Product Agility

OKRs vs. Strategy: Are You Focusing on the Wrong Thing? (with Sebastien Prioris)

• Ben Maynard & Sebastien Prioris • Season 2 • Episode 44

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In this week’s Product Agility Podcast, we explore the critical link between strategy and OKRs with Sebastien Prioris, a seasoned product leader and founder of Stratify. Seb shares why so many organisations struggle to make OKRs work—and how a clear, actionable strategy can change everything.

Key Takeaways:

  • OKRs Alone Aren’t Enough: Why they fail without a strong strategy behind them.
  • The Missing Link: How to connect your vision, objectives, and execution seamlessly.
  • Empowering Teams: Align OKRs with outcome-driven goals to foster success.
  • Strategic Debt: The hidden cost of ignoring foundational strategic work.

Practical Insights:

  • Crafting Strategy: Treat strategy as an optimisation problem for better results.
  • Breaking Silos: Use strategy to align teams and drive cross-functional collaboration.
  • Outcome-Focused Leadership: Embed strategic thinking at every level of your organisation.

Quotable Moments:

  • “OKRs aren’t dead, but they’re meaningless without the strategy to back them up.”
  • “A great strategy connects vision to execution and empowers teams to thrive.”

Links and Resources:

💬 Ready to rethink your approach to OKRs and strategy? Tune in now and share your thoughts: Is your organization focused on the right thing?

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Don’t miss this episode—it could transform how you think about strategy and OKRs!

