organizations that set goals. With OKRs, like the thing that you said successfully complete that first part, which is, look, it's not easy, but it's not rocket science, generally speaking, unless you're in the rocket industry, in which case it might be rocket science, but otherwise otherwise it's the formula who does what by how much is fairly easy to understand, it might be some work and aligning and, cascading and up and down and meeting in the middle maybe not having too many OKRs, setting the goals is pretty easy.
Like relatively easy in the grand scheme of things. New way of working. This is interesting, right? This is where it starts to break, because I think a lot of organizations pay a lot of attention to writing the goals and setting them and they, and then it's their attention and focus declines as they move into new way of working and ultimately cultural intervention because, and this is so cool.
critical. And I think most organizations don't realize this, right? If you set customer centric, okay, ours, the way that I've been, I've described them a couple of times during this call, right? With measures of human behavior, with outcomes as the key results. There's nothing in that goal that tells a team what to make or what to build.
There's no feature, there's no solution, there's no output, there's nothing right. Teams have to then go and discover What combination of code copy design, business model, value proposition, pricing model, whatever it is going to get people to actually change their behavior in this particular way.
And so many organizations don't know how to do discovery work. That's number one. The organizations that do know how to do discovery work. A lot of the time don't take the insight that comes from discovery seriously and they don't implement it. Or they don't allow it to happen or they only allow it to happen a little bit and they take it they discount the information that comes back.
And so what happens is either teams get work prescribed to them again, in which case we're breaking the value of OKRs or they are reverse engineering their backlog so that they write OKRs that match the things that are already planning to build.
Which fails to deliver value of what we're doing as well.
And so there, there's a that's where it starts to break. Okay. So how do we like imagine you've worked at the same organization for five years and for five years, somebody anywhere from the C level on to your immediate boss has told you like what you're working on for the next six months or 12 months.
And then you're like, okay, I'm going to build that thing as the boss said. And now that's gone, right? Your boss says your boss has now told you that your goal is to increase retention. See you in three months. Yep. Not really, but I'm going to check back in three months and see how retention is going.
And then you're like, what should I do? And so if we haven't given folks the tools to figure out what to do, that's where it starts to break down. And then finally, the cultural intervention where this really gets difficult and starts to where organizations really struggle is that if you're going to do discovery work, you're going to learn that you were wrong about some stuff.
And that's awesome. Because when we learn that we're wrong, we do something better, but it has to be safe to be wrong. Yes. We have to feel comfortable coming back to the organization and saying, this idea we had doesn't work. We got to try something else. And if that's not, if the culture isn't a learning culture, if it doesn't reward learning and course correction and, learn fast and iterate fast and that type of thing, that type of culture, then all of this starts to break down, right?
Because people won't do that. They won't do the work necessary to discover how to achieve the OKRs. They'll just do what they're told. Yes. And that and by the way, and that cultural intervention, it goes way beyond psychological safety, right? And what the organization rewards, it goes to job descriptions, performance management criteria, like it's the whole I can describe OKRs to you in 90 seconds, like what's an O, what's a K R.
But the implications of that are organization wide. And I think that's ultimately where companies are like, Oh crap, what did I sign up for? I just thought I was just changing the goal setting framework. And that's, and so that's, that to me that's the thing I see a lot. Like people really focus on the writing of the goals and then cool, we did it.
Steve Klein
Yes.
And yes and expect it to just work. Yeah, I mean there's so much in there. Yeah, I think teams need a kind of centralized place to really memorialize the stuff that they're learning just around, you one of the oh There we go. One of the examples you gave us around execs handing off a kr around increasing retention and if you don't have You Sorry, this other light's messed up.
And if the teams don't have a good idea of, okay, great, what even are the leading indicators of retention for our customers? Maybe execs haven't communicated that or the organization hasn't even really fully identified that yet. It can be hard for them to, figure out what to do next.
And you're starting all over with with discovery around what, what even are those things? So I think having tools are memorializing that connection between Hey, Here's how the company's doing, here's how we make money, and here's here's the value that we provide to customers, or here's, here's the things that they do in the product that ultimately lead them to to land as a customer in the first place, or be retained and having that shared model of that learning I think helps product teams do better work.
