Cleaned transcript

Order_guys_I_belie.txt

Order, guys. I believe we have everybody on stage. Mallory, there, can you hear me? I can, wonderful. Wonderful. I will promise we will get some faces popping up here in a second, but just as a quick welcome to everyone, thank you for joining yet another fun webinar we have going on today to talk a lot about how in the world we actually measure what our business is doing, especially from a revenue side of things. We know how tough that can be, and so we are excited to dive into that. So with that, there we go. Now we can see everybody's faces. Perfect. And Will, then you can kick off. I know we got a lot to cover and care about time to do it though. I know we will inevitably run out of time for conversations, but as always, Mallory, so good to see you again. I am so pumped to have you on here. For those who don't know, Mallory and I actually worked together many, many moons ago at a different company, but I learned more from her about how to attract the right type of okay, our Wiki eyes and truly hollow Redbox, a well-oiled robot's machines to be crap sump pump. So, have you here, Mallory. Let us introduce ourselves. Yeah, thank you. So, it has been a little while, but I'm excited to be back. My role is VP of operations at Nylas, and I have been in the B2B technology space, specifically marketing technology, for more than 10 years now. And now, this is my first jump over into developer API technology, so it's been really fun. I started my career in marketing and marketing operations and then slowly progressed over to revenue operations about three years ago, so I love it. I also recently took on business operations, so we will have a nice little segue into the world of okay, arms here, I think. And I live in Indiana, and I have three little boys. And I have no hobbies. You have hobbies. It's the three little boys. So glad to have you again on another episode. Yeah, I am ready for you to drop a lot of knowledge. John Asia, same thing. Darren, you know, it's funny. I was thinking back to how long I have known you and how long we have been in the same circles together. That was a couple of years ago at a conference out in Utah. We have been friends and rev Ops enthusiasts together ever since. But I will let you introduce yourself as well. Yeah, thanks man. So, Darren Faith from Instructure, Director of Revenue Operations and Intelligence, and I support our sales function, our business intelligence, and operations portion of the business. My hobby is wake surfing. I like to go wake surfing, and I have been at Instructure now for coming up on three years. Before that, I was a sales leader, business development leader, and operations leader, and kind of a jack-of-all-trades. Now I get to focus on fashion of pure red box, which is nice. I love it. Yeah, as long as I have known you, I did not know you're a passionate wake surfer. Or, I know we have got about 40 minutes left to talk about OKRs and KPIs, but we will set at least 30 more minutes away, sir. It's a great, great, great, great, well, good time. One thing, I just did it for everybody that is online and watching, just opened up a new poll. Would love to hear how you are actually thinking about tracking your goals and if you and your business are already into OKRs/KPIs. You can either choose completion or other. If you don't, then please jump over the polls on the right side. We'd love to hear from you and how you're actually going through it. So I think the cool thing, and as everybody's kind of voting right now, we will let everybody jump into it. You know, the issue thing that I can't help but think about this as a former office leader and running off steam, but also watching all of our customers and entire ecosystem and a lot of our folks from our community talk about this often, we know the importance of it. Some of the facts and some of the data are already supporting that. We see rev Ops as a title and as a job function increasing by over a hundred percent year over year, I think is the stats on LinkedIn. And yes, while hiring markets are a little weird, especially in technology right now, there is no shortage of needs for robots. Folks, I think from a business perspective and putting my CEO hat on, I am going to measure everything neurotically for my business, and I assume the leaders in your businesses are doing the same. So, this is a perfect time for everybody to start to understand not only the importance of it objectively, why we're all passionate about it, but how do we as a business start to track the success of things like RevOps and Business Systems? And when we make a major investment in a piece of technology, what do we expect to get out of that? Or, man, we're overhauling this process and I really want to be able to track, "Hey, how was that three-month project that involved 20-plus stakeholders? How do we track the success and the progress of it?" So, we're really pumped to jump into this. What's really cool, look at this poll, right out to 20 folks have already voted, and the majority of folks are already in. Okay, ours. A lot of folks are leaning towards the project completion, some KPI folks, and then of course, there are some folks that are tracking success yet. Hopefully, take a few things away from this today and be able to go insert this into your business. So, we will move over to question number one. When we start to think about performance tracking, just 101, there's a ton of different ways. I know I keep throwing acronyms out all day every day. OKRs, KPIs, I'm sure we can come up with many more of them. How are you all doing this, Mallory? I will let you start, and I will take this over later that way. It's not hard to hold. But how are you? Yeah, so I think it's a combination of all of those things together, you know, with an OKR. It's made up of two parts. There's an objective and key result. Those key results, you really do want them to be measurable, right? So often times your KPIs become the measurement aspect of your P result. Also, a project getting completed on time by a certain day makes a KPI measurable. So I think you can really kind of combine these elements together to come up with OKRs that are compelling, actionable, and measurable. But for us, I think OKRs really do drive forward the way that we try to prioritize, and so that's important to me. I think that any time you're doing this correctly, it's going to help your team prioritize their daily work in a way that helps them communicate. Here's what I am doing. Here's why I am choosing to do this thing first before I do this other thing, and the reason is that it's going to lead us to this result. And I know that's a priority for our business, and that's hard to do, especially in operations because, you know, everything crosses our desk, literally all of the go-to-market even product pieces. So prioritization, I think, is one of the toughest parts. Really, there's no shortage, and you both know this being at the top of the funnel for requests that come through the business. There's no shortage of those. You have so many things coming at you, and being able to effectively prioritize is a pain. Darren would love to know from the instructor side how you and your team are thinking about measuring the success of your business and what you use, right? Yeah. So it's funny, I have a very similar methodology. You know, I believe OKRs are always going to be at the foundation of what you do. The KPI can be a key result with an OKR, but it's never the opposite, right? So you always start with an OKR because the OKR is your objective as an organization. What I find to be the most successful route and to making a meaningful. Okay, so are and, you know, waterfall down to KPIs starting with the executive team or the senior leadership team that are going to be your customers, right? The easiest way is if you ask somebody for an objective, everyone always fumbles, right? So you start with problem statements. So you ask them, "Hey, what are some of the problems you're trying to solve this year?" You take those problem statements and then you use those to determine what the objectives are going to be. And then at that point, you build off those objectives of your key performance indicators. And you know, when you think of a key performance indicator, the key is like, you should feel really good about having confidence that it's the right metric and you're measuring the right thing. And then you have the performance piece, which you should feel like you're measuring the right area to be successful and it is with an alignment of your strategic goals. And then, you know, making sure it's measurable. You know, if you go into OKR principles, that always ends with the objective always ends with "as measured by," right? And so making sure whatever you choose is in relation to the overall objective. And you know, at the end result of it, OKRs and KPIs are providing visibility and transparency in what you're doing, adding value where you can to kind of justify the expense of running operations organization amongst a few other things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody explained this to me the other day, and it was a little bit of an aha moment for me, so I am probably going to butcher it, but I will do my best to stay the same way they did. The goal setting in general, and we can take our Redbox hat off for a second and just kind of put our business hats on. There's a massive difference between why and how. And I think when you start to just use those two words explicitly in there, right contents, why are we going after the specific goal? What does it actually do for the business? It's not going to go full Simon Sinek on everybody, and it starts with Y, but it's a really good place to kind of start with your at least creating these OKRs, there were KPIs, or however you're tactically tracking these. But then how you do it, obviously, this is where it gets really fun on the upside. We get severe great strategies, create these teams and really start delegating around to the whole business, not just our teams, how to go and actually execute on this. But now I am going to come back to one thing. I love it when you're talking about really pushing the priorities on here. I think the underlying theme, and I remember even when you and I worked together, and we were doing this at Terminus, was doing okay. I remember our CFO at the time, Cathy, used it as a leverage point to say, "This gives you the autonomy to say no." I think we all need that again for the top of funnel requests coming into the business. To be a goofy funnel analogy, but it's so true. There's no shortage of them, and how we say no effectively is really important. If we're not able to do that, we probably all, at least I know I did this early in my career, I was a "yes" person. You want it? I think it's in our DNA. It's like rub off people. We want to go satisfy everybody's needs. So we're gonna say this often, but be able to say no and say no with grace and a really strong reason. I say why I can say no starts at the very top of setting some things objectives for your business, whether it be on a quarterly system or an annual basis. One thing I am going to come back to this exact same question and go one layer deeper. When y'all are setting these daring OKRs, I will start with you on this one. Are you setting these goals and OKRs on a quarterly basis or annual basis? How are y'all thinking about that business perspective? Yeah, we're on a quarterly basis, and we have kind of altered the OKR methodology slightly, right? So we start with the EC. We get their objectives of what they're wanting to accomplish, and they may have some key results within that area. We do a cascading effect. So based off of those key results, we look at what we're going to do from our key results that are going to relate to their key results. So I will deliver an objective and a few results that are aligned with the EC. And then, at that point, we will take that to our teams and our teams will develop the tactical plan in order to outline how we're going to get there. So what are the tasks they're going to own in terms of ownership so that they can highlight their successes against that? And you know they will also have a KPI associated with the tactical plan. Success, God, I love that. Valerie, same or different on the Nylas front? I would say similar. You know, if you just start at the very top and work your way down without any knowledge of what's going on like on the ground, you're going to overlook things that are important. You're going to miss something. So we also have modified a couple of things for our, you know, benefit and I list. I think what we have decided is we're going to go with annual company objectives and then the place where the OKRs have really come to life the most is in the departmental aspect. And so I think that might be the same as E. See what you're saying, Darren, is that? Can you clarify for me? Yes. Yeah, exactly executive and to your two points. Yeah, we do the executive goals on an