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Ben Maynard

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Strategy in many ways, an assumption that you know a specific way of doing things is going to lead to better outcomes, right? So if you don't have that part, then you're really screwed up, right? And I think most of the time this is where you have the weakest thing. Welcome to the product Agility podcast, the missing link between agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. This is the Product Agility Podcast as you may have ascertained from the introduction. Thank you to all our returning listeners and hello to new listeners. People are getting lots of new listeners now and new listeners and old listeners alike. You are in for a treat because today we have a seasoned technology leader, somebody who is as passionate about strategy as I am. And we're going to be talking today about a really, a really interesting new concept that Seb, who is on the, on the episode with me today mentioned at the beginning of the call. He told me that, OK, eyes are dead, just watching fair and waiting for his reaction to that. He didn't actually tell me, OK, I was dead. But you know what, they might, they may as well be in many organisations. And we're going to unpick this over the next 45 minutes. But before we do, I wanted you all to have a little bit of an introduction as to who Seb is. And Seb is somebody that I met at Productise actually in Lisbon, and it's wonderful to have him on for a full episode. So Seb, welcome to the Project Jersey podcast. Would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners? Thank you. No, it'd be, it'd be a pleasure. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I've been, I spent the last 20 years across technology and product mostly, but also the roles across operations and the, the business. I've done many different industries and types of companies. So I think that's, you know, something that is quite unusual these days. We both tend to to focus on the same vertical for a long time. I've been in product leadership for the last 10 years, Euro tech and more recently I've taken on the change of starting my own company called Stratify as a way to help SAS companies do better with the strategy. Hence the passion behind it for strategy, Ocios and road maps and everything related. Thanks, Liz. I'm looking forward to this episode. I'm feeling a little bit feisty today. Yeah, this will be the second episode of 2025, bringing on check what year it was then. So we're starting off strong. Starting off strong. But Seb, you're also working on a prototype, aren't you? At the moment as well. You're you're getting your hands dirty and and building something correct. And it's good to to be back to the roots in many ways, you know, so I mean, you know, a product is, is an end to end kind of endeavour, right? It starts with the code. It it's about, you know, the go to market on top of that and ultimately, you know, having the right contact engagement with the customers. So go to the point where I had, you know, in a way, develop all the skills to do everything else but the code because I haven't coded in 20 years. So it was a bit daunting to kind of face maybe having to go back to doing that. But you know, luckily for me, a lot of the technology has evolved, right? You know, there's a lot of no code, no code tools, integrations with API is much easier than ever. And you know, the AI is also helping a lot in many ways. So it's easier to configure agents and build things by yourself. So, you know, still very early days, but exciting to to see how you know that turns out. No, I say, well, I can't wait to hear how it turns out. This year will be the year that I finally get my product out as well. So maybe we can, we can do an episode about how well we're doing, about how wildly successful both of our products are proving to be and all the money we've raised through funding. That'd be a really nice episode. We'll book that in for September perhaps. And it's all a reality. So definitely happy to have you set yourself any OK Rs for what you're doing with your product? Well, good question. I'm actually, I mean the, the, the product is meant to be a lot more than just OK Rs. I think you know, like in, in many companies strategy if you think about that way is brought down to very few things. And I think OK Rs are the more obvious kind of emanation of strategy in many ways. The rest is mostly dusty documents. And so Long story short, I'm dogfooding my own product, right? So everything I'm doing to create the company in terms of setting the vision, setting the strategy, you know, defining the market, you know, all the things that you actually really need to do in order to do good job at strategy, whatever that means is in the product. And so I'm definitely using that right. And obviously as as part of that, what comes out of it is a road map is set of objectives and goals. You know PRS, call them whatever you want, but yeah. Nice, it was good to hear. It's good to hear you're eating your own dog food. As I say, practicing what you preach I suppose is to be less gross. Indeed, consistency is key. Exactly. So I've been mentioned at the top of that. OK I was a dead OK has been around for about 20 plus years and yet consistently people seem to struggle to have them have the effect that they would like. Big organisations, small organisations, I don't think anyone is immune from doing them in a shit way. I say that inflammatory, maybe not in a shit way, but doing them in such a way that does not deliver upon the promise of them. As I said, from work, from your vast experience and from the, you know, stories and tales from being in the trenches, working with OK, I was like, why do you think that OK Rs are so difficult to really live up to the promise? Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is the word you use, right? Difficult because if anything, the promise of the OK Rs was very much based on that, you know, proposition that they were super simple, right? There was this sort of beauty about the OK Rs, which is they are very simple. It's only two key objects that are related to each other, like to have the same coins, you have objectives and key results, and they just cascade. And it's universal. I mean, at the heart of it, this is what what it is, right? And so it's kind of surprising that 20 years later we would still find, and I mean, you know, the wider we, you know, like many people would find the OKR still very difficult, right? If it's that simple to start with, how can it ever be difficult? And I think, you know, the reason between those two statements is the fact that, you know, they are falsely simple, right? The reality is, if you think about the vocabulary that is used like an objective, what is it? They really has their own definition of what an objective is. If you listen to the zillion videos, you realize that everybody has their own take on what the word mean means. And then you have key results and the same thing happens all over again, right? So what happens, I think for for many people is, you know, they get introduced to the methodology, they watch the video, they read the book maybe, right. And the problem is OK, It seems all very simple when you have an example. Right. But the problem is that it's like if something is so simple, but you have to continuously