# “OKRs S&%k, but we don’t know anything better”: transcript Automatic transcript of the published podcast audio. Recognition errors are possible. Speakers are unlabeled; do not attribute a passage to Yuval or a guest without checking the audio. Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/okrs-sk-but-we-dont-know-anything-better/ Source RSS GUID: substack:post:161734988 Source: published Riverside RSS audio enclosure Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English ## Transcript [00:00:00] Welcome to Scaling With Agility, a new vol. [00:00:03] Today I want to talk about how to scale without reverting to founder base mode, and how OKRs [00:00:13] are related. [00:00:14] OKRs suck, but we don't know anything better. [00:00:17] That's a direct quote from a cybersecurity scale up to ChicoStuff, but I hear the sentiment [00:00:23] way too often from founders, ChicoStuff, COOs, and others in the scale up ecosystem and beyond. [00:00:30] I started encountering OKRs when working with scale ups a couple of years ago, helping leaders [00:00:34] fix their ways of working to reap the promised benefits of agile. [00:00:39] A lot of the time I'm brought in to deal with agile theater and make it better, and in one [00:00:44] of those organizations, it was a biotech scale up, they were using OKRs. [00:00:49] The intent was to have a grown-up way to manage an organization that was growing fast, and needed [00:00:54] more management, more alignment, more discipline, more focus. [00:01:00] You could imagine their VC suggesting OKRs and EOS during their latest funding round. [00:01:08] When I looked deeper into how they were using OKRs, I saw some familiar patterns, even though [00:01:12] it was the first time that I saw OKRs. [00:01:15] I've been helping leaders fix their agile for a while now, so it was interesting to see some [00:01:19] of my usual nemesis patterns. [00:01:23] Using new processes to reinforce rather than bridge the silos and departments and functions, [00:01:30] managing dependencies rather than avoiding them, calling working different names, but still [00:01:34] being involved in the details as if it was still early days in the lab garage we worked [00:01:40] chart space, instead of providing clarity about the mission and staying at the right altitude. [00:01:47] Choosing strategically what check and cadence and involvement is appropriate where. [00:01:52] Using cool new tools, Monday, ClickUp, Trello, Jira, Basecamp, Conlonboards, but still working [00:01:58] on too many things and inflicting context overload and unsustainable pace on everybody. [00:02:04] Telling people their goals rather than involving them in fearing of the mission and the plan. [00:02:10] So what we started doing was focusing their OKRs on the things that mattered, not everything [00:02:15] that was happening. [00:02:17] You don't typically need to have an OKR for everything that is going on. [00:02:22] OKRs should focus on what I call development work, work on developing your company, moving [00:02:29] from one way of doing things to another, moving from one product focus or business focus to [00:02:35] another, business model change and operational change, those changes grow optimization. [00:02:42] Those are the things that you need OKRs for. [00:02:45] You don't need them to run the day to day. [00:02:47] And if you actually do use them to run the day to day, they are not as helpful for that. [00:02:53] But also you lose the forest for the trees. [00:02:55] There's so much that OKRs capture that it's hard to see what's really strategic. [00:03:01] One other thing that we've done is we've reflected on how to organize around these OKRs. [00:03:06] We made some structural changes to the organizational topology, complimented by temporary and power [00:03:12] teams. [00:03:13] So we created some teams that were cross-functional, multi-disciplinary, involving people in the [00:03:20] tech side of biotech, as well as the biocide of biotech, as well as the GNA, to tackle things [00:03:26] like, for example, onboarding or accelerating the velocity of our biotech search for therapeutics. [00:03:36] We rewrote OKRs to focus on outcomes, think double the velocity of our search for useful [00:03:42] therapeutics, and brought those into a big-room collaborative goal-setting session where everybody [00:03:50] in the company tried to figure out what does this mean, what will need to be true for this [00:03:55] to be possible, hopefully it's not working twice as hard, it's working smarter, figuring [00:04:03] out where the bottlenecked, and also what does that mean for my own area, whether that's [00:04:08] a specific function or maybe it means collaborating across functions, maybe even creating some temporary [00:04:13] teams to tackle an aspect that needs to change in order to support this bigger mission, this [00:04:19] bigger, more strategic goal. [00:04:23] We didn't worry as much about mechanics and pedantic processes, we emphasized principles, [00:04:29] like organizing around outcomes, reducing the number of things that were working on focus [00:04:35] was an important principle. [00:04:38] This also applied to their use of edge-on methods. [00:04:41] A dogmatics crime guide compiler would probably have issues with the changes that we've made, [00:04:46] but they didn't care, and for sure I didn't care. [00:04:50] These folks understood empiricism, it helps when you're a scientist, and they did what was [00:04:57] needed to ensure that their process allowed them to run quick feedback loops, that enabled [00:05:04] them to leverage a daily feed-on, necessarily agile, beyond the software and technology teams, [00:05:09] they used agility to improve their onboarding processes, the way they were finding partners [00:05:17] and onboarding partners. [00:05:21] They started using iterative, outcome-oriented, empowered, cross-functional teams for initiatives [00:05:25] such as scientist productivity. [00:05:28] How quickly can we get a new scientist up to speed and get out of the way? [00:05:33] The sort of initiative that involves people, ops, IT, business ops. [00:05:38] As a result, finally there's traction, more traction towards what's really important without [00:05:44] micromanaging. [00:05:45] The leadership team finally had time to focus on where to take the company and not just [00:05:50] managing the day-to-day. [00:05:52] People feel like players, not pawns, in this environment. [00:05:58] People are agile, organization is agile, but not necessarily doing agile, it's lower-case [00:06:03] agile instead of upper-case agile, and they're leveraging OKRs rather than following OKRs. [00:06:09] OKRs are helping them align and empower. [00:06:13] They have a scalable operating system in place, and what that allows them is to tackle their [00:06:19] next growth and scaling inflection points, because they know that the next time something [00:06:24] like this turns up, they will create an OKR around tackling it, and they will organize [00:06:31] the right people together, try different things to work through that inflection point [00:06:38] until they find something. [00:06:40] They find a way to manage their scale to scale up, without reverting to founder Bismod. [00:06:48] Without putting people and sustainability and empowerment aside.