The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford)

**Christina Wodtke** (0:00)
People do not value celebrations enough.
I've had CEOs who said, well, it was the middle of the quarter, so we didn't start OKRs, but we did start Friday celebrations, and oh my God, things are already changing. Things are already getting better. The simple act of getting together and saying, what was the most awesome thing that happened to you this week? What's the most awesome thing that happened in marketing? What's the most awesome thing that designed it this week? It makes people feel like they're part of something really special, you know, and it's super exciting.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:29)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Christina Wodtke. Christina is a multi-time author, speaker and lecturer at Stanford, where she teaches product management, game design and a few other topics. She also consults with companies on their product development processes.
And in particular, their OKR process. Before getting into teaching and consulting, she was a product leader at LinkedIn, Myspace, Zynga and Yahoo, as well as a founder of three different companies, plus an online magazine called Boxes and Arrows. In our conversation, we go deep into OKRs. What is the atomic unit of an OKR? What might be broken about your OKR process? Why you may want to roll out OKRs or change how you approach them? Also how the best companies leverage OKRs? The most common root causes of OKRs going wrong? The elements of a healthy OKR cadence? How OKRs fit with mission, vision, strategy and roadmaps? We also touch on the skill of storytelling. And she also shares her most contrarian perspective on what new product managers should be focusing on. Christina is a wealth of knowledge and is super interesting and fun. And I know you will learn a lot from her. With that, I bring you Christina Wodtke after a short word from our select sponsors.
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Christina, welcome to the podcast.

**Christina Wodtke** (3:55)
Thanks, Lenny. I'm really excited to be here. I've been hearing about you forever. It's so cool to be here in person.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:00)
I'm more excited for you to be on the podcast.
I kind of see you as the queen of OKRs. I don't know if you like that title or not, but in my mind, that's where you sit currently. And partly because from what I can tell, you've done more to help people with OKRs and understand OKRs and fix their OKR process than most anyone else I know.
And as I'm sure you know, a lot of people just like don't like OKRs or kind of anti-OKR and have had bad experiences with OKRs. And what I want to try to do with our chat today is to try to change people's mind who are maybe anti-OKR. And to help people optimize their OK process if they're having an OK time with OKRs. How does that sound?