The OKR Podcast

Jeff Gothelf, business agility and OKR framework expert, organizational designer, author and speaker, sits down with Deidre to share his unique approach to cultivating a product-focused mindset across large, complex enterprise organizations. Jeff uncovers how agile organizations that manage to outcomes are fundamentally in opposition to legacy, command and control leadership practices - and more importantly, how leaders can empower their people with the right framework for autonomy, discovery, and learning. Jeff's Recommended Reads: Jeff Gothelf.com - Blog Sense and Respond - Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden Continuing Discovery Habits - Theresa Torez Lean UX - Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden

Anthony Coppedge, Principal Agile Digital Sales Global Transformation Lead at IBM, sits down with Deidre to share how he introduced OKRs across Sales and Digital Marketing to ensure the creation of customer value is the focus of every employee in the org, and why a self-directed culture is at the core of successful business transformations. Running his business on fact-based data enables Anthony to validate business goals, navigate with headlights, and inspire deep trust amongst his people.

Cindy Hoots, CIO at AstraZeneca sits down with Deidre to share her unique perspective on driving innovation at speed and scale. Cindy shares the importance of operationalizing the strategy and how it helped get everyone aligned and focused on outcomes.

5 ways OKRs go sideways and why. Tried OKRs and they didn't work or hearing that from a colleague? This podcast talks about why OKRs fail, the root issues, and gives a fresh perspective gaining their true value.

Cathy Benko, Former Vice-Chair and Managing Partner at Deloitte, shares her wisdom on the implications of the way we work and the steps leaders, CEOs, CIOs, and CHROs can take to prepare themselves and their organizations for a thriving and more resilient future.

This week, Deidre welcomes Vikas Butaney, Chief Product Officer and GM at Cisco. Vikas shares how Cisco implemented OKRs, the power of every employee being aligned on the mission, and advice for new business leaders who need to connect distributed teams.

Zendesk CIO Colleen Berbue says "it's just how we run the business" as she shares how OKRs flow into WorkBoard Biz Reviews and they ensure every major initiative has an OKR that clearly aligns to the company objectives.  Teams, time, and effort align and they're building stronger accountability muscles as they grow from 6k people to 10k.

Margo Georgiadis, former president of the Americas at Google for 8 years, leads a master class for executives on why the choice of measures is really a strategic decision, and how clarity and alignment on the right measures are growth fundamentals. Her examples from leading Google's ad business and YouTube are priceless and her experience bringing OKRs to Ancestry.com as CEO and to 40-person startups is equally insightful.

Tina Murphy, President of GHX, joins Deidre for a discussion on the leadership lessons of 2021. She shares how GHX reset its operating rhythm from annual plans and QBRs to iterative OKRs and MBRs, and the power of purpose to galvanize greatness.

Hootsuite CEO Tom Keiser joins Deidre for a CEO to CEO chat on cohesion in chaos, the changing nature of connection and community, and leading the way forward in transformative times. Tom and Deidre first met when he was COO at Zendesk launching their OKR program on WorkBoard several years ago, and he brought it with him as he took the helm as CEO at Hootsuite.

Iterable's Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Samuels, and Chief of Staff, Nicole Watkins, join Deidre Paknad in this week's OKR Podcast to share how they are maximizing inflection points at their rapidly scaling company by accelerating lateral and vertical alignment and learning with OKRs and WorkBoard. For Iterable, using the OKR framework has had a significant impact on their ability to operationalize their strategy by providing each team with transparency, a real purpose, and meaning in their everyday work.

3M Automotive & Aerospace Division president Steve Shafer shares his observations on the potency of momentum to accelerate transformation and outcomes. It's hard to define, obvious when you see and when you don't have it -- but it's what winning teams have in common. Hear how Steve uses OKRs and a growth mindset to amplify his organization's best possible outcomes.

Sameera Moinpour, VP - Strategic Services and Susan Mallaney, Manager - Strategic Services have coached thousands of product and engineering teams to great OKRs. In this podcast, they discuss common OKR questions, concerns, learnings and aha's, across many product and engineering organizations. 

Denise Kanfield drives the OKR and results program at Cisco. Before that, she was a business agility and transformation leader at Thomson Reuters for three years. Denise has done OKRs at three different companies, and she intentionally sought out a role to lead OKRs and results management. We sat down with her to tap the breadth and depth of her knowledge in the OKR space. 

I first met Rob when he was working with Cisco on their move to agile and I was working with them on the move to OKRs — peanut butter and chocolate! We discuss how strategy and execution improve and accelerate with these frameworks.

Erin talks about alignment and measurement muscle, how shared OKRs drive the One Microsoft vision, and why learning is the key to, well, everything.   

Tony Merritt talks about the cost of drift and the power of time and purpose to accelerate transformation. After more than two years with OKRs and WorkBoard, he shares how Secureworks shifted from reporting results to elevating them and how his team increased their own velocity.  What started as "ivory tower OKRs" in a spreadsheet has become a business and transformation accelerator.   

Artificial harmony leads to artificial alignment — hard discussions and risks are avoided, passive decisions are made and choices aren't. Exec coach Jocelyn Kung offers simple steps leaders can take to create trust, healthy conflict and better outcomes.

