[Podcast] The Outcome Transformation (With Josh Seiden)

Stephen and KJ sit down with best-selling author, designer, and strategy consultant Josh Seiden to discuss his book "Outcomes Over Output" as it relates to OKR and operational alignment.

Podcast Transcript

KJ

So Josh, how's it going?

Josh Seiden

Good. It's good to be here with you guys today.

KJ

Yeah, it's great to have you, you know, it was a couple of years ago when myself and Stephen stumbled across your book Outcomes Over Output and I think we both had a pretty incredible awakening when we read it. I'd love to know, maybe just for the people who haven't read it out there, we could start with a bit of a summary. But then I want to get into a load of questions as to how it came about, what motivated you to write it, and all this good stuff. Maybe you could summarize for us sort of the synopsis of what really is the problem and solution? What your book is all about?

Josh Seiden

Sure, sure. Well, my work, I work as a, as a advisor and coach to teams that are making digital products and services. So I work with designers and product people and engineers and teams that are trying to be more collaborative, trying to be more user centric, and trying to be more agile, right? Because everybody's, you know, like, that's sort of the context that we that we work in these days is if you're on a digital team, most teams are trying to do those things. And it's hard, you know, all of those things are hard. And, and being more effective. One of the things that you hear teams say that's almost like a slogan, is you know, we want to be more outcome centric, or, you know, we are we we believe in outcomes, not output. In other words, like, we want to focus on the results, not so much on the stuff that we make. And the problem is that that turns out to be really, really difficult. One of the things that makes it hard is that when we say we want to be more outcome focused, we don't have a shared definition of outcome of that word. So people tend to use that word kind of as like a just a word that means results. Yeah. And one of the things that I discovered in my work is that it's much easier to do if we have a shared and precise definition of what the word means. And so in my work, and what the book is about, it uses this definition that says a an outcome is a change in customer behavior, that creates business results, right? So a change in what people do human behavior, that creates value for them for the organization. etc. And so when you use that definition, first of all, it's it's something that everybody can kind of get aligned around. But then all kinds of good things happen. And we can kind of talk about why that is in, in this conversation.

KJ

Yeah, absolutely. That's, that makes a lot of sense. So really, the, the genesis or the catalyst for you was, we don't have a shared definition of this word, like everyone's just using it interchangeably. We also don't really link it to value, I'd like to hear your definition of value as well. So really, the first thing was like, I need to clarify this for people. Is that it?

Josh Seiden

Yeah, I mean, it's funny you say that because like my, you know, my background, I like I said, I've worked in digital products for a long time. I've spent most of that time as a designer, but my background is in writing. And, one of my first sort of jobs in technology was as a technical writer, kind of explaining things to people. And so a lot of that work is sort of like how do you take this complicated world of technology, and explain it to lay people who don't necessarily know how the bits and bytes are flowing? And what I discovered, people who can who can be technical writers, like they have my admiration, I couldn't do it. It's a really hard job because a lot of it especially in the early days, a lot of the work of tech writers was to take terrible systems and explain how to use them. So for my personality was sort of much better suited to saying Well okay, this system is terrible, let's not explain it, let's fix it, you know. And so that's kind of how that's how I got into design.

KJ

That wouldn't have been my attitude, I would have just written like this system is shit, stop using it. Do something else with your time.

Josh Seiden

So for a long time, I've thought like a lot of the work of that designers do is almost like a translation. It's like translating a technical capability into like a user interface that people can understand and interact with, you know?

KJ

Yeah. Right. So that was the initial, and then that's really great. Was there anything then as well that you felt, because you talked about a little bit in the book, certainly, it's a great context, the way you give historically, you talk about the same manufacturing as an industry how the output was the focus, and the definition, our most value, it's like, all we have to do is calculate how many cars we make as an output. And then it's tangible, you hold it, and there it is. But then you talk about how the world has evolved, it's digitized, and now, building features doesn't automatically create value. And this has led to incoherent products. And, and so on.

