PITA 024

ICEBREAKER: Recommend a movie/TV show for the holidays!

TOPIC 1: Tips/gotchas from the field for setting OKRs when it’s the first time your org is trying out OKRs

• Q1 will be wrong. Don’t worry about it.

• Introduce at the top the first time. Add other teams later

• Make sure you have metrics

• 4 key lessons I've learned about OKRs | by Richard McLean | Medium

• The best OKR reading list in the world?

• Duration - set what makes sense for you

• OKRs At The Center: How to use goals to drive ongoing change and create the organization you want by Natalija Hellesoe, Sonja Mewes

• Deliverables can be KRs

• How to Write OKRs That Don't Suck by Adrian Howard

• https://twitter.com/adrianh/status/1325910031691378688?s=20

• Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth, John Doerr

• Start with a North Star - or figure it out

• Start small - just one. Don’t try to do too many at first

TOPIC 2: New Year’s Resolution: what are you going to START (or STOP) doing in 2021?

• Eat more veggies

• Thinking of my career as a product

• Find a way to go into conversations assuming best intentions, understand motivations better - so i can be less defensive

• Stop trying to change people who aren’t going to change - pick other battles, ones with a chance of success

• Keep count of meetings where i’m NOT interrupting people, to make sure I listen to people

• Introduce silent meetings to one of my clients

• Put more things on paper

  • ONE PAGE / ONE HOUR

• Do more things asynchronously 

• Invest more time in challenging ‘This isn’t measurable’ statements

TOPIC 3: Tips on how to influence without ‘telling’ a young team, with lots of opinions and no real metrics!  

• Workshops & discussions with the team

• Prioritise - avoid ‘change whiplash’

• Play (good) mind games - ask questions so that they figure it out, rather than telling them what to do directly

• Coaching towards a process 

• Help them figure out where to have processes; co-create a checklist for making decisions

• Reframe opinions as hypotheses, then test

• 15% solutions from Liberating Structures also helps  people to identify what they can control/change themselves

• A great activity to get people to come up with solutions is From Obstacles to Outcomes / Resources: 15-minute FOTO

• Hofstede is the daddy of cultural power distance work / Hofstede Insights Organisational Culture

TOPIC 4: Biggest Product Management Failure/learning in 2020

• Get a good sponsor/stakeholder

• Generic terminology (like wireframe, prototype, etc) WILL be misinterpreted/interpreted differently across the org

  • MVP

  • DevOps

  • Product Management

  • MVP+, whatever the heck that is

• Summarising meetings is amazing - but I can’t be the designated scribe for other people’s meetings

• Be intentional and active when training people - don’t assume

• Missed out on someone getting to a burn out stage - be more careful, do more 1:1s, take care of your people

• Don’t make assumptions about what someone’s dealing with - ask, support

• Invite your stakeholders to your user research sessions