Chris Cravens, former CIO of Zynga and Uber as well as former VP, Software Engineering for Splunk shares what he learned about OKRs from Zynga, his passion for clarity, and how servant leadership leads to better business outcomes. Chris is one of few people who has ridden three high growth rockets -- his lessons are worth learning, including how ruthless prioritization helps people thrive as fast growth companies scale.

Sarah Frew shares how this fast-growth startup drives fast, full cross-team alignment from the leadership team to squads and functional teams with OKR themes and a formal OKR Week in which the whole company gives attention to purposeful alignment. She shares what they've learned over 2 years and how their feedback loop improved their process.

Nanci Taylor, VP of Business Agility at IBM, talks about aligning on strategic imperatives, competing to win, and better business reviews. She explores the Capacity-vs-Ambition Gap and how sharp focus on it drives smarter decisions and outcomes.

LexisNexis Special Services & Risk Solutions Government CEO Woody Talcove talks about creating rapid competitive advantage with alignment and focus — creating customer value faster than competitors. He shares the fast wins and culture building experience OKRs enabled and how he got great outcomes in tough conditions.

Mike talks about the power of their OKR practice and platform during the sudden move to work from home Spring 2020, what his personal leadership essentials are, and how his team achieves its best possible outcomes.

Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard, discusses how leaders can turn current events into a catalyst for revisiting and improving the way teams come together, create value, and drive strategic priorities.

David Kreiger, CEO of SalesRoads, talks about how OKRs have helped his autonomous teams stay aligned, avoid the meeting trap, and drive results.

A conversation with: Sarah Davis Director of Portfolio Programs - Data and AI at IBM Sarah Davis, Director of Portfolio Programs - Data and AI at IBM, discusses how she's using OKRs to enable a very global organization to do its best work for customers. Sarah talks about having good alignment conversations, transparency for thousands of people in 16 countries, and accelerating organization impact.

Ryan Padilla, Head of Global Planning at GHX, discusses the organization's experience with implementing the OKR practice and how OKRs helped give the GHX team the clarity to stay focused on value to customers.

Cisco Security Business Chief of Staff, Anna Birch, and Deidre discuss the importance of alignment to drive growth in large enterprise. An acquired team brought OKRs in and the Security Business embraced them to unlock faster growth. Anna shares their journey, including the initial leadership alignment breakthrough, and how they've operationalized leading for results. The Cisco Security Business OKR practice helps align teams on common growth objectives in a matrixed org with a deep product portfolio. Since the Security team brought OKRs and WorkBoard into Cisco, it's continued to spread across other business units -- especially those with collaboration and dependencies with Anna's group. Anna has been Chief of Staff for the Security Business Group GM since it acquired OpenDNS in 2015. At OpenDNS, she was VP of People Operations and Minister of Culture. These roles at the intersection of business outcomes and empowering people and culture to achieve them serve her well as she leads the OKR practice!

Zuora CEO Tien Tzou and Deidre discuss the inverse relationship between a company's growth and its alignment. As a company scales up, alignment on outcomes often goes down -- the strategy doesn't trickle through the new layers and most people get further from customer. Zuora's OKR program reconnects people to the outcomes they drive for customer and company; it's unlocking growth and unleashing the power of teams for this high-growth SaaS company.  In this podcast, Tien talks about the shift to an outcome mindset, how OKRs are scaling managers and leaders to help scale the company, and why every day counts. Tien is the CEO and Founder of Zuora, an innovative company that predicted the modern subscription economy well before others. He is a widely recognized thought leader on SaaS and the author of the best seller Subscribed. He holds an MBA from Stanford. He was employee 11 at Salesforce, where he was CMO and Chief Strategy Officer prior to founding Zuora.

In this fun interview Marcin Kleczynski, CEO and founder of Malwarebytes, tells the fun story of growing his company from its start when he was a teenager to $30 million in revenue from a college dorm room to $200 million and 800 people today. Marcin shares why OKRs are foundational for next-level growth, how they've motivated and engaged the large engineering organization, and how they've accelerated company growth. In our conversation, Marcin expands on how his OKRs are authored for impact and what's changed in hallway conversations over the first year.

Transparency and Transformation with OKRs w/ Mark Organ Mark Organ is a visionary who founded both Eloqua and Influitive and is the author of the best-selling book The Messenger is the Message. In this episode, Mark talks very candidly about the challenges Influitive faced in 2017 that led him to adopt OKRs and the WorkBoard platform – they'd hit a growth wall and the great people in the org didn't have great clarity on how best to contribute. Their OKR program was transformational within its first quarter. Mark gives us a candid view on what that's meant to the company, culture and to him personally.

Authoring Company OKRs to Motivate Great Results w/ Sameera Moinpour For executive leaders, OKRs represent a communication opportunity. They can provide direction and motivation, clarity and inspiration – a motivated, inspired organization wants to achieve its best possible impact.  Authored and communicated well, OKRs help leaders tap more of the skill and will of their team. Sameera Moinpour, head OKR coach at WorkBoard, and Deidre discuss the assumptions and default behaviors that undermine your real intent with OKRs and how to unlock your team's passion and possibilities.

Leaders want to unlock their full organization's growth potential, leveraging the OKR technique and other cutting-edge strategies. There is a dearth of information on how to do them well and reap their full benefit of OKR's.  That's where this podcast comes in! We're here to help you accelerate the outcomes and foster a growth and outcomes culture. In this episode we interview host Deidre Paknad on the direction the podcast will go and what to expect as you tune in for each episode!