Josh Seiden

So much of what we know about how to do our job comes from things that we, as a profession, learned in the industrial age, you know, so we learned how to manage teams, by, you know, managing industrial workforces that built stuff, you know, and designers, just to use my own background, like we learned how to design in the context of getting things ready for print, or getting things ready for manufacture, so like, you know, get it all ready, and then send it off to the factory. And, you know, what we learned about managing engineers was, you know, a lot of like, managing production line, right? And how do you build stuff efficiently and effectively and robustly and, and, and, and when we get to the digital age, much of what we're doing is really different, right? It's not about building a million Model T Fords, right. It's about building one big system that we want people to use in a certain way. And so it really is much more of a, it's a different category of problem. Yeah, getting people to interact through technology. And once you start thinking about how do I get people to interact through technology, as opposed to making technology, then you're thinking about, you know, changing people's behavior.

KJ

Well, that's the beauty of what you represent. And this book represents is you're an advocate for that to change from the previous, our past lives, in the industrial era to to thinking and operating in this mode, which is thinking about outcomes. So do you feel as if you're standing at the forefront as a revolutionary? Do you feel the movement? Or am I just talking about crazy stuff here?

Josh Seiden

Well, I think I think there are a lot of people sort of working in technology today who understand that we're kind of transitioning from one world of managing organizations to another, right, almost any large organization, you go to someone in the organization is talking about transformation, digital transformation, new ways of working these buzzwords, right, like people are talking about this all the time, I think that's one of the reasons that people are so interested in OKRs, right, because OKRs offer a promise of kind of a new way of thinking about how we organize large groups of people to work together. And so, so I don't feel like, you know, I'm not leading any charge here. But I think like we all together as an industry are trying are grappling with our legacy and how to work in these new ways. And these new ways that we know, by the way, you know, because if you've worked in technology for any length of time, you know, right, like, it's possible to build and build and build software, right? Even to a pretty good job of building software, which that alone is hard, right? Yeah. Put it in the world. And then just discover, like, oh, that didn't work, not because it doesn't work like it's, it's bug free. Yeah. But doesn't work in the sense of creating value for the user, the customer and the organization. And so, to me, that's the thing that as an industry, we're all we've all come together around that kind of problem.

KJ

Yeah, almost that fear. Yeah. And is that still? What drives you today? Like, you know, is that still why you're so passionate about this? Or why do you make this your life? Sort of, you know, work? Why is this consume your life?

Josh Seiden

Well, I think there's sort of two two reasons why it's interesting to me. One is like, I'm, I'm a, I guess I'm a quality oriented person, right? So I want to be working on good stuff, I want to be making good stuff. And to me, good stuff is, I've done this long enough to know that good stuff is not the, like my idea, on paper, turned into software, hey, look, I've put my idea in the world good stuff is I put my idea in the world. And it worked, you know. And so part of it is like that, like, everybody, I think, you know, has some sort of shares that that idea that we want our stuff to be effective. But then the other part of it is, like, I work with a lot of organizations that are just really struggled to be effective, and the people in those organizations, you know, that that's a, that's a hard way to spend all your life energy, you know, is to be working on stuff. And it's not working, you know, because you can't get alignment, or you can't agree on what value is or you can't, you know, you're you're you're aligned around the wrong mission, you know. And so to me, this kind of way of outcomes is an interesting tool, because it helps us to ask questions about what we're really trying to do, what success really looks like. And it gives us a language for expressing that really concretely and getting aligned around that.

Stephen Newman

So I'm curious. So when I read your book years ago, like KJ mentioned, one of the things that really stood out to me and resonated was putting the customer sort of at the center of your decision making, right instead of a lot of these internal metrics, were kind of overwhelmed with KPIs and different forms of measurement internal external, and you were a big advocate of looking at the customer behaviors, which, ironically enough, is very difficult for a lot of organizations to, to, like commit to, they're kind of still in their old ways of measurement and performance and what really matters across the organization. So how do you like where do you start to drive change? Or what are your recommendations to helping teams or organizations start to get more outcome focused? And and start to validate that it works? Like where's a good place to start for somebody that's maybe never done this before? or thought about it this way?