learn by example, it feels like it's somehow you're not really understanding deep down what it's about, right? It's almost like someone teaches you to do additions, you can repeat it, but then you make the occasional mistake because you just don't quite really get how it's supposed to unfold. But I think there's a bit of that with your KRS where still today people not quite sure exactly how to select an objective, you know, the relationship between higher level and lower level objectives and also more widely how all these things connect, right? I think part of the problem with the KRS is that now, you know, like they're not so easily connected to road map to strategy or, you know, retreats or whatever exercise you're doing around strategy, right? And the disconnection between the OKRS and the rest of the reality of strategy and the business means that it kind of becomes its own island, right? You have this island called the KRS and the teams are supposed to do them. And then when they have to do it for their own teams, it's not correctly how it's supposed to do or to go. And the reality is in most companies, you might have a few people who are very well versed with the KRS, but not everybody, right? And I think that that's a bit of, I think that's the macro pattern that's been happening over the last 20 years is like O KRS came to the forefront and a lot of people got really excited. Why? It's like, as you're saying, the problem is like, if you buy into O KRS and you roll them out, you're going to be the next Google, right? Like back to the book. And the reality is like, it's very different. There's many reasons for it, but the problem is that you know, and like what it was 20 years ago where people were very much at the, the, in the golden age of strategy, where you had KPMG and all these companies coming, you had people like Andy Grove where like on top of their own previous 20 years of really understanding how a company works and everything and Porter and all these things. The thing is 2020 years later, the only thing that most people understand about strategy is just the KRS. And so it's that tiny island in the middle of everything that, you know, is actually not as simple as it was sold to you. And then magically that's supposed to solve all the problems in the company, you know, from a strategic point of view. Hmm. I think that's what people were left with in many ways. No, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, I like what you were saying that OK, ours are sold in this kind of simplicity premise. But they are very simple. But then you kind of then go on to make the point very rightly, that if you go back and you look at a lot of the experts who have succeeded running businesses who then perhaps used OK Rs because they were successful business people, then for them to set an objective, a short term or a medium term objective and some key results wasn't as difficult for people who haven't got the understanding of why their business exists, where their business is going. How are we looking to achieve the the goals that are set out to do at a longer level? What problems are they looking to solve in in the immediate future? And I think that's, you know, then when it breaks down to when OK Rs are sold such marketed or adopted, however they are introduced as this island, which is in divorce for everything OK, has to become the strategy. I think that's when you'll see that actually OK as may as well be killed, may as well die because I don't think that you can have a good OK R if you haven't got a strategy which you understand correct. And, and I think this is the main challenge, right? You hear of, of fairly bold statements about the KRS, you know, whether they're useful, not useful, whether you should adopt them or not, or, you know, stay away from them and everything. But yeah, at the heart of it, you know, if, you know, if you don't really understand them well enough and if you don't have the, you know, all the other things that need to connect to it well in place, you know, you're going to struggle. And The thing is what happens also the other way around is you have a lot of people who don't necessarily need to understand the KRS or understand them vaguely, but actually have more intuitive natural understanding or strategy or, you know, from experience or whatnot. And so there will be be able to formulate things the right way, you know, and suddenly, you know, daring to the formalism of the OPRS is just like a nice to have, but it, you know, it's not necessarily a challenge for them to formulate the strategy. The problem is that that works well enough when you are a founder or leader and you have that kind of experience or you've had the training somehow and enough, you know, iterations to really like understand how it works. The problem is most of the time you're trying to cascade that to a whole organization who doesn't have that background, doesn't have that understanding. And so the only thing you really give them is the Okrs. So they have they don't have that experience to kind of connect to. Right. And really like understand, OK, this is what you want me to do through the methodology of fuck yours, right? It's just they give them a framework, almost like a methodology and now make it work somehow magically, right? And that takes a long time for people to actually understand how to roll it out. You know, how to actually really write things and craft them the right way, just as a way to see also all the dark patterns of what it is when you do the when you write them the right way or when you don't write them the right way. And then there's plenty of other things that go into that. For example, like a key thing in your key Rs in many ways has been as as part of the culture, I would say around the key Rs is to set very ambitious targets. You know, the target is the objectivity, the key result. That's one thing. But you know, you get to the point where people are over ambitious. And so those are key Rs that are meant to be like, oh, you're 100% is actually more like 150%. So if you only do 70%, you know, it's kind of good, you know, like all these things actually confusing people, right? It's like because they want to live in a world of certainty. And I think that's that's the also another link to the strategy, which is strategy as an inherent part of, you know, something you can't control, right, Because the outcome you're seeking is on the market, right? You want users to come, but you have no real way of forcing them to come, right? So your strategy has this built in uncertainty and people are not, you know, comfortable with that. So you have to really place the uncertainty where it where it lives. But for everything else, you have to be very clear about what it is that you expect and how it's supposed to work. And if you're looking at a road map document, if you're looking at the set of Okrs, if you're looking at, you know, a vision document, whatever it might be, then it should be very clear how those things tie together. And I think that that's what I mean by it's not as simple as it seems, because if you look at just the connection between the vision and the strategy, right? Everybody wants to have an ambitious strategy. That's one thing. And if it's just that, you know, that's a bit of a cop out in many ways, but more importantly, you want a vision that will drive your strategy, right?

