From Outputs to Outcomes: How Customer-Centric OKRs Unlock Organizational Agility with Jeff Gothelf | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

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[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Jeff got health. Welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:05] Jeff Gothelf: It's my pleasure to be here, Mohan. Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:07] Mahan Tavakoli: I look forward to talking about your book.

Who does what by how much a practical guide to customer centric OKRs. My audience knows I'm a big advocate for OKRs. Episode 48 was with Doug Dennerlein, CEO of BetterWorks,  then 154, Daydream Projects. Park, not CEO of work board. So we'd love to get your insights. Before we do though.

We'd love to know a little bit more about you, Jeff, whereabouts you grew up and how your upbringing impacted the kind of person you've become. 

[00:00:41] Jeff Gothelf: . It's interesting. You got me thinking about it a bit. I grew up in New Jersey outside of New York city, spent all of my formative years there. And fairly standard upbringing there.

Although it was interesting to think about my folks, , both my parents worked as in house employees for a long time. And then both of them took entrepreneurial paths late in their careers. My mother bought and ran a travel agency for many years and a travel business.

my father did , a variety of entrepreneurial businesses in the tech space in the last sort of decade. 10 to 15 years of his career as well. And it's interesting because my career path has mirrored that surprisingly unexpectedly, I didn't make that connection until you asked me this question.

I too worked professionally as a designer in the early days of the web and then a product manager and a team leader.  And then eventually in 2012, striking out on my own as an entrepreneur launching a product design and development studio in New York city with two partners growing that for four years and then exiting that.

And since then I've been self employed as a trainer, coach, speaker, and author. And it's interesting, the content that I've talked about has varied over the years from collaborative design to product management to organizational agility, objectives and key results. But there's the through line through all of that has been customer centricity.

So regardless of what I was doing or teaching or training or continue to do, customer centricity plays a huge role in that conversation. And I think it's a, defining characteristic of the work that I do  and that defining characteristic of successful organizations as well. 

[00:02:15] Mahan Tavakoli: That customer centricity that you talk about, now you're mentioning the role that OKR's objectives and key results can play in that.

We'd love to take a step back a little bit, Jeff, what are. OKRs I've seen different iterations in my consulting and coaching work. What are OKRs? 

[00:02:35] Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. to your point, I think if you ask different consultants, you'll get 10 different answers at the very least.

So I will give you our definition of OKRs. And when I say our, by the way, that's myself and Josh Seiden, who co wrote the book with me. He's my longtime business partner as well. Our definition of OKRs is this, objectives and key results . It's a goal setting framework for teams where the objective is a qualitative future state.

Or benefit that we'd like to realize for our customers. And the key results are metrics that measure behavior changes. In our customers to tell us that we have achieved that objective, that qualitative future state. So I'll give you a quick example to illustrate that. So for example, a qualitative future state, you might say, we want to be the easiest way to buy groceries online by the end of the year, right?

Something like that. And your key results. So that's qualitative. It's a future state. It's an aspirational goal. And a key result for that could be something like the the number of orders per average number of orders per customer per week increases. Or per month increases 10 percent year over year, right?

The average order value per customer increases 12 percent and the number of new customers that we get by from word of mouth referrals makes up at least 30 percent of our new customer acquisition, right? Something along those lines. And in every one of those situations, the measure of success.

Has nothing to do with a feature or a product or a service or a task completion and has everything to do with meaningful changes in customer behavior. So what we call outcomes. 

[00:04:23] Mahan Tavakoli: I like that you are shifting the perspective and starting from that customer, rather than. Inside out, it's outside in that said, how does this differ from typical goal setting in organizations when they do prioritize the customer?

[00:04:40] Jeff Gothelf: It's rare, but let's be honest. This is why there's so much material on this and so much conversation and the work that we've been doing for 15 years. Look, think if you went into any organization and you ask anybody top to bottom, especially at the top, do you want to satisfy your customer?