annual basis and then drill them quarterly for the departments. Yeah. Yeah, I think that helps and you know, sometimes it will not change that much from quarter to quarter and I think those are things that are fine. Being able to handle some of that ambiguity of things changing quickly is, you know, very much an operations sort of trait, very much a start-up or tech company kind of trait. But I wanted to say one other thing, Brad, about your point about saying no. And if you're doing OKRs well and your key result really gives you a strong why, I think it also gives you a really strong way to say no. And so often our teams are overloaded. They're busy, you try to bring a project to them, and they're like, I have got these 10 things to do. I am just too busy. I can't take on any more things and that's their default way of saying no, but in reality, we should be able to say, hey, love that request, but I am working on these things that are achieving this key result. And I don't think this new request is going to achieve that key result. Oh my, why is that? I am really focused on achieving this thing this quarter for the business. Yes, and you know, let us find a way to spot you in after we get that accomplished. So it gives you just that context of why I am doing things. And that also shows why I am not doing things, hopefully. Yeah, absolutely. I use the better. I was just gonna say, you know, I love the way you put that, Valerie, because at the end of the day, I think empowering your team to understand how they can impact the business by each project, rather than thinking about project completion, because you can get so tied up in project completion and not focusing on the overall outcome that they're delivering to the business. So I love the way you put that. Yes, absolutely. I am going to switch over real quick, so I want to start being a little prescriptive here. We can start giving a lot of advice to a lot of folks that join us in the webinar to hopefully take some nuggets back to their business. So we will talk about where we start, but in that same vein, we could be very fluid and how we work. Yes, we could be flexible. If a fire drill comes up, let us go. Just there to make sure things happen the right way. Nobody's problem. These calls had to go through any fire drills, especially with banks lately, but it was really interesting to me. Jack, my co-founder, and I were talking about this from an engineering perspective, that's his old background. We don't go to our engineering team with things overly on fire. Sometimes it's, "Hey, I know you're working on this big rock that y'all are implementing for our product right now, but hey, I just got one customer's feedback, and we need to switch over to this rock real fast." Our engineering teams are so sophisticated in how they run sprints and how they groom things and look at their backlog. Maybe Bob starts to get that same level of respect and, "Hey, you don't just get to come in and fly in with the helicopter and say, 'All right, I know your day is probably oriented and do this thing, never mind, come do this.'" So it goes back to effectively saying no and having the right posture and everything. But we all started somewhere. Y'all have been running this type of bouquet our program for a very long time, many years, whether it be in the same business or different ones. What's the best place to start? Mallory, I will start with you because I know you wrote about, I know you got some scorecard need that you do as well. But how do you think about this day? One focusing around starting tracking success for your team. Yeah, I think that having those tight definitions is the first step and the hardest. Before you can track it, you need to know what you're shooting for, right? And I love Darren's point on asking, "What problems are we solving?" And inevitably, you're going to arrive at objectives that are solving your problem for your business or capitalizing on an opportunity. As a manager in the past, I have really struggled with OKRs because I felt like the process of defining the OKRs was just adding work to my team's plate. They are already busy, and it was a while that this went on. So what people inevitably do without even realizing it is they just take their existing work and they fit into OKRs. And it's like, "Complete this, complete this, complete this," and it's all the stuff they're already doing. And so then it becomes very redundant. It's like, why do we need OKRs if it's just a list of the things I am doing? And truly, an eye-opener for me, it's the first time that I have really gotten into this business operations role a little bit deeper and learned to understand it better. And my CEO is fabulous at helping me realize this recently. But if you're doing it correctly, in my opinion, you're not adding any work, and you're not just listing out the work that you're already doing. You're taking the projects in the work that you're already doing that, you know, are going to happen, and you're just clarifying. What will that bring to our business? What will happen because of this? So we are beginning to implement the forecasting module in Kong. That's a project that my team is actively working on. We have time frames, and we're in the middle of the rollout. So we have a due date for that, and I am drafting things. I am like, "Okay, roll out Bomb by the state done." Okay, it's like, actually, no, like what is going to happen because you did that? And you stop and think about it, and like, "Oh, okay, so we're going to have better predictability in our forecast. We're going to have accuracy of X percent against our forecast." All of a sudden, that's measurable. I can improve my forecasting accuracy, and I can see whether that came true or not. Does it mean that my team is on the hook for the whole forecast? No, but that's what we are trying to get out of doing this. And so, there are two implications there. The first implication is that it really forces you to think about how to measure the efforts and how they could pay off. And then, secondly, it relieves this accountability of, "I am the only person who can ever deliver my key result." And that is where a lot of things get sideways. And I think I even saw a question in the chat from Danielle about, like, how do you decide about accountability? So, okay, ours. Oh my gosh, Brad, you're a little questions about how cool is that? Oh yeah, that's great. Welcome. Okay, so as soon as you realize that as an operator, you don't have to be accountable for every single thing, but you can still map your success to your goal. We're trying to take a KPI or accuracy or whatever. It's immediately this weight off your shoulders with like, "Oh, I don't have to be the person that actually delivers that, but what I need to do is drive clarity, help my team understand why we're doing this, help the sales team." Understand why we're doing this and then communicate that effectively across the board. And the place where people get very tripped up by this is that if you're okay, hours are the basis for your bonus, you can have a very hard time reconciling those two things. So when it comes to getting started, one of my first pieces of advice is that I don't think people's bonus should be tied to their okay hours because you instantly create this accountability problem, and it's a lot easier if you don't have that. I completely agree. I think we're all humans here. We're not robots quite yet. It's coming faster than we can get some of the GDP technology, but we are. And we are too surgically coin-operated, and however that coin comes into our bank account, we're going to prioritize how that works as you want to do. I think what you're mentioning is totally fine. We should all be having a sentence that aligns the outcomes for our business, but make sure that you're not over-indexing on that or creating too much bias with how that okay hours can actually play out for the whole business. So, I completely agree. I would love your thoughts on the same thing. Yeah. Like, I want to address Danielle's question, but I also want to start from the core principles of setting okay hours and KPIs. Not every company is going to have confidence in their data, right? And I think you really need to start before you start setting okay hours, understanding and aligning what those values and yields will be that you need to align off of and make sure that they are agreed upon in terms of how they're calculated, what they are representing, right? Because I could come in and say, "Oh, my deal of sales velocity is defined this way," and somebody may define it another way and get continuity across the team. So, like data governance is really important to start before you get to the point where you start developing KPIs, right? And then once you have developed those KPIs, one of the things I love about the okay hour principle is okay. Ours are more strategic and long-range. So if you achieve 70% of your key result in our principal methodology, it's a success. It should be stretch goals, and when you go into a KPI, it's more of "did I achieve it or not?" Marrying the two in some sort of fashion means saying, "Here's my objective," and to your point, Danielle, the important part is the overall principle of the goal you want to achieve. Then you go into the KPI, and there are portions of the KPI where your portion that you own should be measurable, and you should be accountable for your portion. But there should be somebody else doing another project in tandem with you that also helps you deliver against that objective. The one thing I love about the principles is that if you have it from the top down, you have multiple people driving towards the same goal. You can make sure that somebody's got pipeline coverage. You're going to own portions of that project, but you also have sales leaders who should be held accountable for their portion of that key result and how they're going to finish the pie, so to speak. You can't bake it with only half the ingredients, so making sure that you start by communicating those problem statements is important. One of the things we like to do is start from the field, so the people who are doing the work collect problem statements. Then we come together as a leadership team and review all those problem statements. We look for trends and things that are similar, and then we assess it for impact and determine which one is going to impact the business more. We align against these principles to help determine what these objectives should be. It does come from the field and is determined based upon impact to help deliver the right result for the business. It's a good reminder that you set these goals, we set these OKRs, and whether they be on a quarterly basis, annual basis, or otherwise, that doesn't mean that you can't ask questions about them partway through. We track them the right way, not to be overly challenging, but to make sure that we're making these business decisions and not just putting it in concrete every 90 days without thinking about the validity and flexibility of them. I love this question and Andrew, you asked a very similar one, so it kind of popped up here too. But it's interesting to learn how you keep the visibility on these. So we talked about creating them foundationally, what to think about, how do you communicate these and keep everyone on top of mind and the top of progress for how they get tracked. What are y'all using to communicate? I will let either one of you start. Yeah, like, I can go ahead and start. So, in the core principle of our methodology, one of the core factors is having regular meetings and making sure you keep it at the forefront of your conversation. So at every team meeting, one of the first topics we're going to be having is, how are we turning against our OKR, our progress, right? And the difficult thing is you need to build an environment that's rounded around the OKR methodology from the organization's perspective because you need to be able to have your boss communicate that to the next boss and it needs to be cycled up and it needs to be brought up on QPRs. It needs to be brought up on regular meetings on a monthly cadence, as well as a weekly cadence and highlighting the various milestones within those key results. One of the things I like about setting a key result with an OKR methodology is having the tactical plan because then you can celebrate the successes of each tactical milestone, right? So you do have something to update the team on. Totally. Yeah, I really think I have done this so many ways. Like I have done it in a spreadsheet. I have done it in laughs that is, so I have done it in a fly. I mean, some of it depends on which tools you're using and how your business is. Inherently larger complex organizations have a harder time making these things readily available and visible. What we're going to do this quarter at Nilus because we're working on this literally now is we're going to have all of the departmental OKRs in one simple Google doc that is shared out with the whole company. And so it