I’m Back Baby!

#Golf, #MUFC, #cats, tweets are my own and don't represent my employer

[I’m Back Baby! @benkross]

@mdharrisnyc @AndrewArruda @joshuakelly @RealGeneKim @kevinbehr @gspaff #TheUnicornProject - written by same authors and contemporaneous to #ThePhoenixProject. It has the benefit of a few years of the market maturing in their understanding of #lean and #agile. It links #marketing to tech product development. Highly recommended.

[I’m Back Baby! @benkross]

@elonmusk So basically the fat part of the bell curve that represents maintaining the status quo...makes sense, as this system has been very good to you

[I’m Back Baby! @benkross]

@mdharrisnyc methinks a redirect after the first tweet is the ticket 😁

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Thanks for reading!

If you're currently thinking about OKRs and looking for some help with planning for Q1 my DMs are open. Would love to chat and see how I can help.

<3 Matt

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

As the CEO, you're meant to be working *on* the business, not *in* the business.

Use this structure to ensure that you spend as much time as possible at the organization level of leading the company, and not getting bogged down in IC work that is likely better done by others.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Ultimately, you need to fire yourself from this role. The good news is that you get to hire someone else to do this role now!

OKRs will make clear to you and your team where the org needs resourcing. This should ultimately create your hiring roadmap.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Now, you as CEO are likely not going to fire yourself because you've become a poor head of sales or a crappy product manager.

However, the OKRs should reflect back to you that you've failed in your role of "ensuring the right people are in the right seats"

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Now, take note of where you as CEO are playing a role in multiple levels of the org. Hold yourself accountable to these KRs the way you would any other employee.

What you'll find is you likely would fire the person who is doing one of your many jobs for poor performance.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Carve out 3 levels across your organization.

Lv1 - Organization level (this is your actual responsibility as CEO, ensuring the whole company gets their OKRs done)
Lv2 - Department level
Lv 3 - Individual Contributor level.

(In larger orgs you may have middle manager level)

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

As CEO, you wield outsized influence on your org. And if you are struggling in a particular department, it's not an easy thing to ask of your key managers to call you out for non performance.

As a result, you can use the OKR structure to hold yourself accountable.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Often times, the CEO will lose focus and begin to burn out. They might either struggle to focus on the organization collectively and support multiple departments through their leadership.

Other times they have critical IC work that other orgs rely on and it doesn't get done.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

The problem is, that the CEO often is not accounting for when they are the person in the wrong seat.

As an early stage startup, it's not uncommon for the CEO to be the CEO, Head of Sales, and the lead account executive.

This is obviously hard to sustain over time.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

3. The CEO is not tracking where they are playing multiple roles in an org.

As a CEO, you have three jobs.

1. Make sure the company isn't running out of money
2. Ensure the team is focused on the right things.
3. Put the right people in the right seats.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Allowing for multiple objectives means your company is focused in multiple different directions.

Again, the point is to ensure organization alignment. Make sure the organization is aligned by having everyone focus on accomplishing the same things, even if by different means.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

The point here is that you want to ensure that everyone is trying to work together to get the same things done.

If each department from customer success to finance to eng is focused on "NPS score"... the result is everyone is focused on your customer experience.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Had these teams worked together, they could have said.

Sales will focus on 80% of intro calls being SQLs +50% more intro calls QoQ

Eng will focus on 99.9999% uptime to handle volume and ensure customer experience.

They're both focused on accomplishing the same objective.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

Simply, your teams were not aligned. They literally had separate objectives. They could both get 10s on their OKRs and the company still likely fails.

When teams can create objectives outside the company objectives, they risk having fiefdoms who march in different directions

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

What you might experience is a sales team bringing in a high volume of customers, none of whom are necessarily ideal customers, while your eng team was focused on new features instead of keeping up with customer volume.

Result is high churn and bugs, causing a low NPS score.

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

The result of this is that your engineers are likely focused on launching new features without current usage, rather than focusing on something relevant to NPS such as reliability and uptime.

Your sales team is focuses on closing max volume of deals, even if they aren't SQLs

[Matt H 🇺🇦 @mdharrisnyc]

The eng team then says "our objective is to be be a feature shipping machine"

The eng KRs become story point velocity.

The sales team says "be a revenue generating engine."

The sales KRs become total deals won.