How do you go from 1:

00 to the other? And that's what's interesting because when I do, you know, conferences and I do workshops and I do consulting, you know, a lot of people still come back to me and say, well, we have a chaos, but we don't have a strategy or we have a strategy, but we have no vision. I like. So they talk about the same kind of components of the strategic exercise in the wider sense of the term, but those things are not connected, right? So you have all those different layers that play against people and the reality of companies as well is that. I, I personally believe that, you know, we don't invest enough in strategy. And I mean that in terms of, of developing people. And this is kind of what I'm trying to solve in many ways. Because the moment you say that people that of all levels do PRS, what you really think to them is they're doing strategy. And yet if you ask leaders or you know, most of the time leaders, but you know, people in general, they would say another strategy, something happens in the leadership team. What they refer to is the company strategy, right? But if you think about the product, right, there is a product strategy, there is a product vision, right? So all these things are still connected, right? So, and if you cascade that all the way down, it means that also product teams, any other any other team in the business for that matter, that strategy, right? They have a set of problems like, you know, whether it's needs goals, they have a market in many ways, like they're trying to solve that and they have an optimization problem to solve for the strategy is a way to solve that the optimization problem. So I think there is also sort of cultural disconnect in many ways when you know, you are really not really properly leveraging 90% of the organization. And what happens when you don't do that is that people not really familiar with strategy when they start at the bottom level and they hope that one day they'll get in the leadership team and then, you know, the strategy will be magic, right? Like they would be all very clear. And, and, and the reality is like I have done that myself, you get there. It's not the case. I like the, the quality of the conversations of the strategy conversations, I think is, you know, not where it needs to be at all levels. And I think that's the key thing. I, you know, I would prefer to, you know, I'm, I'm dreaming of a time where people from the first day in the career, you know, do strategy. Like whatever it is that they do. When they say, I want to set my objectives, I want to have, you know, create a road map just as a product person, a developer, whatever they understand, they have the awareness that they're doing strategy and then they grow into their roles and into the ranks doing strategy continuously as part of their thinking, their operational thinking. If you think about, you know, the the technical scheme so that by the time they get into leadership team then they have that understanding. So I think it's wise for us to spend some time talking about, you know, really what is strategy or how would how do we describe strategy? Because you mentioned a second ago that a strategy is a way to solve an optimization problem, which I thought was nice. And I think maybe we could spend some time understanding really specifically like what is strategy because I think there are different. Obviously you were saying about having everyone think strategically and that's great. But what does that even mean? What is that strategic thinking mindset? If you were to say to somebody, Oh yeah, that's a really good strategy, Like what are you seeing in front of you, which is saying that that is a good well understood, clearly articulated strategy, which is feasible. Like what are the, what's the checklist for you for what makes a strategy? Yeah, I think so to start with, it's true that the word strategy used in many different circumstances and actually the reality is like it's not that all of them are wrong bar one, right? Like there is multiple occasions where you use strategy for slightly different things, but actually all correct in many ways, right. So that's kind of like that doesn't really help you know the confusion because people just like when there is just one answer to the question kind of thing, right. But I think what what I meant by the optimization problem is if you think about you know, even when you do a vision, right, what you're really saying is you start with a problem, right? There is a problem somewhere and fundamentally what you want as a company is to solve that problem, right? What you're really saying is the first strategy you put in place is actually creating the company and the first objective you have is to solve that problem right? Now the reality is like you have that, it's like, OK, great, but you know, what does it mean to create the company, right? Well, you know, what are the objectives for the company? At a high level, you can think that one is a notion of product to market fit. Why you? That's the closest proxy you have to solving the problem. Then you know you have a scalable organization in many different ways, right? Like, you know your operations are good and then you have a sort of line of sight to the future. Right. Those are typically the key dimensions, right? And when you think about that way, then the strategy is always a way to fulfill a higher level objective, right? Whether it's solving the customer problem, whether it's achieving a specific goal regarding product to market feet or efficiencies or what not, There is that notion of high level goal. This is like, you know, when I used examples around Napoleon or, or you know, the Le Mans race, what you want is winning the race. What you want is winning the battle, all right? So it does start with the notion objective, but then the real question becomes the how, all right, So the how is fundamentally what people would define as the strategy, right? So if you think about your vision, you know you want to achieve that. You know that those objectives of success, of solving the problem and everything. But then you would have to go through missions like what are the different stages that it will take? So it's that, you know, that's when people say a coherent set of actions, right? But obviously you're not just doing that, you know, to go from A to B. So today there is a problem. What I want to go is B to get to a position where there is a solution in place and I've resolved the problem. That's fundamentally what you're trying to do. And so the strategy is that, you know, change mechanism from A to B. Now you're not doing that completely in isolation, right? You have constraints, right? So you're going to do something in the hope of fulfilling your goal, right? But you're going to have to do it under specific constraints, right? From the environment, from your capabilities, you know, budget what not. And then you're going to have to manage risks. And so for me, This is why, you know, when I think about the strategy, I mean that this is a way to fulfil higher level objectives through your existing or to become, you know, new capabilities, you know, and then, you know, you have to set the objectives for how those strategies will convert into something very tangible. And then you just have to sequence it. I don't know, it sounds simple, but if you think about it in many different ways, we already have the keys to that through a traditional road map. Right. And, and a lot of the, the, the talk I'm the talks I'm doing at the moment are very much around like how do you connect OK, R strategy and road map, right? And actually in one slide, you can see everything. If you imagine that one slide where at the very top you'd have the high level objectives you want to solve, right? The, the sort of the headers of your swim lanes, all the strategies that you're deploying, they are different kind of mechanisms of creating value, right? So when you have a product strategy, right, which could be the title of your slide, the objective of your product strategy is to fulfill the specific objectives, right? And the way you're going to do it is, for example, having a combination of an app of integrations of APIs all of the time. People in Rd. Maps call them themes. Oh, it's the header, it's the theme. It's not that it's actually a strategy. That's the name of your strategy, right? The product strategy is a combination of your app strategy, your integration strategy and your API strategy, right? And each of the swim lanes, when you see what happens inside of the swim lanes, you're basically, you know, creating objectives, right? You know, the objective is basically saying, if I have a strategy like an app, that app could take a zillion different shapes, but you have to really choose the one shape you want for that app. You want to choose which user is going to be targeting. So I'm not sure if I'm being, you know, super clear because it's very visual. I think this is this was part of also like, you know, people are visual people and so trying to explain with words and I'm doing what I don't want to be doing, right? Like I'm basically trying to explain with word that people don't connect easily in their heads, something that is both simple and complicated. And I think This is why I wanted to build a product, right, because the product is a way for people to understand things because you can then break it down into, you know, different bits and bobs that you can understand piece meal, but then you can connect them all back together. All right, So you have your key hours, you have your road map and you have your strategy all in one place, which I wonder is it? For many organisations, the they struggle with us all because they have a complicated and historically they have they have over complicated things. So when you look at a way that an organization is structured and let's say that there is lots of kind of functional silos and there are many, many layers of reporting and there's a huge amount of distance from the people who are, you know, making the changes to the product and the market and that market feedback. But I