won't be as granular as every single person in the business, but it will be departmentally representative of the biggest things that are happening and why. The key results are all about why. And so we're approaching a low-tech way to make this available and visible to everyone. And then, there's a point, these do have a weekly component because if you don't watch them weekly, you will get off track. So in our weekly executive team meeting, we have got one that's more status update related, and like departmental collaboration, just talking through all the stuff that we need to talk through. That's better, that's more tactical. And we have a template that we go through each week, and one area of our template says, "Okay, our progress," and we just do a red, yellow, green on those objectives, and we talk about that every week. On top of that, my team is very entrenched in using Jira. That's how they manage their work and their projects. So what I am hoping to do, I haven't done it yet, but I have got this plan to have all of our key results in Jira as initiatives. And then I can map our tasks in our epics up to the initiative to show which pieces of work are really laddering up to each key result. And then I can also see how much work is associated with each one. So I am excited to try that out. I will let you guys know how it goes because we're not live with it yet. But meeting people where they are, I think, is important because if it's just one more tool and it's just one more thing they don't know how to use, and it's just one more place that they forget how to log into, they're not going to look at it. So I want to make it a thing that is very easy for people to look at. Totally real. Lex had a really good question about that and real good seen a couple of weeks ago. I'll be back out in the Bay Area next month, so I will be sure to swing by. But I love this question from a tactical perspective. Each map those key results as the stories themselves in Jira, start thinking about that. Saw your architect in it. I am thinking about it. I think that I might put them in as initiatives on like a roadmap, but I need to learn more, and there's a guru insider knowledge that's going to help me with it. As long as they're connected to each other physically, I don't care. So if you have tips, please feel free to send them my way. There you go. I will take real. Probably has some very smart guy. Cool. We're going to move into one final question. We still have plenty of time. More questions, the better for the Q&A. So I think, if you haven't dropped questions already, please do it there, and we're happy to answer as many as we can. But this always was one of my favorite questions. Regardless of what the actual topic is, we have all gone through building something or implementing something and have stubbed our toe or had just heartburn from something going wrong while doing it. So yeah, the biggest question is when you think of her, this out, what are the gotchas and where are the blind spots and some of the pain points that you have either experienced personally or seen experience when you have gone to implement some sort of thing? They're Imola will kick it off for you. Yeah, it's say you know we talked about like the weekly and monthly and quarterly readouts. I think if you don't keep a hold on that and you don't keep communicating that, okay? Ours are the core foundation of what you're driving against. What happens is people will start to forget that that's what you're working towards and it's not at the forefront of the mind. And then you do have that issue that we talked about earlier, which was prioritization. Then something else becomes more important. And then when you highlight and go back to an okay, are they go? Well, yeah, that was before but if you continually keep that communication open and highlighted on why we set that, okay? Are as a priority level for that quarter, or if you do it on an annual basis or monthly basis, then it keeps at the forefront to allow you to have, like we talked about earlier, the pushback against why you would change those okay hours. And it allows you to have Brad, I think you brought it up earlier, being more like engineering, right? Where you have the power to push back and make sure you bring it up often and highlight it. I think one of the highlights for engineering is they talk about their deliverables often and that they do talk about, "Hey, listen, this is what's going to deliver here and this is what we're working on and it is the top priority." So by communicating and keeping visibility and transparency, we can keep that at the top, right? And, you know, I find that in the past, if we haven't talked about it, it could go by the wayside and then there could be something else that filters in and consumes it. Yeah, totally. Oh, I completely agree. Yes. Mallory, where's the Harvard, and where's the scar tissue from for doing this? Well, but also probably still hear that through it all my paths cars, revolve around executive alignment, or the lack of it, right? So I think that if we don't have a unified and aligned executive team planning together, the risk you run is that each department runs off in their own direction and is doing what they think is best by no fault of their own, but you accidentally end up with results and plans and initiatives that just clash with each other. And it's like, how did we get to this? What's going on here? How are we working on something that's so different but, you know, we're both trying to grow this thing and it's just because we don't all plan it out in time, and we don't all make sure that we have a line at that highest level possible before we go forth and create key results. And, you know, in my past with some of the Ops teams, one thing that I learned the hard way is that I couldn't really set my objectives and key results until I knew what everybody else was doing because if everything has to kind of flow through your team in order to get out the door, you have got to be able to say, like, your three things, that you're eight things, and your seven things add up to too many things. My team cannot support that much. So we have got to start to figure out where do we prioritize, even before we get the key results and objectives set. Because if you have any kind of bottleneck in delivery, that's going to be passed to be able to support the stuff that's going out the door. So I started to hang back more when I was participating in the process and it's like, show me yours first. And then, I will figure out how do I make room for all this stuff? Exactly. I think that's actually a really, really good point. The sequence of this matters sequentially. How you set these for your business and every business is different. I think we could always make a case of, "All right, let us start with our overall revenue goals, to start with sales success." And even what that looks like from a marketing perspective, from pipeline building and everything like that. How do we as Ops folks know? Because for all three of those functions of business units, to make sure that they can go get those. So you're spot on. I am trying to scratch my head right now. I am thinking like, "All right, how do you, how do you play devil's advocate here?" How would you set a rub Ops objective without knowing what the greater business objectives are? That would be pretty hard. Can we go clean up 10% of our tech debt in our sales force? That's probably one that you could do with help from overarching bigger company things. But at the same time, is that the most important needle mover for the business in the next 90 days or six months, 12 months? I think that's a really interesting way to think about it. I will say it aloud where you are exactly a month, almost two months in a month and a half into tracking. Okay, ours. The first time that Sonar, we have always had our goals mostly based rather be wise, but as our teams continue to grow, and we keep going out more and more dedicated departments, it was important for us. And so we obviously went through this together at Terminus, and we have seen how things work really well, and how things work poorly in other places. So I told our team start small. We will inevitably grow, but our biggest advice, just kind of going through it in the past was, "Yes, we can all be very bullish, really excited and throw out 17 different objectives per department." It's going to get noisy, really fast. That's all we'll start intentionally on two to three per department and let us go from there. The one interesting finding, and again, we're starting to jump into some Q&A, so get those questions in folks. The interesting thing that we found there is that yes, we need to be transparent and talk about how we're tracking these, but while some goals are neurotically tracked, like I can tell you exactly down to the nth degree where we are from a revenue perspective and what goal we're going to hit all the way down to probably three or four decimals, funny too, but there are certain objectives. For instance, Melissa on our finance team is working through setting up our pre-audit right now. It's not exactly something you track at 23.25% completion. It is kind of binary like did we get the pre-audit done or not? And so, you know, there are things like that. So we have to be mindful of, but I love the suggestion you gave. It doesn't have to be percentage-based. It can be red, yellow, green. Are we on track with this or not? Are we switching one tool for another? That's kind of a binary project. We know we can go deep into those tools and how they're actually tracking for implementation, but some of it can come down to just being fiery. So I really like that and just being transparent and overly communicative. Yeah, the one question I have for both of you all as questions again, I will keep pushing everybody in the chat to jump in. How do you create the alignment between departments that really don't have a lot of skin in each other's game? Probably one of the best ways I could think about this is like, think about marketing and engineering. Now, of course, we're all creating a product together. We're trying to take it to market and go win, but when they don't have necessarily overlapping objectives, how do you get enrollment across different departments or one person to say, "Yeah, I am really bought into what your objective is over there in engineering." And, "Oh, by the way, marketing, as an engineering leader, I am really bought into your goal too." How do you drive that collaboration across departments? And I think, for me, it would be more highlighted around the similarities of what the overall objective is for the organization, right? This is why it's so important to have it from the executive team down because everything can be a subsidiary of that overall company objective, right? And you brought up a good point earlier, Brad, where you're worried about not necessarily being able to set your goals or objectives before they have been created by, let's say, the DC, right? And that's one of the things that I have noticed. Your executive team is incredibly busy, but they care about what's important and what they are told is important. I think having somebody own that and collect some problem statements and say, "Hey, let's go to the field, let's understand what problems we're dealing with. Let's bring these together and consolidate them and bring them to the executive team and say, 'Hey, I am waiting for some objectives or some OKRs from you guys so we can set our goals.'" And you go about that a month before the end of the quarter, and then you say, "Here's a list of some stuff that we have surveyed across the organization that we think we have identified, right? Like, give them the information to make those decisions so that they can come together and make a decision around, okay, our objectives and deliver some guidelines." And then from there, you can kind of bring the different departments together by how they support each other's initiatives in order to achieve the overall company objective. I love that, Valerie. What do you think about keeping everybody aligned? That's one of the core tenets of RevOps, making sure that all of our departments know what we're all doing. But you think, I agree, it's so important, and it's not that easy. But I think I do nerd out on the challenge of connecting those dots for people, and I am the person that's like, "No, wait, I will explain how it is all the same. Like, I will coach you through the way that this is all connected." And I think at product companies, it's easier, and this is not necessarily an OKR-related, sorry. But if you are really putting the customer at the center of everything you do, there's no way for any one department to not get on the same page about how to make that customer successful. And if you're an engineer who's trying to develop the product and you're thinking of the story and the problem you're solving and what you're building and what you're trying to help, how is your product helping that user? Marketing is