Okay, I want to, we're coming up on time here. I wanna get to some questions. There is a little bit of q and a. Let's see if I can pop over here. I can add this to the stage. Here we go. Ashley Shaw. Ask how I think this means maybe. How do you know that when you're bringing a new disruptive process to a well established industry?
How do you how do you do that when you are? I think this might have been asked in the middle of one of the talks. I'm trying to think what this might have been in response to.
This might have been around setting good objectives, setting KRs. Actually, if you could, or. I'll just start talking
Jeff Gothelf
about this. And if Ashley wants to add some clarity in the chat but look, if I was around the lady, Oh yeah, there you go. Oh, I see. Look, five, five is a number I made up, right?
It's a good number. Not what could be one to strive for, but if you're bringing a new process into an industry, right? The first few people you're going to talk to, on a weekly basis, whether it's one person, three people, five people, whatever it is you're gonna talk about how do you currently do stuff?
Tell me about the last time that you did X. When the last time, but the last time you filed an expense report, because we're completely disrupting expense reporting would be a really nice thing in most corporate organizations. Tell me about the last time you filed an expense report. Oh, it's a nightmare.
I have a wallet full of receipts and you have to take photos of everything and the upload mechanism was broken. And so I had to scan everything on and on. It goes cool. Talk to two or three people and and and you get some patterns, you do it again the week after that, maybe the week after that, after a while, you've got a clear problem statement, right?
And maybe you're starting to propose some potential solutions. So the next time you're talking to one or two or three or four or five people a week You're going to show them some wireframes or a workflow or something along those lines that says hey listen compared to the last time you filed an expense report.
What do you think about this process? Oh, this is easy This is hard. I don't understand where did I scan the receipts, right? That type of thing and so That's how you start to do that with folks who are We're doing the thing in the current way. And then once you've got a new version of the way you start to show incrementally higher fidelity versions of the new way, and that starts to give you feedback.
And then once you get to a point where you've actually got something that you can deploy on a website or online, or you can start to increase the number of people that go through that process. Because you can deploy that broadly. It's not required. Like it's not dependent on you align lining up three or four or five people every week.
Yes, I
Steve Klein
love that. One from Kata here and I actually want to add something onto this. So he asked, what do you recommend is the best way to approach OKRs for new product lines? And this sounds I had asked a handful of people just about their thoughts on OKRs and just barriers to implementing them ahead of time.
And one thing I heard was there's a worry that it, the OKRs can promote Like smaller incremental thinking. And I think that goes with this curious to hear how you think about that.
Jeff Gothelf
I'm sorry, is this the question on the screen and the question that you that you asked, help me connect the dots between what you said and the question on the screen.
Steve Klein
Yeah. Here's talking about using OKRs for new, so maybe you have an existing Existing company. And you're thinking about adding new product lines and in the same way I've heard people say that, Oh, every time we use every time we've tried, okay, ours, the cares people come back with are small improvements around the existing product, maybe instead of new products for the same segment, or maybe applying our current product to different segments or things like that.
Jeff Gothelf
So let's talk about your objective, right? Because that's ultimately the goal that we're trying to create. I think if your objective is optimize the state of whatever workflow for this customer benefit, I think you're going to get KRs that, that speak to that, to optimize that workflow if your objective is bigger, broader reinvent the way that people file expense reports or whatever, or, Something along those lines then the key results will reflect the objective that you're looking for.
And honestly, you don't have to live with the key results that people present. If someone brings you an OKR and you're like, look, this is small thing. This is thinking small, right? You're going to be nice to them about it. But like this is we're trying to think a lot bigger than this because we want you to come up with solution ideas that are a lot bigger.
We can have that conversation and people can edit them, right? First drafts or first drafts, right? If you're not seeing that, but I think setting the right objective drives better key results, right? If you want bigger key results, you need a bigger objective. If you want more tactical key results, you have more tactical objectives.
Steve Klein
Yes. I think maybe part of the problem for those people is for the four bigger. loftier objectives, it can be harder to measure. The progress towards that sometimes they might you might be in a company where you're very used to. Oh, I have a very clear analytics around how the products working now.