Josh Seiden

Yeah. Well, I think I think there's sort of, there's, there's sort of two ways of approaching the same question, which is, you know, you know, we are, are one is the sort of internal point of view, and one is the user centered, or the customer centered point of view, or the outside point of view, right. And the outside point of view is, you know, what are people trying to do? And that we might be able to help them do. Right. And so that's the, you know, that's the age old question about trying to understand your customer, right? What are customers? What are our, and I say, customers and users, but you know, it's the people who were serving, right, what are they trying to do? And then the Inside Out question is like, when we are successful, when we are successful, what will our customers be doing differently? Right, they'll be buying our product at a higher rate. You know, they'll be logging into our website every day to read the news, whatever our our organization's mission is, when we were successful, what will our customers be doing? And what you're trying to do is you're trying to find the overlap of those two things. Right? What are our customers want to do? And when we're successful, what will our customers be doing? And if you can find that overlap, right? That's, that's the need that you want to serve. Right? And, and so that's the question that starts, right. When, when that's, that's the kind of lead that's the first question in the journey, which is, you know, when we're successful, what will people be doing differently? And then how do we get them to do that? How do we get them to do that or do that more easily or more effectively or more frequently?

Stephen Newman

On the venn diagram, so have you placed in the middle? That's really right.

Josh Seiden

Right? Because, you know, it's not just if you just take one point of view, right? Like, what are our customers trying to do? Well, our customers are trying to retire early. So we could just take all our money and write them a check. That would make them really happy, right? We'd be out of business in a couple of months, right? And so, you know, what do we want them to? Do? We want them to pay us all their money? Well, okay, that's never gonna work. Right? So So you actually have to like the tricky part. And I'm being silly with those examples. But but, you know, customers don't just want to come to your store and buy your product, they buy your product, because they want to use it, right? They want to use it to get something done. It's that old, that old marketing star, right? Customers don't want to a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. Right? And so like, they're, they're thinking about the results, right? And we need to think about the results they're trying to get and find that intersection. Got it.

KJ

Yeah, that's fantastic. I just like to think about that. You know, and so give us a, you know, we talk a little bit about in the book, around outcomes and planning, with outcomes. A lot of, you know, this new digital age as well, in our companies, there's a lot of planning that goes on, and people try to make the plans and spend a lot of time, you know, in the plan and doing all that stuff. And, you know, what, what would your advice be when it comes to that part of the process planning? How to incorporate outcomes into that?

Josh Seiden

Yeah, well, you know, most of the time, you know, our, our plans, at some point, get translated into, what are we going to make? Right? We're going to make a website, or we're going to make a new page on the website, or we're going to change something on the website, we're going to, you know, at some point, it has to write because we live in the world, we have to interact with the world. So what are we going to make? The problem is, that's the output, right? And so the language of the book, the output, we often plan in terms of outputs, we go straight to outputs. I talked to a client this morning, who told me that his boss came to him and said, hey, you know, our competitor has just released this feature, we need to release that feature add it to the roadmap. Right? Yeah. To without a conversation about, you know, okay, well, when Why, what's the why behind that? Right? Maybe our competitor is really dumb. Like, maybe that's a terrible idea. Maybe they've just wasted all their time, for a year doing this thing. And we could just skip it, you know. And so but but it, that's what we see people doing, people are making features and putting them in the world. And that's how our plans end up. So it's really easy to jump there without doing the intermediate thinking that says, Well, what is how does that tie to our strategy? How does that enable us to be successful? How will we know if that feature that we made is working? Like, are people using it? What are they using it for? How often? Are they using it? How will we know if it's the right thing to do? Do they even want that feature? And so, you know, my, my, my work with with with clients is about kind of connecting the dots to that why? Right? So starting with, Okay, what's the organization's strategy? Right? Is that if they're using OKRs? You know, is that strategy expressed in terms of high level OKRs? Make? Does your workgroup have an OKR? Right. That's your that's your strategy. And how does that feature, right? support that, that focus area that's expressed in the OKR. So for example, I'm a big advocate that that your your key results, your KR, should be an outcome. It should be a measurable change in behavior. Right. So you know, we wanted to be number one in sales globally. That's the objective. Right? So what would what would that mean from from a key results point of view? Well, it would mean we'd see increase in sales from X percent to y percent. Right. That's people changing their behavior to buy at a higher rate. Okay, how does this feature support that? Well, right. Does the feature support that? How could we know? How could we get deliver that feature in an early in a way that we could get early, like leading indicator kind of feedback that this feature is working before we spent a year building it? So to me that the planning question is about creating a plan, where you're not just listing out the stuff you're going to do. But you're, you're also you're building into that? What what that your hypothesis, your best guess, about? How does this feature, change people's behavior, and I want to see both of those things, the output, the feature and the outcome, that change the behavior, I want to see them both on the plan. To me a plan, it doesn't have both of those is really incomplete.