doing the same exact thing in the way that they craft their messaging with pain points to attract buyers. They should be very closely linked to each other. Is that going to come out like 100% an objective? I mean, hopefully, maybe not that clear-cut, but just having those problem statements, I think that I am going to probably steal that a lot because I think that if you boil it down to the problem statements, they're probably not that different, and it's all about creating that value and making the customer understand like we do. We can help you achieve this value, especially right now. At Nihilus, we are in the middle of launching a brand-new trial experience, and it's a big deal for us because we're really embracing this product-led motion a little bit more than we have in the past. One of our company objectives for the year is that any Nihilus user can build and launch their integration in one day. That's the lofty objective we're reaching for, and if it takes longer than that in the old way, it touches everything in marketing. We have a developer relations team and a documentation team that does all of the things associated with getting people through that process. So, I feel like we have achieved this kind of lock-up between marketing, product, and engineering. That's not very common. I am ranting at this point, but I just think it's so cool. And I think that's the point of operations, to help people understand that you guys are really doing the same thing, and what you do impacts what this person does. How many times have you read the messaging on somebody's website, and then you go to their product and it's not even the same world? Really, what is happening here? Your messaging on your website doesn't tell the story of what your product is doing, and that's what happens when you don't have that collaboration. Totally, I completely agree. I think the one thing I am trying to date back into the conversation, I had it might have been a conversation I had with Glove a long time ago about whining, a lot of that. And it kind of leads into Kristen's question, which I am going to pop on the screen too. Look, you might not directly impact somebody else's objective, but at the end of the day, there is a set of those at the very top of the business that are impacting every single person, all the way down from the head of HR and executive assistant to a janitor or a CEO. It doesn't matter. If it was really cool, I think Glove said it was at some point, and we will talk about some or compensation here in a second. Have some skin in the game for somebody else's. Okay. There are things that you might not have full control over, but you at least have accountability towards, and it gives you the authority and the autonomy to go to someone way outside of your department. Say, "Hey, I know I can't tactically help you commit all this code or push this new release, but I am here to support you to make sure you're on track because a little bit of my compensation is involved in as well." So I thought that was a really unique idea, and I am going to give Blodgett credit for it. I don't know if it was him that told me that, almost could date back to when him and I talked about that. Yeah, I love this question from Kristin too. We talked briefly about bonusing but commissioning Radloff's teams, yay or nay. You've heard pros and cons of both, and we'll be sensitive to how you all vote as a team. But yeah, this is a big question. People ask me this a lot. How do you go about incentive-based comp for drive-off teams? So I would be curious to see what y'all heard and seen what works and what doesn't. Yeah, I will let you go, Mallory, at all. I will follow up. Okay, this one's hard. I, you know, personally, I am not the profile of someone who's super motivated by a big bonus, and I think that could be common among operations people. It might not, but it's definitely not the same profile as a salesperson who's extremely motivated by every action leads to a dollar. And I can, you know, predictably measure the way that's going to work out for myself. It's just not really how I am wired. I have never done like a variable compensation for a robotics team based on an output or an activity or like, you know, counting up a number of things to be done. So I don't know if I think that it's the right way to go. I just know that I am personally not that motivated by it. I love bonus plans that do focus on the overarching company success, whatever that is, whether it's ARR or gross or whatever the big milestones are that the company is trying to get to. I love the idea of incentivizing many people at the company on that because you're all working towards this common goal. You're all celebrating success together. You can't get there with only sales. You need everybody to get to, you know, these big objectives that you have as a company. Yeah, you know, I agree with Mallory on having it tied to something that's more of like a global company metric, right? Because, you know, as businesses and SAS or understanding, it's about the full customer lifecycle from a standpoint, right? Revenue operations is going to have a piece of just about everything in that realm. But there are also aspects of the business in finance or engineering or other areas of the business that require some optimization for the company to be healthy. And I think the important goal is that there are two things you're focused on: delivering a good customer experience for your customers and making sure that you run a healthy business. Having a bonus structure around something like eBay or something like that, I think, is a reasonable expectation. I think the one thing I love is like an equity play. Somebody does a really good job and has delivered value for the organization, you give them ownership because they are acting as an owner, right? And I think when you think about that and the implications of them having been bought in that much more purely because they have an ownership stake in the game, I think it's unique to a behavior, right? I think in sales, you do commission because you're paid to do a job, you do a job, and then I think in revenue operations, you touch so many facets of the business that it would be difficult to pick a metric that because then you'd be too focused on one area and not focused on the bigger picture, which is what the whole point of revenue operations is: connecting all the different portions of the customer journey together. It's great. We got $5 every time you delete an unused field, and yeah, anything else that's exactly what Derek. Maybe you remember those old coils with my old boss, who was probably my first job, told me that since think like a customer and act like an owner. If you don't have embodied a little bit like, "All right, about making the best decision regardless of what my role is in the business, am I thinking like what is best for our customer?" And also, "Does it behoove me to act like an owner? Like, do I have the keys? Is our dog barking in the background? Like, can we actually control that?" So that's a fantastic question. Great positive. I don't have one quick one. I will throw it up there for Matthew because I know we're getting close to the time. Also, we're going to hang out, or at least I am going to hang out after this. Everybody looks at the top of the blue top right corner. You will see, "Wow, I am going to open up a lounge where folks can join, and we can all have a lovely virtual happy hour together and kind of keep this conversation going." But it's Matthew won't leave you hanging. I love this question. Have you ever created individual OKRs for employees? If so, do you typically align them with the department or the company? We did, and I think it's important that you still have folks that have individual OKRs that, yes, they can still roll up and impact the business. It might not go all the way up to the company-wide objective, but there is still a path to get there. So, I am a fan of making sure they're still moving. They're still on a personal level, a C-level that is directly affecting the growth of their side. But yeah, curious Mallory Darren, I don't think about individual OKRs. I think for me, oh, sorry, Glen Ballard. Yeah, you know, I think for me, it's important. I am just like zoning in on one portion of what you wrote there, Matt, which is, "Have I ever created individual OKRs for somebody?" Like, have I ever created them for somebody? No. And I think part of that methodology is you got to weigh in to get buy-in, and I believe that's the advantage of it. Let us yummy, right? And you go through some of these aspects of the planning aspect. I think you should give them the opportunity to develop their own OKRs or guide them in the means of understanding how they can build an OKR for their own professional development. But in the means of doing a tactical plan, which is what we outline, you allow them to pick a tactical plan, and then in that, they have their own key result to understand that they meet their tactical objective, right? And you have those milestones. It's kind of like a light introduction into OKR principles, right? And you have them own something and have them develop it so that they can say, "Hey, I know this objective. I know what I am this key result." I know how I can impact that and have them use some of their problem-solving skills to kind of level up their career a little bit and understand. Hey, I can impact that. This is how. Maybe be a part of this team, and it may require some guidance. But I try not to deliver an "okay" for somebody but try to guide them. Yeah, totally developing their own. Yeah, yeah, I like that approach a lot. I think that different companies are at varying stages of doing this, so I have done it both ways in the businesses where people are getting their bonus based on their "okay" hours. Everybody's got them, right, because that is a key component for compensation, and you know, I'm not a fan of that. But as you think through the other options there, I think I have seen goal setting and project planning as it's related to almost more of like a professional development plan, which I think Darren is kind of what you're getting at as well. It's, you know, here's how I want to develop personally, here are the things that I want to learn, the things I want to do, my main objectives that I know are helping the company this quarter. That planning process is important, especially just for people to be able to articulate how they have grown, how they have contributed, and to feel that connection back to the business. But I don't think it has to be in the very strict "okay" hour wording per se. It just depends on what works for your teams. Totally the one thing that we have done, we haven't that's really baked it fully into the "okay" hour side at the individual level, but we talk about professional development plans. One thing Jack and I started from day one with our business was creating professional development plans for every employee. We actually have a called our PDP. Every employee has a certain amount of access to capital, access to money to go and get a new certification, go to a new event, go to a conference, take a class, read a book, do whatever you need. But you are responsible for your own journey as well. It's not something that should be followed told you from an executive or your leader. You should show enough excitement about yourself to go and find something that's going to help you. Some companies are willing to pay for that for books, but we bake that into promotion plans, like hey, I can help you achieve X, Y, and Z metric here at someone or, but if you're not helping yourself build your career, I need to see it out of you as well. It's not just me. Just gonna drag you along and you run with it, except really, really fun way of thinking about it, and potentially incorporating that into just overall employment plans, and not necessarily just broker arms. But I know we're at the top of time, they were actually a few minutes over. So I know it is a busy Thursday for a lot of folks, busy for me, in a sense, I get dumped over the lounge and hopefully have a virtual happy hour booked. But Darren, Mallory, I cannot thank you both enough for joining. This was a great conversation and I know everybody that Chad and a lot of folks who attended that this take it away at some nuggets. I was writing down those to myself to incorporate here, so dark. So I really appreciate you both joining. Thank you, of course, and all right, we're going to try this. This is the first time full disclosure where we jump into the lounge. If anybody wants to jump in, keep the conversation going. I will be there. Yeah, looking forward to seeing the folks on the other side. We will talk soon. Thank you, thanks. Everybody have a great rest of your day. To open this lounge up now. See what happens. All right, think that. Let us go joy. I believe we have everybody on stage. Mallory, can you hear me? I can, wonderful. Wonderful. I will promise we will get some faces popping up here in a second, but just as a