don't think, OK, ours, whoever really deliver what they're supposed to, even if there is an alignment of problem and said everyone thinks strategically. Because by the time you get down to that lower level, you're so divorced from the reality, the types of problems which you are trying to solve at that lower level, they're probably not aligned to the greater organizational purpose. And you're dealing with much, much pain, probably because of dependencies and having to wait for people and because of ambiguity. And because the fact it takes so long to get stuff out is that I wonder, you know, when organisations do get they really overly complicated that then OK, I just don't stand a chance. And I think that, you know, if you want to now listen to what you say and I think about my own experience using Okrs is great when you can align people against that problem and when that line of sight to solving the problem is as clear and as short as possible. The longer that line becomes and the more different functional departments that goes through, the harder it's going to be to allow people to have an to come up with an OK R to come up with a meaningful objective, which is going to really solve the problem. So if you said my, my question to you is that if we then just kind of go back into the top and say, yes, it is about solving a problem, how do you help people figure out at that higher level what is the problem that's worth solving? So good question. I think the first thing is, you know, maybe going one step back is, you know, every team, and this is where I don't believe the Tokyo's are hard. Even if you're the bottom of the organization, it puts a lot more pressure on making sure that the cascade happens, right? But locally, I think you can always do a good job. And I think doing the job starts with just defining your scope, right? When you say your team A-Team is basically an emanation of the strategy, but you have a partnership team because you have a partnership strategy, not the other way around. Right. So if you are, for example, like if you're the team in short of a specific product, you know, what is your scope right now, what is that boundary that defines the inside and the outside, right? You're on the inside as the team, right? You have specific capabilities and then there is the outside, right? And the outside is potentially the rest of the organization, but it's also the user, right? So the moment you see the user in many different ways, you have also shortened the distance, right? Because you are right against the market. So although if you look at the organization, you're 1,000,000 miles away, if you look at the actual value chain, a product team is directly in contact with the customer and therefore the market and therefore the value. Yeah, which is great. So just you said something really interesting a second ago. You said lots of interesting things. One thing that really piqued my interest, you know, you got a partnership team because you have a partnership strategy. And do you know what? I think that's part of the problem. It is definitely like, I think that a lot of the time there are teams are created not because there is a, a strategic problem to solve, but because it's the easiest way for people to solve something that's causing them pain or easiest way for them to to manage the pieces. So then you have teams that shouldn't need to exist in the way that they exist. So they get given the opportunity to grant an OK R and they they don't know what problem to solve or they're not solving problems that are worthwhile. It's an example, if you ended up with a, you know, a low level team and they were nowhere near a product team and it's just something around a particular, I don't know, say an API, right. An API is aren't really a business, it's just a delivery channel. And you're saying don't come up with an OK R What would be a good APA, OK RA for an API team? Like they're going to sell the things that are causing them pain. There is no strategy around API. There's strategy around other pieces, but they weren't created because there was a strategy. They were created because someone thought it's easier for us to manage this API stuff if they're in a separate team. Well, yeah, but that's because it was not explicitly declared, right. But you have you have an app product because you have an app strategy. It's the same thing in the product world, right? So if I take like a lot of people come to me actually for those very same questions, right? Like, for example, you have a platform team or an API team or something like that. So the platform team feels very indirect, right? Like they feel almost like perpendicular to the value streamline kind of teams or working towards the user. But it's all relative, right? So relatively to you, if you're a platform team that, for example, provides, you know, AI tools to a main group of people who actually build the pipelines or whatever functionality is being delivered directly to the customers, right? Your user is those teams, so you're outside is those guys, right? So the moment it's almost like, you know, if you go sideways into those guys and then you kind of go vertical towards the customer. But if you unfold it from your point of view, your value chain is very simple, right? Like you have your own scope, which is like the tools that you provide. Your user is the other teams within the sort of, you know, below the APIs kind of group, and those guys will then be used, you know, through the sort of front end teams and ultimately to the user. So whatever it is that you are doing is indirectly, but very much, you know, still quite directly connected to whatever the user is going to experience, right? If your module for AI is crap, the user experience is going to be bad as well. So we find everything relativity to your own scope. This is the way to, you know, create empowerment as well as, you know, having clear definitions of, again, why you exist, right? Like the moment you empower A-Team. And I think that's where empowerment really come from. Like you're basically saying, look, we need to do something around that, right? There's that strategy. You guys are in charge of doing that. And the point is then you have to set it up for success by connecting it the right way to the other team so people have an understanding of how they add value. So let's talk about the obvious stuff, Steph, right? Because when we before we started recording, in fact, we were talking, I was having a rant about Mike Kagan and marketing techniques and luring people in by saying inflammatory statements like, OK, I was dead just to get them to listen to you or whatever it might be. OK. And we said, yeah, But sometimes I said I was some stuff which is really just quite obvious. And we said, well, maybe it isn't obvious for everyone. And I think this is part of the challenge, right? Is that what you say there? I totally understand. And it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a true statement in, in respect that, yeah, I'm connected to you. You're touching the crown, you're touching the same planet that I'm touching. So we are touching each other not in a weird way, maybe not in a weird way, but you know what I mean? Like we are connected, right? But it isn't actually that straightforward or simple. It's not like I can open my door and just go out and say hi and like shake your hand. I think it's the same for many people and many teams and organisations. So yes, it is possible to connect people to a higher level purpose, but. There are many organizational contexts where achieving that isn't going to be possible. It's not going to be feasible, is it? Let's be honest, because I mean, because they're all, because the leadership in the organization are not incentivized for thinking in that way. They have never thought that way. But if you have a that I have, and I'm talking from experience on both sides of this, right, where where you have we have connected and where it's almost impossible to connect stuff because the people that are leading their specific functions aren't rewarded in solving the real business problem. They're awarded for the size of their team or hitting a robot that they made-up 18 months ago. You see what I mean? It's like there's some obvious that maybe we need to highlight to say, yes, it is possible to do that, but in order to do that, we need to have these things in place. Yeah. But if I'm completely honest, like, you know, from that point of view, I believe that this is mostly a weakness on the strategic side. My point is, if you think about, you know, what Okios are and what strategy is, this is meant to be like a description of the value chain. If you think about that way, or at the end of the day, something that gives you common objectives, right? So if you have a framework that gives you very clearly, these are the common objectives, we are all supposed to, you know, based on our respective skill sets, right? But we're all supposed to contribute towards, you know, that first strong first degree would make sure that the second degree that you describe, which is potentially the operational incentivization of, you know, like what people are driven by or just the revenue for, you know, salesperson, all these kind of things. And the third degree that you're also describing, you know, implicitly, which is like, you know, people's egos and, and you know, like the desire for progress and everything. I think that what the problem is, we are too weak on the 1st degree to the point that, you know, it's almost like the first degree should be 60% and then the second degree should be 30% as a reinforcement mechanism, right? If I have the right incentive to reinforce what I'm trying to get to in the 1st place. And then the third degree, you know, we would basically, you know, be able to have a much better second degree and the third degree would be contained to what it, it, it can be in a way like you can allow people to have ego and ambition and potentially do a scheming if the remain remaining 90% is solid, right? But the problem is we start from a place where that 60% is like 10%. So in reality,