Who would say no, right? But the reality is that's not every organization's value proposition, right? So I fly around Europe a lot, right? We fly Ryanair. If you've ever flown Ryanair, it's a discount airline that flies all over Europe and like the Near East, if you will, the Middle East Northern Africa, that type of thing.

Ryanair does not prioritize Customer satisfaction or customer service. You're buying a cheap product. You're getting a cheap experience. And you're happy with, customers who buy that know what they're getting into, know what they're buying, right? Are customers satisfied? No, everybody hates flying Ryanair, right?

I hate it, right? But the reality is that's not their brand. I think organizations that do this well, right? You look at organizations like Apple. For example, right? For Apple, one of the critical components of their brand value, their brand promise is user experience, great user experience, right?

Let's make, it's super easy to do anything that you can do with one of our devices, any of our devices. Everything is intuitive. Everything's beautifully designed. Every detail is. Thought of, and that in the execution and in the relentless focus on continuing to optimize that as, as these products and these services evolve over time.

And I think that those are two extremes of organizations that do that. And again, it, you can have OKRs in both of those organizations. It's just that the objectives are going to vary and the measures of success are also going to vary based on what the organization is trying to provide and in what fashion they're providing it.

[00:06:31] Mahan Tavakoli: Your focus is on that customer centricity being a critical piece of this conversation around OKRs. Now, how do OKRs , differ from the KPIs that many organizations try to measure performance of teams, groups, individuals, and there are lots of different dashboards and KPIs.

[00:06:53] Jeff Gothelf: So there's a couple different ways to look at it. So I think one metaphor we've used over time between KPIs and OKRs is that KPIs tell you what direction you're heading in and OKRs tell you when you've gotten there. So a KPI says we're heading west, right? But how do you know you've gone west?

far enough or that you're truly making progress heading west. And OKRs give you a sense of whether or not you're actually making progress towards that westerly direction. I think that's one way to look at it and to reconcile those two things. I think another way to look at it, which I find also helpful, is that KPIs are going to be the, strategic or the high level organizational goals, right?

So this is what is on a, an executive dashboard and is often sales, revenue, profit, customer satisfaction, those types of metrics. OKRs tend to serve as the leading indicators. Of those high level KPIs because they measure customer behavior, right? So what do people need to do in the system for us to make money, for us to be profitable, for us to reduce costs, for them to be satisfied, et cetera.

So it's okay. I was filling the gap between the stuff that we make the products and services that we make and the KPIs at the top. Okay. Ours are the metrics in between that tell us that we're making the right stuff. in the right way and that we're headed towards those KPIs, like we're headed in the right direction.

[00:08:13] Mahan Tavakoli: So let's say someone is thinking as a manager, they want to implement OKRs for their team in the organization. What is the first step? Where do you start out thinking through, in addition to the customer centricity, you talked about that has to be part of the core values.

Where do you start? What do you do? 

[00:08:36] Jeff Gothelf: I think a lot of organizations and a lot of folks in an organization feel like we have to change everything all at once right now. And look, I think that the general wisdom here is that's going to be a disaster,

and so regardless of where you sit in your organization, I think you have the power to drive some of this change and to drive it through small steps, small wins. So for example there's a case study in our book of a big British telco, 60, 000 employees. Yeah. And they'd like to implement OKRs, but they're not going to design deployment program for 60, 000 people right off the bat and switch everybody over next Monday, right?

They're going to take a pilot team. Now for them, a pilot team, in that case study, the pilot team for them was 600 people, right? Which is a very small portion of their organization, still a lot of people. If it was me, I would have gone with six people or 16 people, right? 60 even feels like a lot to me for a first experiment, but you start small.

You take a small cross functional group of folks and you say, look, this is the team that's going to test out this new way of working for us. We're going to time box the experiment. Let's say a quarter. A quarter is a nice amount of time where you can make a lot of progress and not do too much damage, hopefully, right?

And we're going to give this team we're going to help them set their objectives and key results. And we're going to see how that works inside the organization and see what they learn. And at the end of that time box, we want to understand if it worked well, what worked well, how well it worked.