quick welcome to everyone, thank you for joining yet. Another fun webinar we have going on today to talk a lot about how in the world we actually measure what our business is doing, especially from a revenue side of things. We know how tough that can be, and so we are excited to dive into that. So with that, there we go. Now we can see everybody's faces perfectly and we'll then kick off. I know we have a lot to cover and care about time to do it though. I know we will inevitably run out of time for conversations, but as always, Mallory, so good to see you again. I am so pumped to have you on here. For those who don't know Mallory, we actually worked together many, many moons ago at a different company, but I learned more from her about how to attract the right type of OKRs and truly how to build well-oiled robotic machines to be crap sump pumps. So glad to have you here, Mallory. Let us introduce ourselves. Yeah, thank you. So it has been a little while, but I'm excited to be back. My role is VP of operations at Nilus, and I have been in the B2B technology space, specifically marketing technology, for more than 10 years now. And now this is my first jump over into developer API technology, so it's been really fun. I started my career in marketing and marketing operations and then slowly progressed over to revenue operations about three years ago, so I love it. I also recently took on business operations, so we will have a nice little segue into the world of OKRs here, I think. And I live in Indiana, and I have three little boys. And I have no hobbies. You have hobbies. It's the three little boys. So glad to have you again on another episode. Yeah, I am ready for you to drop a lot of knowledge. John, Asia, same thing. Darren, you know, it's funny. I was thinking back to how long I have known you and how long we have found ourselves in the same circles together. That was a couple of years ago at a conference out in Utah. We've just been friends and revenue operations enthusiasts together ever since. But I will let you introduce yourself as well. Yeah, thanks man. So, Darren Faith from Instructure, Director of Revenue Operations and Intelligence, and I support our sales function of our business intelligence and operations portion of the business. My hobby is wake surfing. I like to go wake surfing and you know I have been at Instructure now for coming up on three years. Before that, I was a sales leader, business development leader, and operations leader, and kind of a jack-of-all-trades. Now, I get to focus on fashion of pure red box, which is nice. I love it. Yeah, as long as I have known you, I did not know you're a passionate wake surfer. Or, I know we have got about 40 minutes left to talk about OKRs and KPIs, but we will set at least 30 more minutes away, sir. It's a great, great, great, great, well, good time. One thing, I just did it for everybody that is online and watching, just opened up a new poll. Would love to hear how you are actually thinking about tracking your goals and if you and your business are already into OKRs/KPIs. You can either be a completionist or other. If you don't, then please jump over the polls on the right side. We'd love to hear from you and how you're actually going through it. So, I think the cool thing, and as everybody's kind of voting right now, we will let everybody jump into it. You know, the issue thing that I can't help but think about this as a former ops leader and running off steam, but also watching all of our customers and entire ecosystem and a lot of our folks from our community talk about this often, we know the importance of it. Some of the facts and some of the data are already supporting that. We see RevOps as a title and as a job function increasing by over 100% year over year, I think is the stats on LinkedIn. And yes, while the hiring market is a little weird, especially in technology right now, there is no shortage of needs for RevOps folks. I think from a business perspective and putting my CEO hat on, I am going to measure everything neurotically for my business, and I assume the leaders in your businesses are doing the same. So, this is a perfect time for everybody to start to understand not only the importance of it objectively. Why we're all passionate about it, but how do we as a business start to track the success of things like RevOps and Business Systems? And when we make a major investment in a piece of technology, what do we expect to get out of that? Or, man, we're overhauling this process and I really want to be able to track, "Hey, how was that three-month project that involved 20-plus stakeholders? How do we track the success and the progress of it?" So, we're really pumped to jump into this. What's really cool? Look at this poll, right out to 20 folks have already voted and the majority of folks are already in. Okay, ours. A lot of folks are leaning towards the project completion, some KPI folks, and then of course, there are some folks that are tracking success yet. Hopefully, you can take a few things away from this today and be able to insert this into your business. So, we will move over to question number one. When we start to think about performance tracking, just 101, there are a ton of different ways. I know I keep throwing acronyms out all day, every day. OKRs, KPIs, I'm sure we can come up with many more of them. How are you all doing this, Mallory? I will let you start, and I will take this over later that way it's not covering your face to hold. But how are you? Yeah, so I think it's a combination of all of those things together. You know, with OKRs, it's made up of two parts. There's an objective and key result. Those key results, you really do want them to be measurable, right? So often times, your KPIs become the measurement aspect of your P result. Also, a project getting completed on time by a certain day makes a key result very measurable. So I think you can really kind of combine these elements together to come up with OKRs that are compelling, actionable, and measurable. But for us, I think OKRs really do drive forward the way that we try to prioritize, and so that's important to me. I think that any time you're doing this correctly, it's going to help your team prioritize their daily work in a way that helps them communicate. Here's what I am doing, here's why I am choosing to do this thing first before I do this other thing, and the reason is that it's going to lead us to this result. And I know that's a priority for our business, and that's hard to do, especially in operations because, you know, everything crosses our desk, literally all of the go-to-market even product pieces. So prioritization, I think, is one of the toughest parts. Really, there's no shortage, and you both know this being at the top of the funnel for requests that come through the business. There's no shortage of those. You have so many things coming at you, and being able to effectively prioritize is a pain. Darren would love to know from the instructor side how you and your team are thinking about measuring the success of your business and what you use to track it. Yeah. So it's funny, I have a very similar methodology. You know, I believe OKRs are always going to be at the foundation of what you do. The KPI can be a key result with an OKR, but it's never the opposite, right? So you always start with an OKR because the OKR is your objective as an organization. What I find to be the most successful route and to making a meaningful OKR and waterfall down to KPIs is starting with the executive team or the senior leadership team that are going to be your customers, right? The easiest way is if you ask somebody for an objective, everyone always fumbles, right? So you start with problem statements. So you ask them, "Hey, what are some of the problems you're trying to solve this year?" You take those problem statements. And then you use those to determine what the objectives are going to be. And then, at that point, you build off those objectives of your key performance indicators. And, you know, when you think of a key performance indicator, the key is to feel really good about having confidence that it's the right metric and you're measuring the right thing. And then you have the performance piece, which you should feel like you're measuring the right area to be successful and it is in alignment with your strategic goals. And then, making sure it's measurable, you know if you go into, okay, our principles that always end with the objective always ends with "as measured by", right? So, making sure whatever you choose is in relation to the overall objective. And, you know, at the end result of it, okay, an KPI is providing visibility and transparency in what you're doing, adding value where you can to kind of justify the expense of running operations organization amongst a few other things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody explained this to me the other day and it was a little bit of an aha moment for me, so I am probably going to butcher it but I will do my best to stay the same way they did. The goal setting in general, and we can take our red box hat off for a second and just kind of put our business hats on. There's a massive difference between why and how. And I think when you start to just use those two words explicitly in there, right contents. Why are we going after the specific goal? What does it actually do for the business? It's not going full Simon Sinek on everybody and it starts with Y, but it's a really good place to start with your at least creating these OKRs, there were KPIs or however you're tactically tracking these. But then how you do it obviously, this is where it gets really fun on the upside. We get to see great strategies, create these teams and really start delegating around to the whole business, not just our teams, how to go and actually execute on this. But now I am going to come back to one thing. I love it when you're talking about really pushing the priorities on here, I think the underlying theme, and I remember, even when you and I worked together, and we were doing this at Terminus was doing OKRs, I remember our CFO at the time, Cathy, used it as a leverage point to say, this gives you the autonomy to say no. I think we all need that again for the top of funnel for requests coming into the business, to be a goofy funnel analogy, but it's so true. There's no shortage of them and how we say no. Effectiveness is really important. If we're not able to do that, we probably all, at least I know I did this early in my career, I was a "yes" person. You want? I think it's in our DNA. It's like rub off people. We want to go satisfy everybody's needs. So we're gonna say this often, but be able to say no and say no with grace and a really strong reason. I say why I can say no starts at the very top of setting some objectives for your business, whether it be on a quarterly system or an annual basis. How are y'all thinking about that business perspective? Yeah, we're on a quarterly basis, and we have kind of altered the OKR methodology slightly, right? So we start with the EC. We get their objectives of what they're wanting to accomplish, and they may have some key results within that area. We do a cascading effect. So based on those key results, we look at what we're going to do from our key results that are going to relate to their key results. So I will deliver an objective and a few results that are aligned with the EC. And then, at that point, we will take that to our teams, and our teams will develop the tactical plan in order to outline how we're going to get there. So what are the tasks they're going to own in terms of ownership so that they can highlight their successes against that, and they will also have a KPI associated with the tactical plan. Success. God, I love that. Valerie, same or different on the Nylas front? I would say similar. You know, if you just start at the very top and work your way down without any knowledge of what's going on, like on the ground, you're going to overlook things that are important, you're going to miss something. So we also have modified a couple of things for our benefit and Nylas. I think what we have decided is we're going to go with annual company objectives, and then the place where the OKRs have really come to life the most is in the departmental aspect. And so I think that might be the same as E. See what you're saying, Darren, is that? Can you clarify for me? Yes. Yeah, exactly, executive and to your two-point. Yeah, we do the executive goals on an annual basis and then drill them quarterly for the departments. Yeah. Yeah, I think that helps, and you know, sometimes it will not change that much from quarter to quarter, and I think those are things that are fine. Being able to handle some of that ambiguity of things changing quickly is, you know, very much an operations sort of trait, very much a start-up or tech company kind of trait. But I wanted to say one other thing, Brad, about your point about saying no. And if you're doing OK, I was well, and your key result really gives