It's easy for me to set key results around improvements to this. It's harder for me to think about Or measure key results for bigger loftier goals.
Jeff Gothelf
Look, I think in that situation, I think falling back on good old pirate metrics, makes great sense.
If you're trying to build a new business line or a new product line or whatever it is, so pirate metrics, if you're not familiar came from Dave McClure, 15 years ago, maybe like that. Acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. Sometimes people switch the revenue and referral depending on your type of business, but it's called a pirate metrics because the first letter of each one of those spells are, and apparently that's how pirates talk.
But if you're building a new a new thing, a new business unit, a new product line, whatever it is, right. Pirate metrics are great key results, right? Because it's that kind of like that growing funnel of customer engagement, right? So acquisition, can we acquire new customers?
That's a key result. Can we activate those new customer? That's like activate means they start to use the product, right? Can we retain them? What does retention look like in this world? We can write those key results. And so that gets you into a a set of key results that are reflective of something new that doesn't currently exist today, right?
You're not optimizing an existing workflow, right? You're acquiring people to a new one and then you're getting them to use it and to use it again and to pay you and then to tell their friends and, that's the whole. Yes.
Steve Klein
Yes. Yes. I love that. And I think as you get more as you get more mature in that product or you you continue to do discovery and you get good signal around, okay, we were just measuring retention, but now after talking to lots of customers and digging into the data, I see that, oh, retention is actually, it's driven by our customers doing this and this.
So as you get more data and maturity around it, you can set key results closer to some of the, like the leading indicators of things, more of the. The product outcomes as opposed to like business outcomes. Yeah.
Jeff Gothelf
And again, it can be exactly, it could be leading indicators. It could be where customers came from, customers who come from, word of mouth referrals tend to do X, Y, and Z customers who come from France, tend to do a, B, and C, whatever it is. There's all kinds of facets to the data that may help you come up with new ideas about how to drive behavior.
Steve Klein
Yes. Okay. One last one is another one of the pre submitted ones. What is your advice for implementing customer centric OKRs when you have multiple different user types, customer personas using our product? I think this one was around just this idea that it can be difficult picking the right key results when you have, maybe you have a complex wide spanning product that, you know, people at different levels that the organization use.
Any thoughts or tips around this? Yeah.
Jeff Gothelf
So strategy, let's go back to strategy. Okay. Strategically, what are we focusing on in the next six to 12 to 18 months? Are we working towards satisfying the needs of this target audience or that target audience? Are we trying to really make this a place for expert power users?
Are we trying to make this a space for novice users? It doesn't mean you ignore the other. But we want to make sure we want to understand what our priority is. That's number one. I think the other thing too, is to have that clear definition of target user personas. And then say, do we have enough resources to have a team dedicated to novice users, expert users and admins?
For example do we have like the, we have the admin team, the expert user team, the novice user team. If you have the resources, you could divide it that way. If not, you've got to prioritize. And that prioritization comes in the form of strategy and then OKRs, right? So you might want to create like the friendliest place for people to apply for a mortgage.
And that's great. It doesn't mean you're ignoring the expert users. Maybe they're, there's tends to be like, maybe you're optimizing for the novice path. But there is, there are ways for experts to skip the easy stuff or take a different path in there, but I think it comes down to strategy initially.
And then a prioritization decision, if you don't have the resources to it to go after every target audience based on strategically what you care about in the coming weeks, months, year.
Steve Klein
Love that. Cool. Okay. I could talk about this stuff all day, but I think that's all we have time for.
Just want to give one more quick pitch for Vistaly. It's, it's a great way to connect your day to day product work to your key results, your strategy, your outcomes, whatever kind of higher level business stuff you're working towards, so I would encourage you to check that out.
Jeff, thanks so much for doing this. Really appreciate the time. Where can folks find you online to connect? What's the best way to learn more about you and what you're about?
Jeff Gothelf
The two easiest places are my website, jeffgothealth. com and LinkedIn. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Steve Klein
Awesome. Sounds good. Alrighty. Thanks so much, everyone. See you next time.
Jeff Gothelf
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Steve Klein
Yes.
Thanks. Bye.