And if overall we're seeing a positive out, outcome of this experiment, We can use that evidence to justify scaling up, right? So we did that with one team for a quarter. Can we take three teams for the next quarter? And if that works well, can we take five teams for six months and then 50 teams and so forth and scale up from there?

So you're slowly increasing the investment in the change based on evidence that the change works. 

[00:10:29] Mahan Tavakoli: Jeff, I couldn't agree with you more. I have a great client and they could benefit from experimenting, as you mentioned, with OKRs. Everyone in the organization gets an allergic reaction the second the term OKR comes up because a previous CEO had invested.

Lots of training, lots of effort, systems around OKRs to roll it out. And the rollout was bumpy and had issues. So now they don't want to associate with it anymore. So the key point is you don't need to change the entire organization. Okay. R's experiment, learn based on the experimentation before thinking about rolling it out.

[00:11:18] Jeff Gothelf: And look and it's funny because it ended up being one of the last chapters we wrote for the book, but we ended up putting it at the beginning of the book and it's. It quotes, quotes that very famous Simon Sinek book, Start With Why, right? I think part of the reason that these transformations don't succeed is because CEOs bring this stuff in, OKRs in this case, Agile before it, right?

Design thinking, all the various things that we've been implementing over the years and they don't tell the teams why, right? They don't paint a compelling picture or tell a compelling story about why we're doing this. Ideally, they would say, look, here's how we work today. And based on how we work today, this is generating some kind of issues.

Now, if we improve those issues, here's what the future state looks like, and ideally that's what the future looks like. To get there, we're going to implement OKRs. And here's how OKRs are going to help us get from point A to point B. I don't know. Don't see that conversation happening. And I think that if more organizations started with why are we making the change and how will this benefit you specifically, right?

As a practitioner, as a team leader, as a leader, a manager in the organization, I think that makes the change. More likely to succeed. That's really missing from the conversation. 

[00:12:30] Mahan Tavakoli: There is that element of change management, which a lot of times we get wrong and organizations get wrong understanding that introducing something like this without the why, without the clarity on the benefit for the people involved in it, it is much less likely to work.

So you have to get the change management piece, right? Whether it's OKRs or anything else that you want to implement in the organization. . Now you mentioned one of the more positive experiences of implementing OKRs with the organization, starting out with 600, which for them was a smaller subset.

Organizations can choose a smaller team to experiment with. Would love to know , what are some common mistakes in implementation of OKRs that Leaders should make sure they avoid. 

[00:13:24] Jeff Gothelf: So the most common anti pattern that happens without fail is the inclusion of output as part of the goal.

What do I mean by that? Let's just talk about some basic definitions for the language that I'm using, right? Output is stuff that we make, products, services, campaigns, policies, programs, systems, activities, whatever it is. Whatever it is that you produce. Whether, regardless of what you do with the company.

That's output. Outcome is the change in behavior that we want to see in the people who consume our output. So if I make an iPhone app, I want someone to download it, use it every week, use it every day, tell their friends, pay me money, right? That's, those are the outcomes that I want to see.

But the iPhone app itself is the output. Or if you're in marketing and you create a campaign, right? That's your output. The outcome is people click on it, people share it, it generates the kind of behavior changes that we're looking for. So just really quick, right? The most common mistake I see in every organization trying to implement OKRs is putting output in their OKR goal statements.

And if you notice the way that I defined it a few minutes ago, I didn't talk about that at all, right? Your objective is a qualitative future state that describes the benefit you'd like your customers to experience. The easiest way to shop for groceries online. There's nothing in there about how that's going to happen, right?

And the key results, right? Average order value per regular customer goes up 10 percent year over year. Number of time, num, number of orders per customer per month increases by 12 percent year over year, right? There's nothing in it that talks about what we're making. And that is the fundamental difference in the way that we define OKRs and where organizations struggle, because there's so much focus in companies on output that switching to customer centric outcome based OKRs is really difficult.

People will say what's the team working on? What are you guys making? We're making a pen. There's the pen. Okay. That's really easy to measure. It's binary, right? Did you make the pen? Did you not make the pen? It's binary. And because it's easy to measure, it's easy to manage.

