Josh Seiden has worked with hundreds of organizations as an individual contributor, leader, founder and consultant. As a software designer-turned-coach, consultant and speaker, he’s helped organizations fuse strategy, become customer-centric, and utilize evidence-based decision-making to become more agile (with a lowercase “a”), make better products and achieve greater success.
Along with his co-author, Jeff Gothelf, he’s written two previous books. Their new book is: Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs (Sense & Respond Press, which was published May 28, 2024).
Questions
- Now, Josh, could you take a moment and just give our audience just a little bit about your journey, if you could share with us how you got from where you are to where you are today?
- Your new book, Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs, can you tell us a little bit about that book? What inspired you to write the book? What has the feedback been since the book has been published? And maybe even give our audience a little bit of insight into what exactly are OKRs.
- What are some of the tools or ways that you’ve seen organizations get people to buy into using the objectives and key results process?
- Could you give us maybe four or five behaviours that you have seen that are very important for an organization that will emulate customer-centric behaviours.
- Can you share with us maybe one or two books that you’ve read? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you’ve read recently, but it’s had a great impact on you, personally or professionally.
- Could you share with our listeners, what’s the one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about either, something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people.
- Where can listeners find you online?
- Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you’ll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or you get off track, the quote kind of helps to get you back on track. Do you have one of those?
Highlights
Josh’s Journey
Me: Now, Josh, could you take a moment and just give our audience just a little bit about your journey, if you could share with us how you got from where you were to where you are today?
Josh shared that he started his career working in technology in Silicon Valley, back, actually, in the sort of pre-internet days, and he has always been fascinated in with the question of “What makes great products and what makes great services?” And “How do we deliver those to the world?”
And he became interested, he worked for many years as a designer and then as a product manager, and more recently, he works with teams to help them collaborate in ways that help make them more customer-centric, more collaborative with each other, and more effective at putting great things in the world.
About Josh’s New Book, “Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs“
Me: So, you have a new book that you’ve written called Who Does What By How Much? A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs, can you tell us a little bit about that book? What inspired you to write the book? What has the feedback been since the book has been published? And maybe even give our audience a little bit of insight into what exactly are OKRs.
Josh shared that he’s always been interested in the problem of bringing the sort of customer-centric point of view into the process of making products and services. It’s hard to make good products, it’s hard to deliver good services, and sometimes we focus so much on the problem of making those things that we forget about the people we’re making them for. And so he’s always looking for ways to bring the customer into the center of their work.
OKRs, which stands for Objectives and Key Results, is a way of setting goals that puts the customer, at least in their point of view, puts the customer in the center and says what are we trying to do? What is the customer trying to do? How do we find the intersection of those things, and how do we work our way forward to try to create those things that really deliver customer value?
Me: And so, you talk about customer-centricity and making the customer be at the center of your decision making. Could you give, I don’t know if the book has any examples in there of practical situations where an organization took the customer in mind, not sure if they did like a journey mapping exercise, but they utilized the customers experiences and that is what drove them to make the decision, whether it was a policy decision, or it was maybe a new product or a modification to an existing product.
Josh stated that one of the companies that people hold up as an example of using objectives and key results as a goal setting framework. One of the companies is an organization in the US called the Cleveland Clinic. And they are a healthcare organization, a hospital system and every year they publish their CEOs, OKRs, on their website. And so, one of their objectives, is to be the best place in the world to receive health care, that’s the objective.
And so, the objective is sort of states your goal, it states it in customer-centric terms. The key result then tells you how to measure that. And so, how do you measure it?
Well, you measure it in terms of customer behaviour.
And so, he thinks their key results are things like reduce the number of serious safety events in the healthcare system.
He has to go back to the book to get the example, but let’s just stay with that….Reduce the number of serious safety events, that’s a customer-centric way of thinking about it, right?
We’re putting people in the middle. We’re saying, we’ve got employees in the hospital, doctors, nurses, staff, those people need to change their behaviour. We’ve got patients who will benefit from those changes in behaviour.
And so, now the CEO is not saying, “Here’s what you’re going to do to reduce safety events.” The CEO is saying that’s the goal. Now, you are smart people, figure it out.
And that’s one of the real powers of OKRs, is that we set our targets in terms of customer benefit, and then we say to the organization, now it’s your job to figure that out. It’s almost like we’ve set the goal is our question, and people’s job is to find the answer.
Me: And what are some of the pain points that employees have experienced in this kind of process, this OKR process?
Josh shared that one of the sort of traditional pain points that OKRs tried to address is leadership, sort of micro managing everyone’s job, and saying, “Well, you’re going to do this and you’re going to do this, and you’re going to do this and you’re going to do this, and that.”
First of all, that sort of takes all the creativity out of the work, it doesn’t give anybody a problem to solve, and it just says, okay, yes, sir, yes, ma’am, and you go about your job.
