Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the "Seduction of the Task", with Christina Wodtke

Alexis:

Hey Christina, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Christina:

I definitely took the scenic route to get where I am today. I went to art school and changed from painting to photography because all the painting professors were abstract expressionists, and I wanted to work realistically. That's when I first discovered computers. There were Macs there — this was before Photoshop — and I started becoming interested in manipulating digital imagery.

After I graduated I moved to San Francisco thinking I was going to work in computers, but I went back to painting and waited tables for several years. One day a friend said, 'Hey, we're building a Yahoo killer. Would you like to help?' I said sure. I just fell in love with the web — I was reviewing fifty websites a week.

Once I started falling in love with the web, I learned how to code, became a programmer, then switched to information architect because I was interested in why websites were so terrible. I became an interaction designer, then a manager — thinking 'maybe if I'm a manager I can make better websites.' I've been an entrepreneur a couple of times, started a nonprofit. My question is always: why aren't things better? Why do we launch things we're not happy with? Why is it so hard to work with other people? I've worked at Zynga, Myspace, LinkedIn and of course Yahoo!, and as a consultant with people like the New York Times.

What I've really learned is that you need great teams — everything happens through them. If you don't know how to work with other people, you really can't get anything significant done. That question has driven a lot of my work with OKRs and with high-performing teams. I'm now a lecturer at Stanford, teaching HCI, still asking the same question I did back in 1998: how do we make stuff suck less for the human beings affected by it?

Alexis:

That's a great mission. You're also the author of a book that I already love and recommend to a lot of people: Radical Focus — Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results. I'd love to start there. How would you explain OKRs?

Christina:

I always joke that I was writing a book about an acronym, and the only way I could make it interesting was to tell a story — because I love OKRs. They can be transformative for a person or a company. I've seen it over and over.

The objective is qualitative. It's an inspirational goal — sometimes I describe it as 'a mission for three months.' Every company has a five-year mission statement; if you could make a mission statement just for a quarter, what would it be? It has to inspire people. Then key results answer the question: how would we know we actually fulfilled this mission? What would change in the world? What numbers would move?

You have to avoid the seduction of the task. It's tempting to put down things you'll do — but if you do that you might not get the results you want. If somebody writes a key result like 'install a new CRM,' I'll ask: 'What would happen if you install this CRM?' They might say, 'Our existing customers would return 20% more often.' There's your key result. Then you can ask, 'Is the CRM really the best way to do that, or are there other things we could try?'

By setting both qualitative and quantitative goals you unite the company. Sales cares about numbers; design and customer service maybe care more about making a difference in the world. The OKR format lets everyone get pointed in the same direction, with outcomes — not output. Output is just doing stuff and hoping something happens. Outcomes are: we want to move these numbers, we want to make a difference, so we'll think through different ways to do it, guess how likely each will work, and run experiments to get smarter.

The biggest danger with OKRs is set-and-forget. People spend tons of time word-crafting and then forget about them within weeks because the world is full of shiny objects. The thing that makes OKRs great is the cadence — weekly check-ins on what you're doing to get closer, Friday celebrations of progress, and a retrospective at the end to learn what slows you down and what speeds you up. That cadence creates organizational learning, and that's what keeps you competitive.

Alexis:

I love it. The fact that we're aiming for impact is really important — as an individual, a team, a company, a society. 'Avoiding the seduction of the task' — I think I'll reuse that a thousand times. The book is a fable. What was the driver for using a fable?

Christina:

I'm a big fan of business fables and case studies. HBR used to open every magazine with a case study. I love Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Goal, The Phoenix Project. I love stories. Stories are more important to us than we think.

I thought if I could show people the mistake so many make — set and forget — through a small, recognizable company, the journey of Hannah and Jack would let them see why the mistakes happen and how to fix them. What I didn't know is that fiction lets you put in worlds, trouble and challenges, and people learn things you didn't explicitly intend to teach. I had a reader email me saying, 'I'm so grateful for the part where Hannah fires that jerk programmer, because I had to fire someone like that and didn't know how to handle it.' There's a richness in fiction — layers of meaning — that nonfiction can't always carry. The second half of the book then lays it out simply for people who want the cheat sheet.

Alexis:

On business fables, you should add The Gold Mine by Michael Ballé — a manufacturing fable. For my second book, Changing Your Team From the Inside, I tried to combine a fable with experiments people can try. But that's so true: when I read your book I couldn't stop because I wanted to know what happens next.