It's easy to reward. It's easy to incentivize. And it comes from that manufacturing mindset that we still have in business. But if you went to a team and you said what are you guys making? And their answer was, we don't know yet. Exactly. That's a really interesting conversation. And that's the reality for most teams that are working towards customer centric OKRs, right?

Because if the goal is increase average order value per customer 10 percent over the next year, right? How would you do that? You and I could sit here and brainstorm a dozen ideas in about five minutes. Which idea is best? I don't know. Which one should we implement? We don't know, right? There's ones that feel better than others.

We might start there, but the reality is we don't know exactly what we're going to build or how we're going to build it until we see that idea starts to change behavior in the direction that we set our goals. And so that's where organizations struggle. They can't handle that lack of clarity of what is the team working on.

And so they throw output into the key results. We will increase average order value by 10 percent with a suggested products feature, right? And as soon as you do that, as soon as you add output into your OKRs, you've negated their value, right? You've completely negated, you're right back to fixed time, fixed scope initiatives.

Nothing's changed except the brand name on the goal setting framework. You've just changed the name, but everything exactly the same, because now you've got to build. Suggested products by the end of the quarter. That's the biggest mistake. 

There are other mistakes, but that's the one that breaks it the most. 

[00:17:20] Mahan Tavakoli: It really is a big challenge because it's a very different mindset. As much as we keep talking about. outcome orientation. There is a desire to move back to what people have been used to, which is the output that you're talking about so that outcome orientation is really important. Now, what I wonder is with whether it's the experimentation and then eventually a rollout, is it that the objective and these key results become something that the team owns as something separate? 

[00:17:57] Jeff Gothelf: It's a focusing tool and it's a prioritization tool for the work that they need to do on a daily basis. This isn't a side project. This isn't on top of their daily work.

This is a goal that they have committed to. Hopefully they've written it themselves and have had it approved, but it's a goal that they've committed to that now filters All of their work, right? So if they had a backlog this long of all the stuff that they could potentially do, now they've got this clear goal.

They've got to filter all that work through the goal initially to say, which of these ideas do we believe will help us move the needle and the needles in the right direction? And which won't? That's the first step. But this is a way for them to understand what's most important right now to them and to the organization.

So this is not. a side gig or in addition to other goals. This is your goal. You're on the hook for this. And you've got to figure out how to get there. 

[00:18:53] Mahan Tavakoli: Jeff would love to get a couple of examples of how would a healthcare organization or a nonprofit or a government. Entity, how would they approach this when they don't have a typical product mindset, the way some of the Silicon Valley startups and organizations do.

[00:19:12] Jeff Gothelf: love this question. . There's a key concept in our book where we say everybody has a customer. What we mean by that, obviously if you make a product for an end user on a daily basis, that's an obvious statement to you. But if you work in healthcare, you work in government you work in finance or in legal, right?

This idea of I have a customer is probably weird. to you. To us, a customer is the person who consumes the thing that you make at work, right? So you might make a product or a service. Maybe you make the thing that you make is you are the kind of the information, the key information the person who man's the information booth at the entryway to a hospital, for example, right?

Maybe you're an elections official. in the government, right? The people who consume the election policy that you make or the ballots that you design and create, those are your customers. Now, you may not call them customers, but they're the humans who consume the thing that you make. There's a great example.

One of the best examples out of healthcare with OKRs is the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic is a high end It's actually, it's an international organization, healthcare organization it's been around for decades, based in Cleveland, perhaps, no, no big surprise there but global and they use, they've been using OKRs for decades, and the CEO publishes their OKRs publicly every year.

You can go to their website and you can see it, and their healthcare, OKRs are fantastic. So for example one health care, one OKR from the Cleveland Clinic says best place to to receive treatment in the, and, best place to receive health care. And they that's their objective.

It's qualitative, it's aspirational, it's inspirational, it's motivational et cetera. It's, and it's a future benefit to their customers who are. potential patients. And key results are things like the rate of serious safety events, right? They want to see that go down. The absolute number of serious safety events that take place, they want to see that go down.