you a strong why, I think it also gives you a really strong way to say no. And so often our teams are overloaded. They're busy, you try to bring a project to them, and they're like, "I have got these 10 things to do. I am just too busy. I can't take on any more things," and that's their default way of saying no. But in reality, we should be able to say, "Hey, love that request, but I am working on these things that are achieving this key result. And I don't think this new request is going to achieve that key result. Oh, my why is that? I am really focused on achieving this thing this quarter for the business." Yes. And you know, let us find a way to spot you in after we get that accomplished. So it gives you just that context of I know why I am doing things. And that also shows why I am not doing things hopefully. Yeah, absolutely, I use the word "better". I was just gonna say, you know, I love the way you put that, Valerie, because at the end of the day, I think empowering your team to understand how they can impact the business by each project, rather than thinking about project completion, is important. Because you can get so tied up in project completion and not focus on the overall outcome that they're delivering to the business. So I love the way you put that. Yes, absolutely. I am going to switch over real quick, so I want to be a little prescriptive here. We can start giving a lot of advice to a lot of folks that join us in the webinar to hopefully take some nuggets back to their business. So we will talk about where we start, but in that same vein, I use this analogy the other day. We should be very fluid in how we work. Yes, we could be flexible if a fire drill comes up. Let's go. Just make sure things happen the right way. Nobody has a problem with these calls. We haven't had to go through any fire drills, especially with banks lately, but it was really interesting to me. Jack, my co-founder, and I were talking about this from an engineering perspective, that's his old background. We don't go to our engineering team with things overly on fire. Sometimes it's like, "Hey, I know you're working on this big rock that y'all are implementing for our product right now, but hey, I just got one customer's feedback, and we need to switch over to this rock real fast." Our engineering teams are so sophisticated in how they run sprints and how they groom things and look at their backlog. Maybe Bob starts to get that same level of respect and, "Hey, you don't just get to come in and fly in with the helicopter and say, 'All right, I know your day is probably oriented and do this thing, never mind, come do this.'" So it goes back to effectively saying no and saying that the right posture and everything. But we all started somewhere. Y'all have been running this type of program for a very long time, many years, whether it be in the same business or different ones. What's the best place to start? Mallory, I will start with you because I know you wrote about, I know you got some scorecard need that you do as well. But how do you think about this day? One focusing around starting tracking success for your team. Yeah, I think that having those tight definitions is the first step and the hardest. Before you can track it, you need to know what you're shooting for, right? And I love Darren's point on asking, "What problems are we solving?" And inevitably, you're going to arrive at objectives that are solving your problem for your business or capitalizing on an opportunity. As a manager in the past, I have really struggled with OKRs because I felt like the process of defining the OKRs was just adding work to my team's plate. They are already busy, and it was a while that this went on. So what people inevitably do without even realizing it is they just take their existing work and they fit into OKRs. And it's like, "Complete this, complete this, complete this," and it's all the stuff they're already doing. And so then it becomes very redundant. It's like, why do we need OKRs if it's just a list of the things I am doing? And truly, an eye-opener for me was the first time that I have really gotten into this business operations role a little bit deeper and learned to understand it better. My CEO is fabulous at helping me realize this recently, but if you're doing it correctly, in my opinion, you're not adding any work, and you're not just listing out the work that you're already doing. You're taking the projects and the work that you're already doing that you know are going to happen, and you're just clarifying what will that bring to our business? What will happen because of this? So we are beginning to implement the forecasting module in Kong. That's a project that my team is actively working on. We have time frames, and we're kind of right in the middle of the rollout. So we have a due date for that, and I am drafting things. I am like, okay, roll out bomb by the state done. Okay, are it's like, actually, know like what is going to happen because you did that and you stop and think about it and like, oh okay, so we're going to have better predictability in our forecast. We're going to have accuracy of X percent against our forecast. All of a sudden, that's measurable. I can improve my forecasting accuracy, and I can see whether that came true or not. Does it mean that my team is on the hook for the whole forecast? No, but that's what we are trying to get out of doing this. And so, there're two implications there. The first implication is that it really forces you to think about how to measure the efforts and how they could pay off. And then, secondly, it relieves this accountability of, "I am the only person who can ever deliver my key result." And that is where a lot of things get sideways. And I think I even saw a question in the chat from Danielle about, like, how do you decide about accountability? So, okay, ours. Oh my gosh, Brad, you're a little questions about how cool is that? Oh yeah, that's great. Welcome. As soon as you realize that as an operator, you don't have to be accountable for every single thing, but you can still map your success to your goal, we're trying to take a KPI or accuracy or whatever. It's immediately this weight off your shoulders with like, "Oh, I don't have to be the person that actually delivers that, but what I need to do is drive clarity, help my team understand why we're doing this, help the sales team understand why we're doing this, and then communicate that effectively across the board." And the place where people get very tripped up by this is that if your OKRs are the basis for your bonus, you have a very hard time reconciling those two things. So when it comes to getting started, one of my first pieces of advice is that I don't think people's bonus should be tied to their OKRs because you instantly create this accountability problem, and it's a lot easier if you don't have that. I completely agree with it. I think, look, we're all humans here. We're not robots quite yet. It's coming faster than we can get some of the GDP technology, but we are. And we are to a certain coin-operated, and however that coin comes into our bank account, we're going to prioritize how that works as to what you want to do. I think what you're mentioning is totally fine. We should all be having a sentence that aligns the outcomes for our business, but make sure that you're not over-indexing on that or creating too much bias with how that okay can actually play out for the whole business. So, I completely agree there. I would love your thoughts on the same thing. Yeah. Like I want to address Danielle's question, but I also want to start from the core principles of like setting okay hours and KPIs, not at that. Every company is going to have confidence in their data, right? And I think you really need to start before you start setting okay hours, understanding and aligning out what those values and yields will be that you need to align off of and make sure that they are agreed upon in terms of how they're calculated, what they are representing, right? Because I could come in and say, "Oh, my dear, my deal of sales velocity is defined this way," and somebody may define it another way and get continuity across the team. So like data governance is really important to start before you get to the point where you start developing KPIs, right? And then once you have developed those KPIs, one of the things I love about the okay our principle is okay ours are more strategic and long-range. So you look at those and if you achieve 70% of your key result in the okay our principal methodology, it's a success. You should be, it should be stretch goals and when you go into a KPI, it's more of, "Did I achieve it or not?" Right. And so marrying the two in some sort of fashion to where you say, "Here's my objective," and to your point Danielle, I think the important part is the overall principle of the goal you want to achieve. And then you go into the KPI, and there are portions of the KPI where your portion that you own should be measurable, and you should be accountable for your portion, right? But there should be somebody else that is doing another project in tandem with you that also is going to help you deliver against that objective. And the one thing I love about the principles as a company, if you have it from the top down, you have multiple people driving towards the same goal, right? And you can make sure that somebody's got pipeline coverage. Okay, yes, you're going to own portions of that project, but you also have sales leaders who should be held accountable for their portion of that key result and how they're going to finish, you know, finish the pie so to speak. Yeah, you can't bake it with only half the ingredients, right? And so making sure that you start by communicating those problem statements. Like I talked about earlier, one of the things we like to do is, like I said, we start from basically the field so the people who are doing the work, collect problem statements. And then what we do is we come together as a leadership team, and we review all those problem statements. We look for trends, and we look for things that are similar, and then we assess it for impact and say which one is going to impact the business more. And how do we align against these principles to help determine what these objectives should be? And so it does come from the field, and then it's determined based upon impact to help deliver the right result for the business. That's great. Yeah, I think the Australian there just to reiterate it because I know looking through a lot of the folks that are on this call, and I don't want these folks personally to sign a lot about their business and where they sit in the business. It's a good reminder, you set these goals, we set these OKRs, and whether they be on a quarterly basis, annual basis, or going to come to one of Andrew and Kevin's question because they're similar, it doesn't mean that you can't ask questions about them partway through. And how we track them, we track them the right way, not to be overly challenging, but you want to make sure that we're making these business decisions. We're not just putting it in concrete every 90 days and not thinking about the validity of them and the flexibility of them. So that's a really good point. I am going to switch over to Kevin, which I think we all know getting here. So good to see you, man. I love this question, and Andrew, you asked a very similar one, so it kind of popped yours up here too. But it's interesting to learn how you keep visibility on these. So we talked about creating them foundationally, what to think about, how do you communicate these and keep everyone on top of mind and the top of progress for how they get tracked? Yeah. What are y'all using to communicate? I will let either one of you start. Yeah, like, I can go ahead and start. So, the core principle of our methodology is having regular meetings and making sure you keep it at the forefront of your conversation. So, at every team meeting, one of the first topics we discuss is how we are turning against our OKRs, our progress, and the different key results we have. The difficult thing is you need to build an environment that's rounded around the OKR methodology from the organization's perspective because you need to be able to have your boss communicate that to the next boss, and it needs to be cycled up and brought up on QPRs. It needs to be brought up on regular meetings on a monthly cadence, as well as a weekly cadence, and highlighting the various milestones within those key results. One of the things I like about setting a key result with an OKR methodology is having the tactical plan because then you can celebrate the successes of each tactical milestone. So, you do have something to update the team on. I have done this in so many ways, like in a spreadsheet, in Laughs, and in a fly. Some of it depends on which tools you're using and how your business is structured. Inherently, larger complex organizations have a harder time making these things readily available and visible. What we're