And never mind that the role of leadership is different than the role of the people who are sort of actually doing the work and interacting with the customers, their point of view is different, they know different things.
And so, what the leadership might be seeing is, or what they are seeing is, by definition, different from what the people who interact with customers are seeing. And if you just tell people what to do, you don’t take advantage of what these people know about the best way to serve customers.
And so, the OKRs are designed to say leadership is not going to be in the business of micromanaging. Leadership is going to be in the business of setting strategy, setting the goals, and then providing the environment in which folks can do their work to hit those tournaments.
Now, that’s hard because now you’ve taken the sort of traditional tools of leadership, which is, I say, “Write this report, I’m the boss. Write me a report.” And then the employee goes off and writes the report, here it is, it’s done, and we all know it’s done, right? It’s easy to know, like, from a management point of view, it’s easy to know whether the person’s doing their job or not because they’ve written the report or they haven’t. But have they created any value? That’s a harder question.
And so, instead, when we’re asking people to solve problems, we have to trust each other. We have to say, “Okay, I’m giving you a problem to solve. Now, go solve it.” I have to now trust my people to go solve that problem. As an employee who’s been given a problem to solve, now I have to figure out the answer, and those are new ways of working for everybody in the system.
Ways Organizations Use the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) Process
Me: So, we give them the problem we want them to solve it for us. Let’s say there are obstacles, they’re not motivated to want to use the OKR system. Or maybe people are resistant to change, this is new for them, it’s different. And so, because it’s new and it’s different, and they’re accustomed to doing it another way, they’re not motivated as much to do it the way that you’re recommending it being done with a new strategy. What are some of the tools or ways that you’ve seen organizations get people to buy into using the objectives and key results process?
Josh stated that’s a really important question, this can feel like just another change or just another management fad. “Oh my God, it’s another three letter acronym.” And so, there has to be a reason for it, right? Like, who cares about this stuff, right?
Well, what’s the reason that we’re doing this? OKRs can be really positive way to create alignment, to create transparency, to create accountability, to create agility, they can be a tool for those things. They’re not automatically a tool for those things, they’re not automatic, they don’t become a tool for those things unless we all embrace it and start to work differently, which, he thinks is the question, right?
And so, part of the responsibility of leadership, if you’re choosing to implement an idea like this, is to be really clear about why, right? Like, what are you trying to improve in the organization? Are we moving too slowly? Are we working on too many things?
Whatever that problem is, it’s probably something that’s experienced by most of the folks in the organization. So, being really clear about why we’re adopting this new tool, that’s the first step. Why are we doing this and then being able to tell that story in a way that connects to people, and says, “Look, if we start to do this together, it’s going to improve things for you, right? Here’s how it will make the company better. Here’s how it make your job better. Here’s how it will make us a more effective organization to pursue our mission.”
This isn’t only for commercial companies, this is a tool that can be used for mission driven organizations too. And so, how do we connect people to some kind of motivation, you need to be able to tell a story about why this is a useful tool, not just like, “Okay, well, guess what? It’s January 1, and now we’re doing this new thing.”
Me: It’s our new resolution.
Me: Okay, so we get them to buy in. And I like the fact that you mentioned that it can be used as an alignment, it can be used for autonomy, for trust. I think it’s also important, which I kind of heard you say it, I guess I’m just going to see if it’s reinforced, you have to position it in such that the employee sees that it’s a benefit towards them as well, right? Because, if they don’t see it as a benefit towards them, then they’re probably not going to be as motivated to want to embrace this new way of doing things.
Josh agreed, that’s right. And so, one of the things that they talk about in the book is this idea that everyone has a customer right? So sometimes, when we think about being customer-centric, we sort of only think about that end customer, the person who takes his or her wallet out, puts the money on the counter, or who signs the contract. And those customers are obviously hugely important, but we can think about our customers if say, he works in the Human Resources Department at a company, he might work there for 10 years and never meet a customer, but he has customers. As a human resources person, his customers are the employees of the company who are trying to understand their benefits. His customers are the manager who’s trying to hire people. His customers are the people who are applying for jobs. And so, if he can adopt that kind of customer-centric mindset, then he can use this technique to say, “Well, what is my customer trying to do, and how can I help them be more effective in the way I go about my job?”
So, that kind of customer-centric thinking that leadership has to apply that to everyone in the company. To a certain degree, everyone who works in the company is a customer of the CEO. Who the CEO wants to make this change? Well, okay, you got to sell it, you got to understand what your customers, in this case, your employees are trying to do every day when they come into the office, what are they trying to do? And how is this going to help them make their lives better, make their careers better, make them more effective, whatever their motivations are. And he thinks for many leaders, that the approach is, I say jump, and you say, how high?
Me: And no, that’s not what we want.