That's one example. Another example from the Cleveland Clinic, which I really love, is an internally facing Key result. They have a key result. I'm sorry, an objective and key result. The objective is best place to work in health care. So that's not a patient facing objective. It's an internally facing, it's a staff facing.

So the customer in that case is current staff and potential future staff, right? Prospective employees of the Cleveland Clinic. And their key results are things like voluntary attrition. So how many people choose to leave, for example? How many people, what percentage of people would recommend it as a place to work?

These are measures, these are outcomes, measures of human behavior. But there's nothing in there that tells the organization how to create this environment. They've got to experiment and figure it out. So that's a really good one, I think, from healthcare. And you can go to their website and see lots and lots of examples.

And they do a really excellent job. They've been doing this for decades. On the government side, I think again, like thinking about the various, like government serves the people in theory, right? That's the goal of government, right? And so I think this is an election year, right? Election, election workers are an interest.

Let's say you're the person in charge of people who vote from abroad. You've got to facilitate voting from abroad. So you've got, I don't know, 7, 10 million, 7 to 10 million Americans who vote from abroad every year. And so your job is maybe your objective is to to create the easiest way for Americans to vote from abroad, right?

The simplest way, the most efficient way, something along those lines. And your key results could be things like the percentage of Americans living abroad who request a ballot. And a, an overseas ballot the percentage of those folks who actually completed and mailed in their ballots, right? The number of, the percentage of those folks who complained about the process, whatever it is, right?

But you're looking for those kinds of behaviors that tell you that you're delivering a quality product and those are your customers in that sense. And so really thinking about the people that you serve as your customers. Is a redefinition of how many people think about their work. 

[00:23:36] Mahan Tavakoli: Those are great examples.

I love especially the Cleveland Clinic , in that it doesn't always need to be external facing. Those customers in that case are also internal employees seen as customers. Now, how When an organization, a team, a group has an outcome, how often should they evaluate the key results and determine whether they are measuring the right key results toward that outcome generically speaking, every quarter, right? So at the very least, every quarter. Why? Because we tend to set annual goals. And if we wait 12 months to find out if we were right, Or if we're doing the right work, and we're not, and you're going to be wrong, I guarantee to some extent you've wasted a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money, probably.

[00:24:27] Jeff Gothelf: So at the very least quarterly and this is one of the things that I think that is the cultural shift aspect of using customer centric OKRs. It's that we're going to work for a quarter towards these goals. I'm going to try and see what moves the needle. And when we get to the end of the end of the quarter, we're going to review what's happened.

What have we learned? What have we shipped? How are we doing? Do the goals still make sense? Stuff happens in the world every day, every week, every month. Does it, the goals that we set three months ago still make sense? And if they do, and we're making progress and we're learning, and how to get better at getting those goals, terrific, let's keep going.

But if we learn along the way that we're chasing the wrong goals, or there's nothing that we can really do to move the needle here, sometimes that happens, right? We've maxed out the amount of time. behavior change that we can do, or something significant has happened in the world. There is there's some geopolitical instability.

There's a pandemic. There is a competitive threat in the marketplace that we didn't anticipate before. If the goals don't make sense anymore, we have to change them. I'll give you a perfect example. In October of 2008, A thousand years ago is what it feels like, right? But literally October, 2008, I got a job.

I started a new job in New York City as the director of design of user experience and design at a company in New York City called The Ladders. The Ladders was a job board for people who made a hundred thousand dollars or more. And when I started In, in, in early October the ecosystem of jobs to job seekers was fairly balanced, which is what you need.

It's like a dating site, right? Three weeks after I started my job, Lehman Brothers melted down. And then the financial crisis of 2008 ensued and literally overnight, not exaggerating, sometimes people say that they're exaggerating, not exaggerating. We went to sleep, we woke up the next day, all of a sudden our ecosystem looks like this, tons of job seekers, no jobs.