going to do this quarter at Nilus, because we're working on this literally now, is we're going to have all of the departmental OKRs in one simple Google doc that is shared out with the whole company. It won't be as granular as every single person in the business, but it will be departmentally representative of the biggest things that are happening and why. The key results are all about why. So, we're approaching a low-tech way to make this available and visible to everyone. And then, to Stair's point, these do have a weekly component because if you don't watch them weekly, you will get off track. In our weekly executive team meeting, we have one that's more status update related and like departmental collaboration, just talking through all the stuff that we need to talk through. That's better, that's more tactical. We have a template that we go through each week, and one area of our template says OKR progress, and we just do a red, yellow, green on those objectives, and we talk about that every week. On top of that, my team is very entrenched in using Jira. That's how they manage their work in their projects. So what I am hoping to do, I haven't done it yet, but I have got this plan to have all of our key results in Jira as initiatives. And then I can map our tasks in our epics up to the initiative to show which pieces of work are really laddering up to each key result. And then I can also see how much work is associated with each one. So I am excited to try that out. I will let you guys know how it goes because we're not live with it yet. But meeting people where they are, I think, is important because if it's just one more tool and it's just one more thing they don't know how to use, and it's just one more place that they forget how to log into, they're not going to look at it. So I want to make it a thing that is very easy for people to look at. Totally real, Lex had a really good question about that and really good scene a couple of weeks ago. I'll be back out in the Bay Area next month, so I will be sure to swing by. But I love this question from a tactical perspective. Each map those key results as the stories themselves in Jira, start thinking about that. Saw your architect in it. I am thinking about it. I think that I might put them in as initiatives on like a roadmap, but I need to learn more and there's a guru insider knowledge that's going to help me with it. As long as they're connected to each other physically, I don't care. So if you have tips, please feel free to send them my way. There you go. I will take real. Probably has some very smart guy. Cool. We're going to move into one final question. We still have plenty of time. More questions, the better for the Q&A. So I think if you haven't dropped questions like that already, please do it there, and we're happy to answer as many as we can. But these always were my favorite questions, regardless of what the actual topic is. We have all gone through building something or implementing something and have stubbed our toe or had just heartburn from something going wrong while doing it. So yeah, the biggest question is when you think of her, this out, what are the gotchas and where the blind spots and some of the pain points that you have either experienced personally or seen experience when you have gone to implement some sort of thing? They're Imola will kick it off of you. Yeah, it's say you know we talked about like the weekly and monthly and quarterly readouts. I think if you don't keep a hold on that and you don't keep communicating that, okay? Ours are the core foundation of what you're driving against. What happens is people will start to forget that's what you're working towards and it's not at the forefront of the mind. And then you do have that issue that we talked about earlier, which was prioritization. Then something else becomes more important. And then when you highlight and go back to an okay, are they go? Well, yeah, that was before, but if you continually keep that communication open and highlighted on why we set that, okay? Are as a priority level for that quarter, or if you do it on an annual basis or monthly basis, then it keeps at the forefront to allow you to have, like we talked about earlier, the pushback against why you would change those okay hours. And it allows you to have Brad, I think you brought it up earlier, being more like engineering, right? Where you have the power to push back and make sure you bring it up often and highlight it. I think one of the highlights for engineering is they talk about their deliverables often and that they do talk about, "Hey, listen, this is what's going to deliver here and this is what we're working on and it is the top priority." So by us communicating it and keeping visibility into transparency into it, we can keep that at the top right? Ready. And, you know, I find that in the past, if we haven't talked about it, it could go by the wayside and then there could be something else that filters in and consumes it. Yeah, totally. Oh, I completely agree. Yes. Mallory, where's the Harvard, and where's the scar tissue from for doing this? Well, but also probably still hear that through it all my paths cars, revolve around executive alignment, or the lack of it, right? So I think that if we don't have a unified and aligned executive team planning together, the risk you run is that each department runs off in their own direction and is doing what they think is best by no fault of their own, but you accidentally end up with results and plans and initiatives that just clash with each other. And it's like, how did we get to this? What's going on here? How are we working on something that's so different but, you know, we're both trying to grow this thing and it's just because we don't all plan at the highest level possible before we go forth and create key results. And, you know, in my past with some of the Ops teams, one thing that I learned the hard way is that I couldn't really set my objectives and key results until I knew what everybody else was doing because if everything has to kind of flow through your team in order to get out the door, you have got to be able to say, like, your three things, that you're eight things, and your seven things add up to too many things. My team cannot support that much. So we have got to start to figure out where do we prioritize, even before we get the key results and objectives set. Because if you have any kind of bottleneck in delivery, that's going to be passed to be able to support the stuff that's going out the door. So I started to hang back more when I was participating in the process and it's like, show me yours first. And then, I will figure out how do I make room for all this stuff? Exactly. I think that's actually a really, really good point. The sequence of this matters, sequentially, how you set these for your business and every business is different. I think we could always make a case of, all right, let us start with our overall revenue goals, to start with sales success. And even what that looks like, from a marketing perspective, from a pipeline building and everything like that. How do we as Ops folks? Now? Because Ford all three of those functions of business units, to make sure that they can go get those. So you're spot on. I am trying to scratch my head right now. I am thinking like, all right. How do you, how do you play devil's advocate here? How would you set a robust objective without knowing what the greater business objectives are? That'd be pretty hard. You can't just go clean up 10% of our tech debt in our sales force. That's probably one that you could do with the help of overarching bigger company things. But at the same time, is that the most important needle mover for the business in the next 90 days or six months, 12 months? I think that's a really interesting way to think about it. I will say it aloud where you are exactly a month, almost two months in a month and a half into tracking. Okay, ours. The first time that's on our, we have always had our goals mostly based rather be wise, but as our teams continue to grow, and we keep going out more and more dedicated departments, it was important for us. And so we obviously went through this together at Terminus, and we have seen how things work really well, and how things work poorly in other places. So I told our team start small. We will, this will inevitably grow, but our biggest advice, just kind of going through it in the past was, yes, we can all be very bullish, really excited and throw out 17 different objectives per department. It's going to get noisy really fast. Let's all really start intentionally on two to three per department and let us go from there. The one interesting finding, and again, we're starting to jump into some Q&A, so get those questions in books. The interesting thing that we found there is that yes, we need to be transparent and talk about how we're tracking these, but while some goals are meticulously tracked, like I can tell you exactly down to the nth degree where we are from a revenue perspective and what goal we're going to hit all the way down to probably three or four decimals, it's funny too, but there are certain objectives. For instance, Melissa on our finance team is working through setting up our pre-audit right now. It's not exactly something you track, 23.25% completion. It is kind of binary like did we get the pre-audit done or not? And so, you know, there are things like that. So we have to be mindful of, but I love the suggestion you gave. It doesn't have to be percentage-based. It can be red, yellow, green. Are we on track with this or not? Are we switching one tool for another? That's kind of a binary project. We know we can go deep into those tools and how they're actually tracking for implementation, but some of it can come down to just being fiery. So I really like that and just being transparent and overly communicative. Yeah, the one question I have for both of you all as questions again, I will keep pushing everybody in the chat to jump in. How do you create the alignment between departments that really don't have a lot of skin in each other's game? Probably one of the best ways I could think about this is like, think about marketing and engineering. Now, of course, we're all creating a product together. We're trying to take it to market and go win, but when they don't have necessarily overlapping objectives, how do you get enrollment across different departments or one person to say, "Yeah, I am really bought into what your objective is over there in engineering." And, "Oh, by the way, marketing, as an engineering leader, I am really bought into your goal too." How do you drive that collaboration across departments? And I think, for me, it would be more highlighted around the similarities of what the overall objective is for the organization, right? This is why it's so important to have it from the executive team down because everything can be a subsidiary of that overall company objective, right? And you brought up a good point earlier, Brad, where you're worried about not necessarily being able to get your goal set or objective set before they have been created by, let's say, the DC, right? And that's one of the things that I have noticed. Your executive team, they're incredibly busy, but they care about what's important and what they are told is important, right? And I think having somebody own that and collect some problem statements and saying, "Hey, let's go to the field, let's understand what problems we're dealing with. Let's bring these together and consolidate them and bring them to the executive team and say, 'Hey, I am waiting for some objectives or some...'" Okay, ours from you guys, so we can set our goals and you go about that a month. Leave before the end of the quarter and then you say, "Here's a list of some stuff that we have surveyed across the organization that we think we have identified right a lot." Like give them the information to make those decisions so that they can come together and make a decision around, okay? And deliver some guidelines? And then from there, you can kind of bring the different departments together by how they, you know, support each other's initiatives in order to achieve the overall company objective. I love that, Valerie. What do you think about keeping everybody aligned? That's one of the core tenets to rev Ops, making sure that all of our departments know what we're all doing. But you think, I agree, it's so important and it's not that easy. But I think I do nerd out on the challenge of like connecting those dots for people, and I am the person that's like, "No, wait, I will explain how it is all the same. Like, I will coach you through the way that this is all connected." And I think at product companies, it's easier, and this is not necessarily an OKR-related, sorry. But you know, if you are really kind of putting the customer at the center of everything you do, there's no way for any one department to not get on the same page about how to make that customer successful. And you know, if