The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)

Don't get fussy. Don't try to make it really precise. Just go ahead and say, 'Ah, hand wave, hand wave, 80%.' What matters is, why 80%? Really focus on the learning.

Product sense is intuition, intuition is compressed experience, compressed experience comes from having lots of experience. And if you're young and you don't have a lot of experience, the smartest thing you could do is learn.

If your entire company's confused, you might be the asshole. You have to think about, how can I get more clear? If people are constantly bringing you little things, it's not because they're scared, it's because you're scary.

You can't have more than three P1s. You can have as many P2s as you want and P3s if you really think you should, but you can scam it... skim it, right? Go through it really quickly.

Product managers need to serve the business and it's not a bad thing. If you have a company, it needs to survive and all money is, is oxygen, it lets the company keep going.

Time you're planning is not the time you're shipping, and the best is the enemy of the good.

If you can't fire someone, if you can't tell somebody their behavior is interfering with the ability to get things done, don't be a product manager. If you can't solve the fight between two of your coworkers, don't be a product manager.

I think if you could slow down, you'll end up going a lot faster. So, I would encourage people, if you're in a panic and you're in a tizzy, just take some deep breaths before you do anything and just ask yourself, 'What's a good way to do it?'

People do not value celebrations enough. I've had CEOs who said, 'Well, it was the middle of the quarter, so we didn't start OKRs, but we did start Friday celebrations and oh my God, things are already changing. Things are already getting better.'

The simple act of getting together and saying, 'What was the most awesome thing that happened to you this week? What's the most awesome thing that happened in marketing? What's the most awesome thing that design did this week?' It makes people feel like they're part of something really special.

I think everything can be measured to a certain degree. Not precisely necessarily, but you can get enough of a swag to be useful. So, by trying to measure things, you'll start learning how to measure things.

The biggest question is, why? Why do we get up in the morning? What are we trying to actually do? Are we making a difference at all? And if you can say, 'This week I'm going to do this,' and then at the end of the week you say, 'Oh, that worked or that didn't work,' and you can try something new or keep going.

OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results, a goal-setting framework used by many tech companies for quarterly planning and alignment.

I say OKRs are more of a vitamin, they're not a medicine. So, if you take OKRs and you're like, 'Oh, this will fix everything that's wrong with you.' No, that's not going to happen. It's just going to reveal everything that's wrong with your company.

What questions should I have asked you? I've been using that one forever, whether I am interviewing somebody or being interviewed, because the person is an expert in themselves.