We had plans, we had goals, we had, deadlines. What do we do? You stick your head in the sand and you just keep working towards this as if nothing's happened? No, we review it and we choose to change course because there's new evidence. And I just want to be super clear, changing course based on evidence is organizational agility.

That's what Agile, lowercase a, really is, and OKRs enable that. 

[00:26:53] Mahan Tavakoli: They do enable that, and that's a wonderful example of that need for the agility. Now, one of the benefits of OKRs that you also talk about is greater transparency, and I've seen it in organizations. One of the challenges, That I've seen with it is around accountability at times connected to performance reviews at times, other elements of accountability.

We'd love to get your thoughts on how can accountability be done well around objectives and key results. 

[00:27:26] Jeff Gothelf: It's a really interesting question. You recall at the beginning, I said goal setting framework for teams. And I strongly believe that we do not want to take the system, the OKR system and apply it to individuals inside an organization.

We want to leave it at the team level. And so if you're building across functional team and they are on the hook for an OKR accountability becomes interesting because the team wins or loses together. And so if you've got a few, two or three folks who are doing great work and one or two folks who are maybe slacking or not doing great work.

They're going to win, all those folks are going to win or lose together, regardless of that. And so accountability becomes really interesting because the team is on the hook for it. But individually, we need to assess our people on a different set of criteria than we have to date. And if we're trying to build a customer centric culture, a learning culture that reacts to changes in the world, Those are the qualities that we want to encourage in our people.

And those are the qualities we want to hold folks accountable for. And so while the team may win or lose together, if you're not participating in kind of a a continuous learning way in a humble way, in a way that encourages customer centricity, et cetera, then you're accountable for that aspect, for that contribution or lack thereof to the work itself but breaking it apart.

For individuals within the team destroys the system because everyone's going to start to optimize individually. So we want to make sure that the team is cohesive and has the same goal. 

[00:28:59] Mahan Tavakoli: It's incredible how powerful the system can be when,   there's an element of change management.

That's thought through and it is team accountability and it's incredible how harmful it can become when it all of a sudden becomes a performance management system and the individuals are tracked so you can take a system like OKRs that can add a lot of value and power and make it ineffective by doing it incorrectly, 

[00:29:32] Jeff Gothelf: 100%. 

[00:29:33] Mahan Tavakoli: Now one of the things I'm wondering about is okay. Ours in part became popularized. I love Andy Grove. Only the paranoid survive. I hope Intel had listened to Andy's advice more recently. Okay. Our started out in part with What Andy Grove did, John Doerr learned it there, went on to invest in Google, get the Google founders to implement it.

So the two organizations that are most associated with OKRs are Intel and Google. Now, most recently, there are two organizations that are having serious strategic issues and problems, and that's Intel and Google. So we'd love to get your thoughts with respect to if OKRs are so great, why are these two companies having such massive problems?

[00:30:30] Jeff Gothelf: It's a great question and look, , I'm going to speculate. Okay. Cause don't have a ton of insight, but here's what I do know. I know that in John Doerr's book, Measure What Matters, when he describes the way that OKRs have been implemented, both originally at Intel and then at Google, neither company, and I've talked to some folks we talked to folks at Google as we were writing the book as well Google's a huge organization.

And in the majority of that organization and certainly at Intel, based on what. The book Measure What Matters describes neither of those organizations adhered to the customer centric element of the system. the OKR system, which is fundamental, a big fundamental difference where we disagree with John Doerr in our book, where he's very loose about what could be a key result.

It can be it can be an activity, it can be a task, it can be an outcome, it can be a variety of different things. Whereas we are adamant that your key results must be outcomes, must be measures of human behavior. And I think that what's happened, particularly with Intel, as they've been chasing NVIDIA.

For the with lately, because Nvidia is was crushing for a while there. And Google as they, it almost feels chat GPT is an existential threat. This AI revolution is an existential threat to the way that Google does business. I think there's a lot of panic there and a lot of and what tends to happen in organizations when leaders panic is they wrestle back control and okay, yeah, this was nice to let you guys do what you want.