KJ

That's fantastic. You know, we that we get asked that so often, you know, and it's incredible, the glass that shatters, once people become aware of the differences became listing out of stuff listing at a large list of stuff they want to do, and listing out an outcome, like a behavioral change, and the customer that drives results. That it's, it's interesting to watch people as they sort of get that that's why I'd love to watch people read your book in real time, it'd be like, Wow, look at their eyes change when they realize that all their plans are just a list of to do's, and are they really going to create value or results? So the so it's kind of what you're saying, you know, I don't know, I'd like to hear actual concrete examples from you, as you're consulting and practicing this stuff with people. I know, when I do this, it's the automatic inclination for the individual is to write what they know, like, well, you want me to write a plan for what I'm going to do for the next three months? Okay, well, I know that I have to build that SSL thing, like, I just have to like that's, so I'm going to write what I have to build, they're going to write down what I know, the closest thing to me is what I write down first. So what do you see? And then, you know, do you re-engineer from that up to outcomes? Or do you start? Do you say, hey, stop writing output? Write outcomes? And then do it backwards? Like, which way do you try to teach people how to write this stuff?

Josh Seiden

So So I think there are a couple of things in your in your question. The first, maybe is, which direction do you work? Right? So do you work from the feature up to the outcome? Or do you work from the outcome down to the feature? And, you know, the answer is yes. The so you start with where you are, right? So if if, if you are like, look, I I've been a customer has told me they want a big red button. Right? customer says if you you know, I need a big red button, or my boss says, I need a big red button. Right? You work up to the outcome. So like, okay, cool. You know, if you had a big red button, what would that let you do? Right? What would be the outcome? How would you use it? What would you use it for? What would be the uptake that we would expect of this button? And because the reason you asked that is because the big red button, that's a silly example. But if the maybe the customer is asking for something that takes a year to build, right? Well, if they're trying to do a thing that we could start to service in one month, and then we could improve their ability to service it every month for the next year. We could focus on what they're trying to do, rather than just building something for a year and then giving it to him a year later. Right. So in other words, we could deliver value sooner. Right? I tell a story in my book. When I was working on Wall Street. One of the teams that I was working with was building a trading tool to enable traders to make a new kind of trade. And we designed a really an incredibly beautiful, elegant trading platform. Really, it's from a pure, like, design point of view, is that the team working that the team working on that was one of the greatest designs for piece of software I've ever seen in my life, you know, and but we never delivered to traders the ability to actually start trading this new kind of trade. Because this thing was so complicated that it took us two years to we build For two years, and then the program got canceled before we shipped, right? So if we'd said instead of building this gorgeous design, right, which I mean, we were all seduced by it, everyone in the organization, if we'd said, No, we're gonna, we're gonna get them the ability to trade this, these, these make these trades, and then we're going to enhance it every month, until we get to this beautiful thing, right? We would have delivered real value within a month, and then, you know, built on that over time. And so that's building from the bottom up, right is is to is to, to sort of be able to tell that complete story. Similarly, when that story could have started in a different place, it could have started from the top down, hey, we need to deliver the ability to do this new kind of trade. Right? What's the, what's this? How could we deliver that this month, right? And commit to enhancing it. So you can, you can start from the sort of strategic level and work down to the feature, you can start on feature and workup? It doesn't really matter. As long as you have the, the, you know, you've kind of got a coherent story. The other thing in your question that I just want to talk about, like, you know, you said, you know, sometimes you get a feature that you just have to build, you know, we just have to do it, because we just have to do it, right? This whole thing with outcomes. The reason we use them is when we're not sure about what the answer is, right? We use outcomes when we don't know the answer. And we don't want to commit to something risky, right? If I know the answer to this problem is to, you know, install this new system that has a track record, of solving this category of problem, we know how to build it, we know how to deploy it, we know that it solves the problem, then like I don't need all of this framework, right? This framework is really, for situations where we have some uncertainty about how to make the change that we're trying to make.

KJ

Okay, that's interesting. And like, to me, it really, it sounds like a key ingredient in the recipe here is to listen to the customer like that, that really is the ingredient that is a prerequisite to everything else coming after it. So like, could you tell me if I give you an example, let's say I have a software company, who is speaking with its customers is has customer representatives who are engaging with customers on a continual basis. And they they hear this, you know, the requirements, basically, they they're on the forefront of discovery. And they hear that there's this pain or discomfort that the user is having. You know, it's could you is that the starting point to hear the potential behavioral change the potential outcome and then convert it? And if so, like, what questions should people ask while they're in front of that customer to to extract the outcome from them?