you're left with like 10:30 and 10:

00. So suddenly, you know, ego balances, you know, the, the, the strategy itself. And then you have 30% in the middle of the wrong operationalization of the incentives. And so This is why we need situation. And that's why I really want to make sure that, you know the 80%. Is the conversation that is the healthy conversation. That's what we all trying to do, right. The goal is, for example, for us to have, you know, product to market feed. Imagine if you're a start up early product market feed, you know, in in the specific conditions that product that market great. Below that you have product and go to market motion as a strategy, right? Like last strategy is to create a product and take it to market, right. Just by saying that you're basically declaring your strategies, but they all fit into the same objective. So necessarily, how could it be back to your point that you have sometimes such disconnects between the CRO, the CMO, the CPO and you know, in the leadership team? This is what I I thought was always crazy, right? But I think it's because of the heart. You know, we don't put in the first degree the fact that, you know, it is, it is a team exercise. And that's because people we don't, we never show them how it is that they connect together. Well, it's almost like, and I think we, we have oversimplified, right? People like things that are simple, but it's almost like, you know, this very vertical, very simple, layered kind of approach where it's like almost like throw it over the fence, right? Like the tech guys do it and then you throw it over the fence to the, the product or design guys, they throw it over the fence to the marketing guys, they throw it over the fence too. But if you keep doing it that way and you oversimplify, right, I think you are missing something. And I think this is the change I have, which is I, I get the fact that a lot of people want things that are super simple. The reality is always going to be more complex. The point is at which degree of complexity do you need to get to in order to solve the problem? Because clearly making it too simple hasn't solved the problem, right? So it's missing that core understanding of how it is that, you know, product and and marketing and all the different functions contribute to that, contribute ultimately to the company objectives, which I didn't exercise where, yeah, quite recently I was with a client and I had supported some people in learning about OK Rs. And yeah, they had a good appreciation of it and I gave them some OK Rs to critique. And they found it very difficult and they could go back and say, I know, well they can ask those questions, they can see that maybe it's a bit too output focused and it wasn't really talking about behaviour change, etcetera, etcetera. But they still found it very difficult and they weren't happy with the feedback they were coming up next time around. I gave them a case study of a really clear laid out strategy which articulated what particular users they wanted to focus on, why they're focusing on those users, what types of problems those users had, how their products relate to those users. And then, you know, by articulating effectively what the aspiration was for your organization, where they were looking to focus, what problems they were looking to solve, what capabilities they had to then try and overcome their problems. And then they had some O chaos, yes, it was like night and day. I mean, it was night and day because they could look for this AKR to say, well, that one's rubbish and that one's rubbish because it does not speak to that vistas. And this, this one actually really is a clear line between what they're trying to achieve that their strategy and what's written down. And they were able to provide feedback upon that one that was decent, which is a 1000 times better quality feedback than when they were trying to do it when it was without that extra groundwork. But not, yeah, you say 60%. I would say that it's 90% that that strategic work is 90% of the workers from that. Everything else can fall out of it when you've got that and when you, if people are wondering, you know, well, OK, R is a denim organization. It's always so much effort. It's always so hard. I'm I'm reasonably certain. So a lot of that is because actually they don't really know what problem is they're trying to solve, correct. And I think it hints at a, at a much bigger problem in a way like we're talking about, you know, I think hell is paved with good intentions. Well, like, you know, I think the worst hell that you live in is the one where it's just a perversion or something that's thought it, you know, well, and one such perversion is the fact that, you know, we are very execution biased, right? And again, I think because, and I said that as in, you know, if I call it crafting versus execution, right? If I, if I make a cliche of the life cycle of a strategy, right, it starts with crafting the strategy and then you deploy it, it has its life. You might sunset it right, like like any other object in a way. But I think the problem is we don't do enough effort into the crafting. That, that, that part of the crafting is the key part. That's what I was trying to say, like in a simpler way with the vision, right. If you think about the vision, you know it cannot be a one liner or one paragraph because you know, you wouldn't expect to go to a a, you know, precede meeting As for $1 million with one slide having one line, correct. So even a vision requires you to have a lot more insight and that's before you have even built anything. And that's what I mean by the crafting. So at that point, actually, if you look at the key slides that normally go into this kind of decks, you have identified the problem, you have identified the market, which is a way to say all the people that experience that problem, right? You have formulated a view as to what you think the solution would be. You've had to look at the competition, therefore look at your differentiation. You have thought about things like mode and monetization and all these kind of things, right? So that on the back of all of that, you can then properly drive the strategy, right? This is what will inform how you're going to go into your market. Are you going to start SMB or enterprise? You know, are you going to start Europe or US? Are you going to start like, So that evolution, right? This is what leads ultimately to missions. My point is like all that thinking happens upstream before you have even formalized things, right? And I think this is where we have the biggest gap. This is why people say most of the time you don't have a strategy because most of the time there's already something