Episode 4

full
Published on:

27th Jul 2023

4. Do OKR's work?

In this episode we address the elephant in the room: Do OKRs work? Our special guest is Jenny Herald, Vice President of Product Evangelism at Quantive which delivers better business outcomes for companies providing a strategy execution platform based on the OKR methodology.


In this episode we get her experiences on the following questions: 


  • What are we doing wrong and how can we do it better? (we sneakily asked this twice!) 
  • If you have a good strategy, a series of solid plans and well understood KPI’s, what is the incremental value of OKRs? 
  • How do you avoid the conflation of business as usual KPI’s and change with OKRs when a lot of organisations simply transpose their ARR target as the topline OKR.  
  • If OKRs are simply a framework to help you do the right stuff, why not use any number of other goal frameworks? 
  • Should OKRs involve all functions in the organisation? Should OKRs be cascaded down to every level?  
  • We’ve all read Measure What Matters and Radical Focus and are still rolling it out wrong. If you want to make it work in practice, where do you start? 



Speaker notes and references:


As Vice President of product evangelism, Jenny Herald champions Quantive's vision and shares how customers achieve better business outcomes with the world's most powerful Strategy Execution Platform based on the OKR methodology. Jenny also hosts the Dreams with Deadlines podcast where she interviews business leaders on aligning teams and organisations around a common purpose, the ups-and-downs of goal management, strategy execution, and everything in between.



This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy
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The Operations Room: A Podcast for COO’s
We are the COO coaches to help you successfully scale in this new world where efficiency is as important as growth. Remember when valuations were 3-10x ARR and money wasn’t free? We do. Each week we share our experiences and bring in scale up experts and operational leaders to help you navigate both the burning operational issues and the larger existential challenges. Beth Ayers is the former COO of Peak AI, NewVoiceMedia and Codilty and has helped raise over $200m from top funds - Softbank, Bessemer, TCV, MCC, Notion and Oxx. Brandon Mensinga is the former COO of Signal AI and Trint.

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