Josh Seiden

Yeah, I mean, you know, so So this, this whole area, it's, it's come to be called product discovery, right? You know, we've been doing it for years with lots of different names, market research, customer research, user research, whatever. And I don't mean to trivialize it, I'm just saying, like, like listening to customers is something that we've known about for a long time. And there's a bunch of cliches about it, too. Like, you know, the whole Henry Ford story, like, if I listened to my customers, they would have asked for a faster horse. Like, customers, our customers will express their needs and their preferences to you. Even if it's only by buying the other companies, your competitors product. Like they may not say it to you directly, but at the end of the day, you're going to know what they think, right? Because they're going to either buy your product or they're gonna buy somebody else's. And so the work here is to listen to those signals and to interpret them. Right. And so the customer I mean, I go back to this, you know, the customer may tell you like, Hey guys, we need a big red button. Right? And what they're telling you Is there some some problem we're trying to solve? And we think a big red button is the solution to it. And our job on the other side of that conversation, is to understand why they think they need the big red button. Right? Not just to take orders and say, oh, okay, you want me to build you a big red button? Fine. And then a year later, they're like, well, this isn't what I thought it would be at all, you know? And so the, the kind of the sort of the question here, and and this is a question I've learned from my, my, my good friend, Elaine, who was a early collaborator, when I was a young designer, she taught me that the answer to that, you know, I want a big red button is to ask the question, you know, if you had the big red button, what would it let you do? If you had the big red button, what would it let you do? Because that starts to take the conversation away from the solution. And back to the problem. And so there, you know, it's sort of like the customer asks for duct tape, but you're the plumber. And you know, there's a better way to solve it. Right? We're the experts here. And so they are the experts in the in the problem, and we're the experts in the solution, right? And so that's, that's the, that's the, that's the trick, right, is to take that data, whether it's actual customer conversation, or whether it's the data you're seeing, like usage data about your product, or sales data about your product, and have conversations that unlock the meaning in that, so that you can kind of understand that problem. And that opportunity.

Stephen Newman

I'm curious to hear. So you've obviously written, you know, a handful of awesome books. And they're very product centric. And so you've been in this outcome arena, for lack of a better term for for a while now. And, you know, we've been engaged in conversations about just a broader transformation, outside of the product worlds, sort of at the operational level and, and KJ and I were talking to customers, we're working with customers now. And outcome is being a word. It's a word that's being used outside of just product people. Which is really interesting, because it feels like we're on the cusp of that greater change in terms of how we work. And I think, you know, as we're working remotely now, that was almost the catalyst for that change. But I'm just curious sort of broadly, like, what are you seeing at the organizational level about how outcomes are being applied to different facets of the business to drive change in performance?

Josh Seiden

Yeah, it's a great question. And and I think it's really, the idea is really broadly applicable outside of product. So you're right. Like, my, my examples have all been product centric. But I think what we're talking about, you know, if you think about what companies talk about transformation, or they talk about new ways of working, you'll often hear the same pattern, right, which is that companies will jump to the solution. We want to adopt OKRs. Okay, cool. That's the big red button. Right? And so, and so that. The, you know, the question is why, like, when we've adopted OKRs, and everything's going beautifully, right now that we have OKR, everything is wonderful. Right? What are we doing differently? Like, let's really talk about what are we what are we trying to do differently? We're more aligned, where we've created better transparency. We, we know, the status of our of our projects in flight more clearly, right? Whatever those things are, you know, from an organizational point of view. It's easy to jump to solutions. Right. But it's, I think it's more it's less common for us to think about, think about it in terms of, okay, what will we be doing differently when we're successful? And I think a lot of the a lot of the techniques that, that, you know, organizational change is really hard. Culture change is hard. Process change is hard. But one of the things we can do, one of the ways that we can approach it and the way I approach it in my work is to is to kind of address it directly in terms of behavior change. Okay, how can we, you know, how can we create more transparency across departments? Well, we have an idea. Maybe one way to create transparency would be to start doing it Department newsletters, right? Could we try and experiment with department newsletters, right? It's the same mindset that you'd use in product development, except you're you're thinking about it from an organizational transformation or a process change point of view, when we're when we've when we've transformed the organization, what are we doing differently? And then how do we conduct small experiments in process change or change, to try and get us there? You know, like one of the things that makes sport change, challenging. And I think if you've worked, I spent, I was with this company on, I mentioned this Wall Street company, I worked there for four years, we had three reorders in the four years that I was there, you know, we're a 400 person company or something like that, you know. And I think it's easy to do these kind of relatively, we often attack these problems with big sweeping gestures, you know, big policy changes, as opposed to kind of experimental and empirical mindset. And I think outcomes gives us a tool to start thinking about this in terms of experimentation and empiricism.