existing and you take it for granted and you don't question things. But if you don't have that, you know, upstream part, you are really running blind or definitely you have a few elements, but you need to actually be doing much better job at that. Why is that? Because this is what's going to drive you experiment and strategy in many ways. An assumption that, you know, a specific way of doing things is going to lead to better outcomes. All right? So if you don't have that part, then you're really screwed up, right? And I think most of the time this is where you have the weakest thing, let alone the fact that I think we don't have that. And then we don't have a good way to talk about it, right? Because one is maybe you're missing the diagnostics, you're missing everything I've been talking about. But then you have, you know, what people talk about the buy in or you know, the alignment, all this kind of thing. So you have to have a way to easily explain this is what I'm going to do, right? And I think this is again, like where the simple things like, you know, like, for example, I think about key results as as goals, as a way to keep it simple, but more importantly as Abcds, right, actions, benefits, constraints and detractors like risks. If you have something like that, again, it's like what you were saying, the kind of tips that are, you know, tips as a way to help people remember, like what they should be thinking about. But actually more than that, they are actually a way to describe the strategy with all the code dimensions, right? Because, for example, people talk about risk versus reward profile. Yeah. But where are those boxes? Where do I find them? Whereas if you have the ABCD, you can say, well, my rewards are the benefits, the detractors are my risks, right? What is my key conversion of output into outcomes? It's basically from the action to the benefits. What are the constraints in the sense of the optimization I'm supposed to, to, to abide by in terms of budget lead time, but not it's in there, then you can have that conversation. And that's the point, which is also another topic that you know is very interesting is then prioritization, right? Because you're trying to compare two different strategies, but they involve a very different set of actions. Potentially they can lead to very different benefits. They are under very different constraints, right? And the risk are very different, especially over time, right. So like you would need to get that understanding in order to compare to strategies and decide which one is the most important, like. And so that's my point. It's like because we keep it to 1st degree, there's also a danger that oversimplifying, you know, kind of obscure the picture in any way. Yeah, no, so much to unpack and we are rapidly running out of time as well. So about this, just point that out. So we're going to start wrapping up soon. But you know, I was thinking as you were talking and this idea that OK Rs are dead in the same way that everyone says Agile is dead. And do you know what I think if I draw a parallel between the two, I think that the OK R and, and particularly the Agile commercial complex, right? The the industry that was created around agile. And I think and people have tried to create similar industries around OK ours to kind of sell it. And I think actually what, what should die is the the marketing on this simplicity premise. It's because OK ours OK ours are simple. Yeah, sure. OK, ours are simple if yeah, but like they're easy to understand that that knowledge is not a hard one to attain. However, what is difficult is they're making them effective when there is a when you are bereft, a strategy when your bereft problems this role when the hard work, the groundwork, the foundation that's 60 but 9090% of what actually what will make your organization tick isn't there then actually OK ours they won't work. And I wonder, say many of the people that sold Agile over the over the years, and I've talked for my own first hand experience, I don't know if it's the same in the OKR world or not. But none of them have run a business. None of them have held senior positions and organizations. None of them understood strategy. None of them the hard the odds of trying to make the difficult trade-offs to make a a group or a function or a business successful. And so when they were going in and providing the advice do it fell Flan didn't make a difference because I didn't really understand how it all works. And I think this is what we're saying here is that, OK, ours will die and, and they won't work in an organization if you haven't got people that really understand how that business is, is running and then how it could be running. And, and what's that strategic void that needs to be filled to make OK Rs? Simple. Because ultimately, unless that strategic void is filled, OK Rs will be challenging and they will end up just giving you more or less the same that you've got. But you'll be, you know, maybe a five to six figures lighter because you've paid for loads of training and other bullshit you didn't really need. Yeah, I mean, also a lot of to to impact there. I think you look, you know, the industry is doing the best it can with what it has, right. And in many ways today, you know, you have either very expensive, you know, consultants or that provide the lack of continuity in many ways, or you have, you know, to do the training internally. And that takes time and, you know, this is not necessarily super efficient. And, and so, you know, and, and you have providers, social providers who also like thinking, look, this is the best thing that we have available at the moment, right? We need to offer it. And there's definitely games to be had by having a, a Nokia platform versus, you know, doing OK Rs in a spreadsheet or doing it by hand or whatever and having OK Rs better than having anything, right? But the point is more like, you know, again, you know, I'm all about outcomes in the sense like, does it solve the problem, right? If you just look at the result, look at the state of the companies and the moves they make and the alignment and the, the silos that you were talking about, the painful process, the endless hours of meetings leading to nothing. I mean, you know, and, and that is like that, the thing that kills me. And I do mean that, like, you have great people and, you know, you have great companies that die from bad strategy management. I don't necessarily mean like, there isn't a market or, you know, it was a wrong strategy, but just even the personalization of the strategy, like the way people think about things, like it's just wrong. And that is really killing companies. And the problem is like, as it's, you