you're an engineer who's trying to develop the product and you're thinking of like the story and the problem you're solving and what you're building and what you're trying to help, how is your product helping that user? Marketing is doing the same exact thing in the way that they craft their messaging with pain points to attract buyers. They should be very closely linked to each other. Is that going to come out like 100% an objective? I mean, hopefully, maybe not that clear-cut, but just having, you know, those problem statements that I think like I am gonna probably steal that a lot during because I think that if you boil it down to the problem statements, they're probably not that different. And it's all about creating that value and making the customer understand like we do. We can help you. I do think this is the value, especially right now at Nihilus. We are in the middle of launching a brand-new trial experience. And so it's a big deal for us because we're really embracing this product-led motion a little bit more than we have in the past. And so one of our company objectives for the year is that any Nihilus user can build and launch their integration in one day. And so that's like the lofty objective that we're reaching, and it takes longer than that. That's in the old way, but it touches everything in marketing. We have got a developer relations team. We have got a documentation team that does all of the things associated with getting people through that process. And so, I feel like we have achieved this kind of lock-up between marketing and product and engineering. That's not very common. I am ranting at this point, but I just think it's so cool. And I think that's the point of operations, to help people understand, like, "Hey, you guys are really doing the same thing, and what you do impacts what this person does." How many times have you read the messaging on somebody's website, and then you go to their product and it's not even the same world? Really, what is happening here? Your messaging on your website doesn't tell the story of what your product is doing, and that's what happens when you don't have that collaboration. Totally, I completely agree. I think the one thing I am trying to date back into the conversation, I had it might have been a conversation I had with Glove a long time ago about aligning a lot of that. And it kind of leads into Kristen's question, which I am going to pop on the screen to look. You might not directly impact somebody else's objective, but at the end of the day, there is a set of those at the very top of the business that are impacting every single person, all the way down from the head of HR and executive assistant to a janitor or a CEO. It doesn't matter. It was really cool. I think Glove said it was at some point, and we will talk about some compensation here in a second. Have some skin in the game for somebody else's okay. That you might not have full control over, but you at least have accountability towards, and it gives you the authority and the autonomy to go to someone way outside of your department and say, "Hey, I know I can't tactically help you commit all this code or push this new release, but I am here to support you to make sure you're on track because a little bit of my compensation is involved in as well." So I thought that was really unique, and I am going to give blood credit for. I don't know if it was him that told me that, almost could date back to when him and I talked about that. Yeah, I love this question from Kristin too. We talked briefly about bonusing but commissioning Radloff's teams. Yay or nay? You've heard pros and cons of both and we'll be sensitive to how you all vote as a team. But yeah, this is a big question. People ask me this a lot. How do you go about incentive-based comp for drive-off seem? So I would be curious to see what y'all heard and seen what works and what doesn't. Yeah, I will let you go Mallory at all, I will follow up. Okay, this one's hard. I, you know, personally, I am not the profile of someone who's super motivated by a big bonus, and I think that could be common among operations people. It might not, but it's definitely not the same profile as a salesperson who's extremely motivated by every action leads to a dollar. And I can, you know, I can predictably measure the way that's going to work out for myself. It's just not really how I am wired. I have never done like a variable compensation for a robotics team based on an output or an activity or like, you know, counting up a number of things to be done. So I don't know if I think that it's the right way to go. I just know that I am personally not that motivated by it. I love bonus plans that do focus on the overarching company success, whatever that is, whether it's ARR or gross or whatever the big milestones are that the company is trying to get to. I love the idea of incentivizing many people at the company on that because you're all working towards this common goal. You're all celebrating success together. You can't get there with only sales. You need everybody to get to, you know, these big objectives that you have as a company. Yeah, you know, I agree with Mallory on having it tied to something that's more of like a global company metric, right? Because, you know, as like businesses and SAS or understanding, it's about the full customer lifecycle of the standpoint, right? And rev office is going to have a piece of just about everything in that realm. But there are also aspects of the business in finance or engineering or other areas of the business that require some optimization for the company to be healthy. And I think the important goal is that there are two things you're focused on: delivering a good customer experience for your customers, right? And making sure that you run a healthy business. And having a bonus structure around something like EBITDA or something like that, I think is a reasonable expectation. I think the one thing I love is like an equity play. Somebody does a really good job and delivers value for the organization. You give them ownership because they are acting as an owner, right? And I think when you think about that and the implications of them having been bought in that much more purely because they have an ownership stake in the game commission, I think it's unique behavior, right? I think in sales, you do commission because you're paid to do a job. You do a job, and then I think in revenue operations, you touch so many facets of the business that it would be difficult to pick a metric because then you'd be too focused on one area and not focus on the bigger picture, which is what the whole point of revenue operations is, connecting all the different portions of the customer journey together. It's great. We got $5 every time you delete an unused field, and yeah, anything else that's exactly what Derek. Maybe you remember those old coils with my old boss, who was probably my first job, told me that since think like a customer and act like an owner. If you don't have embodied a little bit like, all right, about making the best decision regardless of what my role is in the business, am I thinking like what is best for our customer? And also, does it allow me to act like an owner? Like, do I have the keys? Is our dog barking in the background? Like, can we actually control that? So that's a fantastic question. Great positive. I don't have one quick one. I will throw it up there for Matthew because I know we're getting close to the time. Also, we're going to hang out, or at least I am going to hang out after this. Everybody looks at the top of the blue top right corner, you will see, wow, I am going to open up a lounge where folks can join, and we can all have a lovely virtual happy hour together and kind of keep this conversation going. But it's Matthew. I won't leave you hanging. I love this question. Have you ever created individual OKRs for employees? If so, do you typically align them with the department or the company? We did. And I think it's important that you still have folks that have individual OKRs that, yes, they can still roll up and impact the business. It might not go all the way up to the company-wide objective, but there is still a path to get there. So, I am a fan of making sure they're still moving, they're still on a personal level, a sea level that is directly affecting the growth of their side. But yeah, curious Mallory, Darren, I don't think about individual OKRs. I think for me, sorry Glen Ballard, it's important. I am just zoning in on one portion of what you wrote there, Matt, which is ever created individual OKRs for somebody like, have I ever created them for somebody? And I think part of that methodology is you've got to weigh in to get buy-in, and I believe that's the advantage of it. Let us yummy, right? And you go through some of these aspects of the planning aspect. I think you should give them the opportunity to develop their own OKRs or guide them in the means of understanding how they can build an OKR for their own professional development. But in the means of doing a tactical plan, which is what we outline, you allow them to pick a tactical plan, and then in that, they have their own key result to understand that they meet their tactical objective, right? And you have those milestones. It's kind of like a light introduction into OKR principles, right? And you have them own something and have them develop it so that they can say, "Hey, I know this objective. I know what my key result is. I know how I can impact that," and have them use some of their problem-solving skills to level up their career a little bit and understand, "Hey, I can impact that, and this is how." It may require some guidance, but I try not to deliver an OKR for somebody but try to guide them in developing their own. Yeah, yeah, I like that approach a lot. I think that different companies are at varying stages of doing this, so I have done it both ways. In the businesses where people are getting their bonus based on their, okay, objectives, everybody's got them right because that is a key component for compensation, and you know, I'm not a fan of that. But as you think through the other options there, I think I have seen goal setting and project planning as it's related to almost more of like a professional development plan, which I think Darren is kind of what you're getting at as well. It's, you know, here's how I want to develop personally, here are the things that I want to learn, the things I want to do, my main objectives that I know are helping the company this quarter. That planning process is important, especially just for people to be able to articulate how they have grown, how they have contributed, and to feel that connection back to the business. But I don't think it has to be in the very strict, okay, our wording per se. It just depends on what works for your teams. Totally the one thing that we have done, we haven't that's really baked it fully into the okay, our side at the individual level, but we talk about professional development plans. One thing Jack and I started from day one with our business was creating professional development plans for every employee. We actually have a called our PDP. Every employee has a certain amount of access to capital, access to money to go and get a new certification, go to a new event, go to a conference, take a class, read a book, do whatever you need. But you are responsible for your own journey as well. It's not something that should be followed told you from an executive or your leader. You should show enough excitement about yourself to go and find something that's going to help you. Some companies are willing to pay for that for books, but we bake that into promotion plans, like hey, I can help you achieve X, Y, and Z metric here at someone or, but if you're not helping yourself build your career, I need to see it out of you as well. It's not just me going to drag you along and you run with it. It's a really fun way of thinking about it and potentially incorporating that into just overall employment plans, and not necessarily just for promotions. But I know we're at the top of time, they were actually a few minutes over. So I know it is a busy Thursday for a lot of folks, busy for me, in a sense, I get dumped over the lounge and hopefully have a virtual happy hour booked. But Darren Mallory, I cannot thank you both enough for joining. This was a great conversation and I know everybody that Chad and a lot of folks who attended that, they took away some nuggets. I was writing down those to myself to incorporate here, so dark. So I really appreciate you both joining. Thank you, of course. All right, we're going to try this. This is the first time, full disclosure, where we jump into the lounge. If anybody wants to jump in, keep the conversation going, I will be there. Yeah, looking forward to seeing the folks on the other side. We will talk soon. Thank you, thanks. Everybody have a great rest of your day. Let's open this lounge up now. See what happens. All right, think that. Let us go, joy.