Stephen Newman

Yeah, yeah, it's funny, KJ, and I did a training a couple of weeks ago with a customer. And we utilize the logic model, right. And as KJ was mentioned earlier, like when the light bulb goes off, and they get it, and they can categorize strategy in a way that makes sense. When everybody's on the same page, it makes driving that change a lot easier. But the boots on the ground, people like they're the ones that can create those leading indicators. And those are often suppressed by the overarching lagging indicators of revenue and, you know, decreasing churn and these things that are like, really long tail metrics that take a long time and are driven by a lot of variables and factors and your strategy and all the rest. So for the for the folks that are, I guess, you know, when it comes to that, like finding that balance, or trying to push those leading indicators are there? How do you drive that sort of change in behavior? And for internal teams? Is it just hey, we're an organization that is now agile, and we just do experimentation? How do you balance that with just your your corporate culture? Who's really focused on making revenue? For example? What are what are some of the things that you can do to try and drive those those changes internally?

Josh Seiden

Yeah, I mean, I think I think one of the challenges, right, is that, you know, once an organization gets above a certain size, you've got people at different places in the organization, worrying about problems at different scale, right. So I might have a team that's working, I might have a team in HR, that's just thinking about compensation. Right? And I might have another team in HR that's just thinking about hiring, right? And I might have another team in HR that's thinking about, I don't know, the corporate handbook. Right? But actually, all of those things are really, really tightly related, right? Because they all lead to retention. And so somebody in the organization in HR probably is thinking about that retention number. But like, you can't tell everyone in the in HR, like, let's all just work on retention. Right, we have to kind of we have to subset that problem. And so having a kind of a clear story, creating a clear story of, well, you know, how how does the work? How do I how do I break down the retention problem into here are the things that people do that lead to higher retention rates? Right? It has to do with recruiting good candidates, it has to do with the fair comp, it has to do with the policies to keep people in the office. But it it it's what's the right way to say it, you need to create a story about what people do as they move through their journey from not employee to employee, what are the what are the key behaviors that they're doing? And how can I task teams with doing more of them? Right. And so that's, that's a process we call outcome mapping. And it has to do with breaking that problem from the, like, high level aggregate measures of behavior like retention to the more detailed fine grained level, like, you know, how do I get people to our employment Portal? Right, how do I get, you know, like I want to get, I want to increase the number of people who sign up at our employment portal, right? I want to increase the diversity of the candidate pool at the employment portal. Right? Like so you start to break it down into smaller and smaller problems that, you know, individual work units can address.

KJ

But that's that's the beauty of this stuff. Because it's it's unanimous across all of us. It's the common denominator. It's human behavior. And we're all humans. Right? So it can translate down. Yeah, it can translate down these this hierarchy and then it, it can be aligned, that's the best thing is, it's a great example of what you just said about the highest behavioral change, outcome being retention. But even at the smallest level, it could just be a simple behavioral change of getting people to a portal like that, gets them to read the handbook gets them to enjoy this blah, blah, and eventually impacts retention. Like, that relationship is great.

Josh Seiden

Yeah. And it's easy. It's really easy. If if suddenly, you're you're trying to get people to the portal to think that your job is about making the best portal in the world. Right? Like, it's because it's hard to make a good, whatever, whatever it is we're working on. It's hard to make it good, right. And so it's easy to focus on that and harder to focus on the results. Because when we're not great at putting in frameworks to measure whether things are working or not, right? And you almost have to think about that you do have to think about how are we going to measure it, before we start doing it, and then build in the ability to measure it to whatever you're doing.