Christina:

We learn better when we're enjoying learning. I teach at Stanford so I spend time digging into learning theory. If all of human history was a 24-hour clock, we only started writing things down at 11pm. For thousands of years the only way we passed knowledge — 'don't eat those berries, stay out of that cave, there's a big fluffy thing with claws' — was storytelling. Our brains are literally evolved to learn from stories. Take facts, wrap them in story, and people enjoy learning more, comprehend more, and retain more.

Alexis:

The story in the book is about a startup. Are OKRs only for startups, or useful in other environments?

Christina:

Great question — that's the number one reason I'm writing the second edition of Radical Focus. So many people using OKRs are not startups, and some techniques designed for startups don't scale to larger companies.

One obvious example is cascading. In a small startup with one or two layers of management, cascading isn't a big deal. With multiple layers of hierarchy, you can't possibly cascade — I've heard of companies where it took a month, by which point you've lost a third of your quarter. You want to move from cascading toward alignment: the company sets the goal, and you trust the people underneath to ask, 'What can we do to help the company meet its goal, given our function and role?'

Marty Cagan and I have come to the same conclusion: if you're an organization that's all about command and control, OKRs are probably not for you. We see people trying to use OKRs to squeeze a little more productivity out of people, and that often ends in cheating. Think Volkswagen or Wells Fargo — those weren't OKRs per se, but they were ridiculous numerical goals handed top-down, tied to livelihoods. People turned to cheating because they didn't have a lot of choices. That's an anti-OKR — the evil twin.

Where OKRs are good is saying: 'Here's what we want to see. Figure out what you can do about it. We empower you.' Marty's next book is called Empowered. If you're hiring A-players, why don't you let them be A-players?

Alexis:

So neither top-down nor bottom-up — both, with people figuring out how they can contribute to higher-level objectives.

Christina:

Exactly. When the company says, 'This is our most important strategic initiative — we're going to move into the European market, or shift from B2B to B2C,' everyone can ask themselves, 'What does that mean for us? How can we contribute?'

I'd go even further — some groups don't actually need OKRs. Is the legal team constantly striving to be better, or is there a level where they can say, 'Yeah, we're solid'? In America we tend to think the sky's the limit, that things can always grow endlessly. That can be grueling. Sometimes the right thing is to reach a high level of performance and stay there — move from OKRs to KPIs, just measure so you know if things change. Businesses need to be more humane.

I've also been working with companies on how OKRs map to strategy. If you remember the BCG 2×2: question marks are a great place for exploratory or hypothesis OKRs — instead of 'go to market in Mexico,' set 'have a product that resonates with Mexico,' and let teams run experiments and use the OKR cadence to decide whether to pivot or shut down. Stars are a great place for OKRs because growth still matters. Cash cows often don't need OKRs — leave a small solid team, move to KPIs, make as much as you can while it lasts. Dogs also fit KPIs, with a clear threshold for when to put them to bed. Think about your whole portfolio: where is growth possible, where am I just extracting value? It's the old explore-exploit question.

Alexis:

What's your perspective on using OKRs for individuals?

Christina:

For five years I've seen people try it, and it almost never ends well. When an upper manager gives someone an OKR, it's really hard to keep compensation out of it. If compensation is tied to the OKR, you either sandbag — set them so low you can easily make them — or, if asked to do something ridiculous with your livelihood on the line, you cheat.

The other reason is cognitive load. An individual already has the company OKR, maybe a department OKR, then a team OKR — that's already a lot. Add an individual OKR and it's too much for working memory. There's a reason I called the book Radical Focus, not 'A Guide to OKRs.' The point is to say: this is the single most important thing.

There are exceptions. A 'business unit of one' — like a growth hacker — can sometimes have OKRs, but still no compensation tied to them. The other thing that works really well is when individuals set personal OKRs themselves: 'this quarter I'm going to take care of my back because I'm spending so much time on screens.' Hold yourself accountable, or use an accountability group.

When I tell people not to do individual OKRs, they say, 'Then how do I do performance management?' Separate four things that are often muddled together: 1) how well are you fulfilling the role you were hired for, 2) what were your contributions toward the OKRs (we tried to go to the moon and didn't make it but we got Tang and Velcro — celebrate that), 3) knowledge and skill growth — let people commit to professional growth and as their manager give them time for it, and 4) contributions to the culture — hiring, mentoring, pair programming. One of the things that makes performance reviews hard is set-and-forget on job descriptions. That's part of why I wrote The Team That Manages Itself — OKRs aren't everything.

