Why This VP's Unique OKR Strategy Elevates Team Performance Standards
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INTERVIEWER
And, and this one I want to constrain to Blink and Compass, uh, as far as, uh, the, the experience that from which you pull this in, in both of those roles, uh, I, I think it, it would be fair to say that you've been, as, as a product leader responsible for, um, cutting edge business models and customer interaction models. So, I'm, and again, this is me, a. Something, please, you know, clarify if it's not true, but this, this generally means that you're likely responsible to have to define performance metrics and other operational metrics to ensure a high performance product and team, right? So, walk me through how you specifically as a leader, right, determine the appropriate targets to set by area of your team.
CANDIDATE
Uh, OK, so, so just to clarify, are you talking about like people and how I know if people, if people are being affected?
INTERVIEWER
Let's let's focus on sorry, that's good clarification. Let's focus on, you know, customer metrics, not, uh, you know, I don't know, this is a terrible metric, of course, lines per day, right, something like that helps.
CANDIDATE
Yeah, so let me, let me draw on Compass, which I think had a, we evolved into a very robust process from my perspective, uh, or actually a, a, a pretty good one. so at Compass, what we did is we had, um, a very clear, um, top level OKR work that was set in coordination with the CEO for, uh, for proct engineering, what proct engineering was trying to accomplish, and we had a very clear and measurable OKR for that. Um, we actually just had one, which I think was a great thing. We didn't have 5 ORs. We had 1 OR that was, like I said, that I was responsible for setting in coordination with the CEO of the company. Um, What we, what my philosophy from there is that because actually at Compass, we had a growing team, is that, um, I want teams to set, you know, I worked with teams to set OKRs that would align to that top of OKR. So, what that means is, You know, if, if you think about a team, a team could be a product manager, two product managers, um, working with 6, 10 engineers, right, um, uh, on, on an area, um, so for each of those kind of like major areas that we had, um, those teams would set again their own OKR 3 to 5 of them, and what we, what I looked for teams to do. I, I look for teams to align to them, not to cascade, and that's an important nuance. So what I mean by that is, um, there will be teams that have close alignment but not perfect alignment, and that's probably OK. Meaning not every single thing that they can do is going to move the top of OR, but they are generally aligned to it. Then I looked for areas where there was gross misalignment, where you're like, OK, wait a second, like, this is our new OR for 2019. What are the teams where it's like, wow, the path they're on is not going to move our OKR. Um, and that's where you kind of have important decision points to make of like, well, how does that team rethink what they should be doing in a way that will start to align their goals with the larger OKR, um. That, that part of the process can be challenging, but that, that's where it's very helpful, where you start to see those gross misalignments and then you can take teams that were working on something that may have been relevant 6, 1218 months ago. But as you go forward looking, you say, hey, this is no longer relevant to where we need to be.
INTERVIEWER
Uh, I'm, I'm chuckling a little bit because the note I just made here is that you, you started answering my follow-on question before I even asked it. So, uh, I'm not gonna ask a follow-on question, um, which, which that's generally a good sign, right? You, you'd be surprised how often we get into these interviews and, and you just have to keep. Poking because the answer is just not the executive communication is not there and so that I'm chuckling this a great job, um, but with that said, uh, um. When you think about, right, you've got gross misalignment and that's either a sign of, uh, poor management or previous management, uh, or drift in product strategy and therefore it's time to revisit, that's, you know, fine, but once you set those OKRs, kind of the downline OKRs for your teams, uh, now I would like to talk about the, the people side of this, which is how do you handle and, and in this case your direct managers who are not meeting these expectations.
CANDIDATE
They're not meeting these expectations, I mean they're they're not hitting their numbers or they're not,
INTERVIEWER
they're they're not, you, you've said, you guys have collectively set the OKRs now it's OK, we've got the clear metric, that's, that's the, the, the product side side of the business. Now it's, you are responsible for this thing and you're red and continue to be red. How do you, how do you deal with that?
CANDIDATE
Yeah, give me one moment to think about that. Um, sure, I can collect my thoughts. Yep. Yeah. Um, I think there's kind of like, I, I try and assess and triangulate is one of 3, there's, there's typically like one of 3 things that are happening when you're read. Um, so one is you have a people, you might have a people problem, right? Meaning the PMs or the engineering managers, um, are not executing properly, right? You can see it because you're like, OK, these, these briefs are not good. The, the execution is not good. There are tons of bug. So you're, you're, you're looking for things that, that are indications to you that there may be people problems, right? Um, and typically, you would, even in advance of being read, you would, you would probably know that you'd probably know, OK, I have a people problem here. I'm gonna give them a chance to see if they can execute. But you're looking for signs and you're doing check-ins, you're, you're trying to have regular conversations to probe and understand the work they're doing, to understand if the work is at high quality. Um, the second type of issue you can, you can have is like a process issue where like, OK, they're doing a good job, but, um, meaning like the, the people you have, you're confident that they're, that they're doing what they need to be doing effectively, um, but the team as a whole is not cohesive, is, is process. The process could be like, for example, they don't have good sprint planning practices. They don't have actually good, like, very mundane, but like, I have seen it where it's like, they don't, they're not actually running a tight ship in terms of getting what they need to get done. So, you wanna actually start looking into, like, sometimes, especially if it's more people who might be newer to that sort of process, or their team is newer to that process. So you might have a director who's pretty senior, but he's coaching more junior people, is the right process in place. Um. The last thing is where sometimes you can have great people, great process, um, but they, they, they, they just have the wrong product strategy, right? The, like the set of things that they're working on that they think are going to move the needle are, are very likely not going to. Um, and that's where you need to start picking up, you know, you, you read the document, you read the briefs, you read the document, you're like, wait a second, like, I get what you're doing. Um, you're a smart guy or a gal. Um, You've got good process, but you're not moving the needle because you're, you're actually not solving problems that will do so. Um, and, and that requires like really, you know, you, you have to be very in the details there. Like you have to be able to get, um, in the weeds and be like, OK, well, um, You want to go drive conversion, right? But if you go look at all the things that you're doing to drive conversion, these are very marginal, right? We, we have data that indicates the problems you're solving are not the major problems. Um, I get that they're fun and they're, they're nice kind of, um, things to, to polish or shine, but they're not, they're not fundamental the problems you need to solve. So, I think you have to look at all three of those. Um, typically, like, I, I mean, me personally, I would always know. Even before OR setting where my people problems with the ones I had, I would typically know where they are so awesome.
INTERVIEWER
No, great answer. uh, great answer.