Stephen Newman

It's great. We've been, we've been peppering you with a lot of questions, Josh, and you're, I mean, it's amazing to see how much value you can, you know, just deliver off the cuff with it's, it's almost like, you're an author that has done this a few times. And it's answered these questions before, but that's been great. It's been great to hear your perspectives. And I think for KJ, and I, it's like, you know, we've been grinding away, and we live sort of in similar worlds, that are starting to kind of converge. So, you know, from a, I guess, a self serving perspective, like, what are the OKRs in the outcome related world? Like, where do you see this sort of going? You know, down the road next few years? What's sort of your just general perspectives of the market?

Josh Seiden

Yeah, well, you know, I, so first of all, I mean, sort of talking about earlier, I think, you know, outcomes and OKRs are, are, are deeply related, right? Because the key results, you know, maybe not 100% of time, but let's say 99.9% of time, I think your key results should be outcomes, right? Like, we're trying to change what people are doing in the world. So I think the ideas are deeply related. So the more I work with this idea, the more I'm working with, with folks who are trying to implement an OKR framework, you know, and I, you know, I've spent a lot of time as I said, I've been doing this for a long time, and I've seen lots of these idea of frameworks, you know, sort of rise up, and, and they, sometimes they, they just sort of become another buzzword. You know, I think there's, for example, I spent a lot of time in the agile software world. And I think there are people who are, you know, using agile, to really make things great at in their organizations, they really understand the spirit of the ideas, and they really live into it. And, you know, I think there are a lot of people who are just kind of going through the motion. Right. And I think that's true with with OKRs, too. And I think, you know, like any good framework, it's, you know, simple, I get it, and it's hard to do well, right. And so it's not like, Oh, now that I understand the idea, our company is magically better. Yeah. So I think, you know, I'm, you know, I'm excited by by what you guys are doing, because I think like, as I said, these ideas are, they're hard to do well, and to the degree that we can kind of support people in their journey to learning how to do this with good tools and good ideas. You know, I think that's, that's what we need to be doing. So You know, I'm looking forward to I'm looking forward to seeing more stories of, of organizations that have adopted this and, and sharing their learning on like, you know, what's gone well, but just as important, like, where's it been hard? And what have we learned along the way? What hasn't worked? So that's, that's, that's, that's what I'm thinking about.

KJ

Fantastic. Yeah, well, we're really appreciative of, of this discussion, these insights. And overall, you know, I'm, I'm, I can say on a personal note, I'm very grateful that, you know, we, we got to connect, and I got to read your book. And I'm certainly one of those people who have been, I feel just very grateful to be emancipated from the orientation of task work, and to be now more outcome focused to have a mode of experimentation and empiricism as he said, and so, to all those people out there listening, who perhaps aren't in the product management field, take a note from these guys, because they know what they're talking about. And it can be applicable, as he said, across various parts of your business. And but certainly, once you go back, or Yeah, once he once you get it, you'll never go back. So it's fantastic, Josh, thank you.

Josh Seiden

Thanks, KJ. It's very kind of you to say,

Stephen Newman

Yeah, really appreciate it. And we talked about it before, like, we read the book. And I think we're probably wrapping up here anyway. But it was like one of those moments where it's like, this guy's in my head. Everything you were talking about the customer journey, like the logic model, it just all made so much sense to me and crystallized it enough, where it sparked enough inspiration to kind of have the confidence to get out and do this, and, you know, convince guys like KJ to join the merry mission, and we jumped in on it, but it was really eye opening, to read the book. And, you know, working in, I never worked in product, right? Like, for me personally, I had always done marketing. And it was always more and more and more and more and more. And I was always like, it's the same thing as output, like more leads more visitors, more followers more. Like, let's, let's pull, let's pull back the curtain and look at the quality, right, that's the quality of the engagement. And so it was a very seamless sort of transition. So when it just connected so many dots, and it's been a thrill to chat with you today. And over the last few months really appreciate your, your time and your contributions.

Josh Seiden

Oh, well, I again, thank you, it's really very kind of you to say, you know, I feel like the books that I write you know, I've written a book about design called Lean UX, I wrote a book about management transformation called sensor response both of those with my co author, Jeff and, and then this outcomes book by myself and all of them I feel like what I'm doing is is taking the things that I've learned from the smart people I work with, and just trying to collect you know, just trying to communicate them in some kind of clear way so so you know, I'm my work is all about, you know, that collaboration and that learning from my smart peers. That's, that's why I'm excited for working with you guys. And maybe we'll we'll see some stuff from our work together in the next book.