Josh agreed, that’s the opposite of customer-centric.
Important Behaviours for an Organization to Emulate Customer-Centric Behaviours
Me: Now, in your experience, Josh, because I imagine you work with organizations as well, right? Could you give us maybe four or five behaviours that you have seen that are very important for an organization that will emulate customer-centric behaviours.
Josh shared that he thinks that the most important thing is to get really good at understanding who your customers are and what they’re trying to do. And that’s a skill that he doesn’t think that we value as much as we should. He thinks we focus a lot on how do we get our customers to buy more?
Me: It’s all about the next sale.
Josh shared that it’s an important question, but it’s a different question than, “What are our customers trying to do and how do we make them successful? Who are they? What are their motivations? What’s getting in their way? Okay, we sold them this thing. Are they using it? Are they getting value from it? Could it be better?”
And so, that set of skills, we’ll call that customer discovery. And he thinks that capability in organizations is so important. It’s important for product development, it’s important for sales, it’s important for marketing. It’s important to operationally. It’s important for customer service. And so, who are our customers and what are they trying to do? So, to him, that’s probably the behaviour that he would say almost every organization he’s ever worked with could stand to improve.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Josh
When asked about books that have had a great impact, Josh shared that sure one of the books he always recommend professionally, these days, he’s very interested in how organizations set strategy, and then how they make that strategy clear and operational for their people. And so, he would say that there is sort of two books that he thought were very valuable for his thinking were a book by a guy named Richard Rumelt called Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters.
And then there’s another book called The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gap between Plans, Action, and Results by an author named Stephen Bungay. And he thought those were two great books.
And he knows you asked me for two, but he’s going to give three for the price of two. He was very influenced about a little more than 10 years ago, by a book called The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries, which is a great book for entrepreneurs, but not just for startup people, it’s also for people who want to bring more entrepreneurial thinking to large businesses as well.
What Josh is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something he’s working on that he’s really excited about, Josh shared that for many years, he’s been an independent consultant, and that has been wonderful. He works from home, he sets his hours, but he’s been limited in his ability to make as big an impact as he would like with the material that he develops. And so, in the last year, he and his partner Jeff Gothelf have launched a certified training partner program. So, they have a company called Sense & Respond Learning, and they are working with great partners, literally around the world to start making this training available in person in countries where he’s not available. So, it’s pretty exciting, they’re just at the beginning of this and starting to develop their worldwide network, and it’s, yeah, so pretty exciting.
Me: So, you said it’s a program that will be in person implementation. So, is it that you and your partner will be flying to those locations? Or are you going to have partners or business connections in those countries and they’ll implement on your behalf.
Josh shared that they’re working with local partners in geographies around the world who are already excellent at what they do, and want to be able to expand their offerings to include their training and their curriculum, and so the training will be delivered by folks who are local to that region and who speak the native language, and who can kind of take their material and make it relevant outside of their particular context, and bring it into the local context.
Me: So, that’s excellent. And just to give our listeners a little bit more context, the program is primarily focused on developing what type of person in the organization?
Josh shared that he and Jeff focus on two areas. So, they have a kind of core is about product and service development. So, they teach product management and user experience and those topics. But increasingly, they are moving into OKRs which speak to the whole organization, and kind of the question of organizational effectiveness. So, that would be for operations and folks interested in improving organizations ways of working.
Where can listeners find Josh online?
Website – www.joshuaseiden.com
Website – www.senseandrespond.co
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Josh Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Josh shared that it’s not a quote; he’ll show this thing that he keeps on his desk. This is a piece of charcoal, if any of any of the viewers or listeners have ever drawn with charcoal, one of the things that is amazing about charcoal is you can draw a mark on a piece of paper, and then you can take a cloth and wipe that mark off and make the next mark, it’s a very, very forgiving way to draw.
And when he was first learning how to draw and was very intimidated about making a mark on a piece of paper, he was surprised to discover that it was safe to make a mark on a piece of paper with a piece of charcoal, because you could just fix it. And so, that always inspires him to just get started, make that first mark, right? Go ahead. Don’t be intimidated to get started; you can always fix it later.
Me: That’s nice. All right. Thank you so much for sharing. Joshua, thank you so much for hopping on our podcast, Navigating the Customer Experience, we really enjoyed this conversation, talking about objectives and key results, OKR and the implementation process, and, just some of the pain points that organizations can experience, but also the astronomical benefits that they can gain if they’re all really aligned and working towards the same goal and mission in order to ensure the ultimate customer satisfaction. Because I believe that’s what all companies are aiming for at the end of the day, is to have high customer satisfaction, high customer loyalty and retention, so that their customers can become their word of mouth advertisers and evangelists. So, thank you so much.
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Links
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt
- The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gap between Plans, Actions, and Results by Stephen Bungay
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
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