But. Okay, things are bad now. I'm going to tell you what to do. Go build this, that type of thing. And I think that's what's happening. I think there's a lot of top down directive, a lot of prescription at these organizations, a bit of panic and they've thrown out the system in favor of, whatever you want to call it, battle mode, emergency mode that type of thing.

 That's my speculation about what's happened there. It's a lack of focus on the customer and more focus on what are the things that we need to produce right now without really thinking that through, 

[00:32:29] Mahan Tavakoli: As far as I'm concerned, , okay, ours is.

Can't always address strategic inflection points and whether it's Google or Intel, there are strategic issues, but I love the point that you made that when that happens, a lot of times in organizations, people gravitate and go back to that hierarchical mindset of, control, take controls back, which becomes counterproductive.

To the goals of the organization. So OKRs don't necessarily address the strategic challenges and inflection points that said, giving up on them actually causes more challenges, which. Google and Intel have been facing. 

[00:33:12] Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. And chat GPT comes out and everyone goes crazy it's revolutionizing search and how we find data.

And I wonder what happened to Google. Was it, oh crap, we gotta accelerate our AI efforts? So hurry up and launch AI, or was it, Hey, let's go use chat GPT and talk to chat GPT users and customers and figure out what's working well there. What's not working well, what they're liking, what they're not liking.

So that when we put stuff out into the world, it addresses actual gaps in the market. What happened? I have no idea. If asked me to guess, I would say that the overwhelming amount of activity I would probably be on the go build AI side. And fast side of things rather than go talk to customers and figure out what our opportunities are.

[00:33:54] Mahan Tavakoli: , even in your title, you mentioned customer centric OKRs in that when organizations lose that customer centricity and other measures become more important. In many instances for public companies, some financial measures that ends up. causing them to get in trouble later on.

But that said, you have worked with clients. You continue to work with clients. You see some of them succeed. Some of them not do as well with OKRs. So beyond achieving key results, how should organizations, reflect on the success of their OKR initiatives? , couple of years later, when they reflect back, how should they measure the success besides the key results?

[00:34:42] Jeff Gothelf: It's a really good question. , I think the question then becomes, did we deliver on our brand promise, whatever the brand promises? And look, and I think healthcare organizations and government organizations can have a brand promise as well. For example, , take the UK government.

The UK government undertook a massive effort and continues to build accessible digital products and services for their citizens, right? Gov. uk has been held up year after year as a model of how a government can communicate digitally and successfully with its constituents.

I think looking back, After this has been out in the world for years have a daughter in university in the UK. And so we use gov. uk all the time to figure out visas and healthcare and that type of thing. And it's brilliant. It's clear, it's well written, it's easily designed.

It works really well. Does it deliver on the brand promise of an accessible, informative, helpful government for the people? To me, I think that's a really nice way to reflect on that. And, whatever your organization's brand promises, are you delivering on that?

And you can tell based on how people are behaving in the system. 

[00:35:49] Mahan Tavakoli: Oh, I love that answer, Jeff, a lot of people who have ended up in Okay. Our work have a very analytical and engineering mindset. And sometimes the.

Lose the forest for the trees. And what you're saying is focus on that brand promise, implementing systems like this, including OKRs is to help you achieve that. And I think that's reflective also of your multidisciplinary background and perspective, which also comes across. In your book. So where can the audience follow your work?

Find out more about your book as well. Jeff. 

[00:36:32] Jeff Gothelf: Absolutely. LinkedIn, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I spent a lot of time there and I shared a lot of content there. So don't hesitate to connect there. If you're interested about the book, it's available on Amazon or anywhere that you buy books online in all formats.

But if you go to okr book. com, you'll find everything you need to know about the book. And if you want to know more about me, jeffgothealth. com, always a good place to go. That's where I blog every week. So lots of stuff there as well. 

[00:36:58] Mahan Tavakoli: We will put a link to those in the show notes really appreciate the conversation on who does what by how much a practical guide to customer centric OKRs. Thank you so much for the conversation. Jeff got health. 

[00:37:13] Jeff Gothelf: My pleasure. Thanks Mahan for having me.