CX Book Gems #16: "Who Does What By How Much" by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
Book summary of "Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs" by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.
This week’s book is Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.
📘 Book Summary
In Who Does What By How Much, Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden present a transformative framework for aligning organizational goals with customer needs. The framework is grounded in the belief that everyone, in every role, has customers—whether they are internal colleagues or external consumers. The success of an organization hinges on how effectively it can meet and exceed the needs of these internal and external customers. This guide emphasizes the importance of understanding and influencing customer behaviors to drive business success. OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are at the heart of this approach. By setting clear objectives that are directly tied to customer-centric outcomes, organizations can shift their focus from internal metrics and outputs to the behaviors that truly matter for their customers. This not only enhances customer satisfaction but also ensures that every team member understands their role in contributing to broader organizational goals.
Everyone has a customer.
6 Key Principles of OKRs
Focus: OKRs provide teams with a clear focus by defining what to prioritize and what not to, ensuring that every question and decision is filtered through agreed-upon goals.
Autonomy: OKRs empower individual teams, who are closest to the work, to judge how to create value within their area of responsibility by writing their OKRs and then achieving the results.
Alignment: By coordinating their efforts, teams using OKRs ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals, fostering aligned and autonomous teams that drive the organization forward.
Accountability: OKRs promote accountability by allowing teams to declare their goals, monitor progress, and make this visible to peers, leaders, and the rest of the organization.
Transparency: High levels of transparency are required for maintaining alignment, with teams constantly sharing progress with one another and their leaders.
Agility: OKRs enhance agility by enabling teams to work in short cycles, track progress, and pivot based on customer feedback and learning, ensuring that success is measured by the value created for customers.
No team can work on everything all at once.
OKRs and Outcomes
Success means that you’ve created a valuable outcome. An outcome is a measurable change in your customer’s behavior that creates value.
There’s a simpler way to say this: Who does what by how much?
Who? This is the person, or customer, we’re thinking about.
Does what? This is the valuable behavior we’re trying to create.
By how much? This is the measurable part—where we specify our target for the behavior change.
In other words, an outcome is when a person—our customer—does something valuable that we can observe and measure in some way.
If we’re making our customers more successful, we’re delivering value. Value for them is success for us.
OKR Cycle
Although it varies somewhat from organization to organization—and you can adapt it to make it work for your specific needs—OKR Cycle has the following 5 stages:
Organizational strategy and OKRs: The process begins annually with setting organizational strategy and goals to align the entire organization.
Team OKRs: Teams set their OKRs annually and revisit them during their quarterly check-ins to ensure alignment and progress.
Execution: Teams pursue their goals as defined by the OKRs, figuring out how to achieve success without being told exactly what to do.
Learning: Teams engage in learning activities, such as research or discovery, to test ideas, understand why they work or don’t, and gain deeper insights into customer needs.
Checking In: Regular monthly and quarterly check-ins are held to review progress, share learnings, make adjustments, and ensure transparency and accountability in achieving OKRs.
OKR Cycle is simply the rhythm that we use to work with OKRs within our organizations.
Most Common Pitfalls of OKRs
The most common pitfalls teams encounter when writing OKRs:
Writing key results as task lists
Reverse engineering key results to fit your team’s to-do lists
Choosing key results that are measures of system behavior instead of customer behavior
Sandbagging key results metrics
Scrutinize the metrics you set to ensure they measure customer behavior, not system behavior or product performance.
💎 3 CX Gems
1. Your work creates value: Every role within an organization, regardless of industry, contributes to creating value for customers. This fundamental principle emphasizes that all employees should view their colleagues and other departments as internal customers. By focusing on delivering value to internal and external customers, employees can improve collaboration, streamline processes, and enhance the overall customer experience.
2. Your customers' behaviors drive results: Success in any organization hinges on understanding and influencing customer behaviors. By tracking how customers interact with your products or services, you can identify areas for improvement and innovation. Customer behaviors, such as usage patterns and feedback, provide critical insights into the effectiveness of your offerings.
3. OKRs help you target those behaviors: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) provide a structured framework to focus your efforts on the behaviors that matter most to your customers. By setting clear objectives and measurable key results, you can align your team's work with the behaviors that drive value for both the customer and the organization. This approach shifts the focus from merely completing tasks to achieving meaningful outcomes.
With OKRs, the organization is essentially aligning everyone around solving problems.
By adopting the strategies outlined in Who Does What By How Much, you can create a more cohesive and customer-focused organization. Recognizing the value your work creates, understanding your customers' behaviors, and using OKRs to target those behaviors are essential steps in this journey. Embrace these principles to align your efforts with customer needs, drive better results, and ultimately achieve greater business success.