Alexis:

That brings us nicely to The Team That Manages Itself. When you say a team that manages itself, does that mean no manager is needed?

Christina:

I think yes, actually. It's good to have a leader of some sort — a tiebreaker, somebody who can manage up. But a healthy team manages itself.

I did a lot of research and a literature review — The Fearless Organization, The Wisdom of Teams, academic papers — and synthesized it into three key areas: goals, roles, and norms. Goals — that's where OKRs help. Roles — clearly defined, with people accountable and growing in them; this is hiring, firing, and feedback, especially feedback, because people tend to be conflict-averse. Norms — how we interact with each other.

At Yahoo! the number one thing in employee surveys was 'I love my teammates.' But it was very passive-aggressive — no overt conflict, so to get anything done you had to have a personal conversation with everybody. At Zynga it was the opposite — aggressive-aggressive: a general manager would walk up and say, 'I'm going to take your game away from you.' Some companies start meetings ten minutes late, others on the dot. Taking the time as a team to say 'who are we, how will we interact, how will we disagree, how will we make decisions' — and following up with a weekly retrospective, because cadence is everything — reduces conflict and increases output. It also keeps people from quitting.

Alexis:

If people in the team are clear on the norms, on how to communicate, on how to handle conflict, on roles, is that enough for them to manage themselves?

Christina:

Yes — that's the beating heart of a high-performing team. Ask yourself what a manager does. Make sure everyone's doing their job? You don't need that if you're hiring A-players who are excited to be there. People want meaning from their work. Hiring? The team can get together and say, 'Here's what we need from the new role.' Weekly check-ins? That's what the retrospective is for. If you have psychological safety, people can come up to you and say, 'You were interrupting me in that meeting and it doesn't make me feel comfortable enough to share new ideas' — and you can work through it quickly.

The manager then becomes 'first among equals' — service leadership. You move from manager to leader: reminding people of the goal, making sure other parts of the company know what you're trying to accomplish, spending time with the CEO to make sure your group is doing what the company needs. Imagine the headspace that frees up — instead of dashing around solving 'I didn't get the mock-ups from the designer,' you can spend time on strategy, competitive analysis, exploring new markets. It's a waste of time to band-aid an unhealthy team.

Alexis:

I totally agree. You're summing it up very nicely.

Christina:

The Team That Manages Itself is actually my fourth book. While my developmental editor Cathy Yardley was going through breast cancer treatment — and had to take a full-time job for a while to pay for it, thanks to our American healthcare system — I set it aside and wrote a book that didn't need a traditional development editor. It's called Pencil Me In. The first half teaches you how to draw; the second half teaches you what to draw — personas, models, org charts, wireframes. Lots of great folks contributed sketches, including Alex Osterwalder, who wrote Business Model Generation. It was a labor of love. Then when Cathy was better we dove back into The Team That Manages Itself.

Teresa Torres now uses Pencil Me In in her product management trainings. None of us have to become great artists, but a little facility with drawing — just enough so you're not afraid to get up at the whiteboard and share what you're thinking — makes all the difference.

Alexis:

Drawing is one of the things I love. People say, 'Your drawings are so nice,' and I think 'they're really crappy, but I'm doing it.' That's the difference — not doing it versus doing it.

Christina:

Nobody expects you to sit down at a piano having never played and produce a Chopin. But everyone says, 'Oh, I can't draw, it's so embarrassing.' You have to learn — teach your hand to obey your brain. It's much easier than piano.

There's something called pareidolia — our ability to see faces and patterns in everything. The front of a Volkswagen looks like it's smiling; an outlet looks like a little face. We're pattern-matching creatures. So you can draw really badly and human beings can still figure out what it means.

I always encourage people to make crappy pictures. When you're talking about a user funnel, draw a terrible upside-down triangle. Just a little facility takes you so far. In the evening I sit with a glass of wine, maybe a little Trevor Noah on TV, and I just make circles, triangles, goofy little people — training my hand to obey my mind. It's so relaxing. When there's no pressure on your drawing, it's just doodling, and doodling is a joy.

Alexis:

Doodling is a joy — that's a really good way to end. Christina, thank you for your time, your advice, and for sharing your experience and knowledge through your books. Thank you for being on Le Podcast today.

Christina:

Such a pleasure to talk to you. A joy. Thank you.

Alexis:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode and to find more tips to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. Until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.