John Quayle is an Operations Professional for small businesses, startups, and brands that are economies of one. Three months ago, he became the Chief of Staff at Four Growers, a startup that’s revolutionizing farming with robots that can pick ripe fruit in greenhouses. Jenny and John discuss false limitations, OKRs, what exactly is the role of a Chief of Staff, and explore the art of planning goals.

In this episode, Jenny Herald is joined by Gibson Biddle, former VP of Product at Netflix and CPO at Chegg. He’s now a speaker, teacher, and workshop host. They discuss many of his tools, models, and frameworks — like GLEE and SMT, how culture is not a touchy-feely soft thing but rather describes the skills and behaviors expected of everyone in an organization. Gib puts Jenny in the hot seat a few times as they examine some Netflix case studies together.

What should you do at the end of an OKR cycle? What does it mean to be a Key Result champion? What do you do if you know you won't make any impact on your OKRs this quarter? How do you make a metric that matters? In Part 2 of an interview with Ben Lamorte—an OKRs coach, author, and founder of OKRs.com—we'll discuss these questions and more.

Founder of OKRs.com, Ben Lamorte, has more OKR coaching experience than anyone on the planet. In part one of this interview, Jenny asks Ben about his background, latest book, current trends, OKR deployment parameters, and experience working with huge companies.

In this episode, Jenny Herald is joined by Mike Pilawski, the Chief Product Officer at Smallpdf where he leads product, design, and data teams. Prior to joining Smallpdf, Mike has held leadership roles in product, engineering, marketing, and data at Typeform, Leanplum, Vungle, and NativeX. In this episode, we chat about the Dimensions of Organizational Blueprints, how one goes about marrying up agility and OKRs for product and engineering teams, and the two camps concerning OKRs and performance management, and more.

After working years in corporate America, startups, and scaleups, Caroline Franczia founded Uppercut First, a consultancy for startup founders. She’s a columnist for Maddyness UK, the author of Popcorn for the New CEO, an OKR expert, and an advocate for women. Her recent article—“I’ve never felt this awake”: Caroline Franczia on Thelma, Louise and inclusion—is about her personal experience as a woman in tech. She believes diversity and inclusion needs to be baked into the business strategy. In order for employees to stick around, they need to feel a sense of purpose, ownership, and that they make an impact. In this episode, we chat about the ROI of closing the gender gap, using a Value Pyramid to set the foundation for company-level OKRs, and what makes OKR programs fail or succeed.

In this episode, Jenny Herald interviews Flavia Neves, Director of Product Management at Spotify and former VP of Product at Free Now. Flavia shares Free Now’s OKR journey. Listening to their experience is like going through the hero’s journey. She's gathered some lessons learned and provides advice to organization's considering adopting OKRs. There is pre-work required to make them work. Tune in to find what you need to make your OKR program successful.

In this episode, Jenny Herald and Vessy Tasheva answer questions that came from participants that joined a Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Roundtable discussion. Unfortunately, we did not have an opportunity to cover all the questions during the event and decided to record an episode to cover them. We were asked the following: * I had a man opt-out of our Diversity Advisory Council because of the literature required to read, which included critical race theory and LGBTQ+, due to his religious beliefs. How should I respond to him? * Are you seeing any discussion of universal design as part of D&I? * What do you think about colleges and universities having anti-racism statements and some are creating anti-racism training? * How do we make sure the nice things we discuss and the slogans we proudly recite don’t stay in the classroom and on the walls, but to really start live and breathe them?

(0:00) Intro(1:35) Vessy’s Background(2:58) What is D&I?(4:07) The state of D&I(6:56) How D&I is misunderstood(13:44) Chief Diversity Officers on the C-Suite(19:14) Connecting D&I to OKR(22:08) Everyone has value(27:10) Negative D&I trends(30:30) Measuring and tracking the success of D&I efforts (38:50) Rapid fire questions(42:48) Outro

In this episode, Jenny is joined by Peter Kerr, Managing Director of Auxin OKR. He’s had the opportunity and privilege of working with senior executives from some of the largest, most well-known companies in the world. Peter shares some incredible stories from his experiences with these leaders on maintaining relevance in the market, working through political infighting, the need for human connection in a digital world, and how OKRs can help aid all of the above.