Episode 156: OKRs for Focus and Alignment with Jeff Gothelf of Gothelf.co & Josh Seiden of Seiden Consulting

In this episode of Product thinking, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden join Melissa Perri to talk about their exciting new book on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). They tackle common mistakes made when implementing frameworks like Lean UX, and how OKRs can solve this. Plus they share all the insights they’ve learned over the last 10 years since their first book, Lean UX. Tune in to discover how OKRs improve your business, business unit, or team’s overall focus and alignment.

Jeff and Josh are the authors of the "OKR Book." Together, they founded the company Neo in 2012 and authored two more books: Lean UX and Sense and Respond. Today, Jeff is the Founder of Gothelf.co and Josh is the Principal at Seiden Consulting. Their diverse backgrounds make them excellent voices in the digital product and corporate world.

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You’ll hear them talk about:

[09:52] - Organizations are continuously looking for ways to improve efficiently. Organizational agility should be at the forefront of businesses minds and OKRs is how to do it. Having your organization aligned around achieving specific goals changes the whole process of how companies work. It affects the management style, incentive structures, team motivations, and more. These make for a correctly customer centric operation and improve agility.
[15.54] - Changing tact and implementing new frameworks of working is hard. This isn’t just an issue faced with OKRs. A lot of businesses find this out. A new framework might give us the language we need to change and to plan change, that's the first step, but it doesn’t make the change. This is where many businesses stall. It’s easy to lose track of why you’re making the changes. It’s important to clarify why you want to use the framework rather than simply adopting them without clear reason.
[26:39] - OKRs are objective and key results. It’s important to be clear on these two elements. The first is qualitative, the reason to get out of bed and work for the business. For example, to make a product more efficient. It is the alignment statement and the overall objective. The key results have to be outcomes. Outcomes measured by the changes in human behavior. The aim is to see people change their behavior in a meaningful way for them, which also positively impacts the business.
[29.13] In some cases OKRs have been used for individuals in a business. OKRs are meant to be used for focus and alignment of the team at the organizational level. Individual OKRs as incentives create conflicting priorities. OKRs are scalable down the organization; they apply to your sphere of influence. A key note is to use them in setting objectives and key results for these areas of influence, as well as focusing on alignment.
[36:52] - Using OKRs isn’t limited to digital product management or software. In fact, it’s been used in healthcare, starting with the CEO’s sphere of influence: the organization. The goal is to be the best clinic to receive care. A change in human behavior, the KRs, is to reduce serious safety events or regrettable turnover. How this applies to other sectors is OKRs force people to rethink how they work and how to improve work as a team to ultimately influence the behavior of customers or users.

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Previous guests include: Shruti Patel of US Bank, Steve Wilson of Contrast Security, Bethany Lyons of KAWA Analytics, Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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