Carsten Ley is the co-founder of Asia PMO – a leading digital transformation & agile consulting company, specializing in implementing OKRs and other revolutionary project management techniques in Southeast Asia. In this first episode of a 12-part series on “Voices of OKR,” Carsten and I discuss: * The difference between customer data and feedback * How to begin using OKRs via a task force * Command-and-control culture versus participative culture * OKRA - Objectives, Key Results, and Actions

Mathias Meyer is an engineer turned founder, a former CEO at Travis CI and CTO at Reaction Commerce. In this episode, we discuss how a simple process, architectural decision records, created the space for his team to make and document decisions; what it means to debug an organization; how to approach OKRs via an evolutionary approach—from not tracking anything to tracking something; the engineering metrics he ended up tracking and more.

Srikant Vemuri has held leadership roles in overseeing the design and launch of breakthrough products in the B2B, Adtech, and Big Data spaces for industry innovators such as Seerene, Womply, Aarki, and Adchemy. Currently, he's managing product and technology at Frontier Car Group as the CEO of Technology. In this episode, Srikant shares what he's learned during his journey—filled with bruises, scars, blood, tears, and his share of successes. He's got this exciting idea of balancing great product concepts and a CEO's strategy—he calls it the "cage fight." We discuss Product Management benching. He's taken the term from sports and applies it in business. Find out what he thinks PMs should be doing when benched. And we spend quite a bit of time talking about OKRs, and a personal KPI he monitors to gauge his teams' health. He believes this KPI is foundational for OKRs to be successful.

Alan Klement is known for developing the theories of Jobs to be Done and Market Modernization and inventing new methodologies and methods for engineering growth. His latest venture is Revealed — a market research and growth guidance firm that helps organizations grow, align, and reveal market insights. He's the author of When Coffee and Kale Compete and is writing a sequel called Jobs to be Done: Understanding Needs. Predicting Adoption. This is part two of our conversation. In this episode, we discuss OKRs and Jobs to be Done, the two goals that product people should take into consideration, the importance of a feed forward communication culture, and we get a sneak peek into some concepts and models from Alan's new book. Let's jump in.

Alan Klement is known for developing the theories of Jobs to be Done and Market Modernization and inventing new methodologies and methods for engineering growth. His latest venture is Revealed — a market research and growth guidance firm that helps organizations grow, align, and reveal market insights. He's the author of When Coffee and Kale Compete and is writing a sequel called Jobs to be Done: Understanding Needs. Predicting Adoption. It's due in Summer 2020. My conversation with Alan is broken down into two parts. In this episode, we discuss the Taylorism versus Humanism approach to explaining OKRs, and how understanding needs means understanding how they're created, how they grow and shrink, and get eliminated. We cover the "voice of the customer" and its flaws and how Lean startup solves problems that come with the "voice of the customer" approach.

In this episode, we hear from Scott Shapiro, Principal Product Marketing Manager for B2B/Account Management Customer Experience at Qualtrics. We get an inside look at how it felt when Qualtrics was pre-IPO and everyone thought it was going to happen—but gotcha—it didn't happen. We hear a lot nowadays that things are slowing down due to this global pandemic. Scott shares his findings from research they’ve been doing. They’re seeing an acceleration of what was already happening. Hear what they’ve learned. Qualtrics has a set of principles called Tacos. Find out what that means and how Tacos shape how they operate. We talk about OKRs and how to go from activity to delivering value.

Joining me today is Rohit Gupta. He is the Head of Product at Honeypot.io and leads the Product Management, Product Design and large parts of the Engineering teams. In this episode, we discuss ways his team is staying socially connected during the Coronavirus pandemic, Honeypot’s dream and how his organization is pursuing it, the power of the reverse recruitment model in hiring, and the key learnings Honeypot weaved into their OKRs process to make the methodology work for them.

Dennis Gräf is a Business Strategy Manager at Kolibri Games. Ubisoft acquired his company in January 2020. Kolibri is one of the leaders of the “idle” games genre. One of their most popular games, Idle Miner Tycoon, has been downloaded by more than 104 million players. In this episode, Dennis shares Kolibri’s journey with OKRs. We discuss the transition of everyone working from an office to everyone working from home, how he pulse checked the leadership team and the organization before introducing an OKRs tool, how their OKRs process works and has evolved, and the hard lessons the organization had to learn along the way.

Gene Hammett is a leading expert on high-growth company culture and leadership. He has interviewed more than 530 CEOs of high-growth companies to understand the core principles of fast growth. In this episode, we examine what leaders of fast-growth companies have in common and what leaders should anchor to during these challenging times. We discuss what's more important in business, the employees or the customers. In Gene's worldview, accountability is too low a bar. Listen in to hear what he believes we need to strive for instead.

Joining me is Blake Thomas, the Director of Engineering at NoRedInk. He’s learned a lot while working with engineers for over two decades. On this episode, you’ll hear us chat about the 2 modes of failure, why we experience issues with people updating their OKRs (and what we can do about it), how to prevent “OKR Theatre,” the universal reality of today’s workforce and more.