know, impacting the company, really what you're saying is it's actually impacting the people, right? You're the one losing time. You're the one being frustrated. You're the one not knowing. So you're gonna hide that you don't know what you're talking about. You're gonna do your best. You just do it because someone asked you to do it. The point is like, this is a missed opportunity. That is absolutely huge, right? And and if you think about like again, as a founder, you're saying like the first employees, right? You know what triggers the decision? You have extra leverage, you can actually go faster as a company, do things better. You get your first, you know, 5 employees. It's the same at 500. The point is like those people are there so they can give you the extra leverage. All right, but you need to invest in accordingly to enable the people to do a great job. Yeah. How much just diminishing returns? Yes, more and more and more and get less and less. Yeah. And I think to, to be honest, like something that I, I know it's also one of those very loaded words, but that's why I call strategic debt. But if you think about it, like most founders, right? It's just our, you know, specialist of one thing that might most of the time have not run a business before nor startup, nor anything like that. And they don't necessarily have an MBA. And even though an MBA is not necessarily a good way to get to strategy, but you know, I mean, the point is like, they're just going to make it happen organically, right? And it's going to keep growing, keep growing, keep growing. And the point is they get to some point where the day of reckoning comes, right? Like you have that misalignment and you don't understand it, but that's because you have accumulated all the strategic debt. And in a way, it's all the hours you're not spending. Because you know, I see on LinkedIn or wherever all those posts where you see like this theoretical split of your time from being a product manager to a head of product, you know, director, VP and NCPO. And somehow, you know, you magically go from spending 80% of your time on the operational work, which is the reality when you're PM to, you know, spending 80% on your strategy or 50, whatever it might be when you are CPO, the reality is like, it's not like that. Absolutely not. And that's the problem, right? Like how much of our time, and I said that, you know, as a way to change the whole like leadership community, how much of our time are we really truly spending, you know, getting better strategy, thinking about strategy, getting insights and understanding the moves you could be making, as you were saying before, like deciding which one is the best move and for, you know, for what reason behind it, you know, making sure your organization is aligned. All these kind of things like we barely spend any time and, and, and the rituals we have today and the mythologies we have today don't necessarily drive towards, you know, doing a better job at that. And I think this is also why the AI is going to be so important, right? As a way to bridge that gap between the fact that people have so little time, so little support and enablement, despite all the best efforts of the companies to actually become better. And the only way to do that sort of, you know, Grand Split is actually having the AI being there with you 24/7 in order to really ask the right questions. So you need to have the right framework as well as the way to structure that thinking, right? You need to be able to have the condition we're having before, like the market and the problem, for example. Have you ever seen a strategy tool that shows you the market? No, but we agree that at the heart of its strategy is a mean to change your business in order to impact your market. So you don't, you need three boxes and yet you only have a Model 1 box. That's what ratify is supposed to resolve, like bring into one place everything within the 10%, right. You don't need the 90% of operationalization, but all the elements that you need in order to do a good job at strategy. And I think there's plenty of things that are currently missing, which means that I, I, I, I say as a joke or find that, you know, it's like trying to be the, the, the team principal of a Formula One team. You can see the driver, but you can't see the car or you can't see the circuit. This is insane. But this is the reality of what we're doing today because we're trying to do strategy without seeing the business. Where is it model? Somewhere, some spreadsheet, some PowerPoint, some mirror, whatever. And then without ever seeing the market, where is it some marketing presentation, some CRM, whatever. But when you're having the strategic conversation, leadership team or everywhere, you should have all that environment around you in order for you to know what it is that you should be changing internally in order to get the changing behaviour of the right type on the outside. And then those simple things that I I said that like that sounds very theoretical, right? So let me just, you know, bring it back to OK Rs when you were saying earlier, like, how do you test that? You know, an OK R is a good, OK RA way to test a good objective is if it's in your control or not. Because if it's an outcome, like people say, you know, like, OK R should be outcome driven. It means that your objective should be in your market. And that's how you test because if it's outside of you, it's not in your control, right? So that's why you say, for example, a good objective would be I want to, you know, I have more adoption from that user category on that specific product. You cannot guarantee that it depends on the person on the outside to actually, you know, behave and and do the change in behaviour in order to get to what you want. And if they do that, then you will incur the benefit that you were trying to get to. All right. So those fundamental understanding is actually very much condition, you know, even like the way that you know any team is thinking about doing their own OK Rs, let alone company strategy and everything else. Nice so I want to leave it there only because it's like it's nice there's a nice way to end it high energy. I thought there's a lot of things we could talk about and I think we should you should come back on when your products and we should we should dissect it a bit more because it's really interesting, you know, and I think it's yeah, I like all the episodes that I record. But I think when we talk about strategy and when we really talk about strategy and what it is and the links that it makes and all the great points you were making, you know, just, you know, really understanding where you're going to play and how you're going to win, to kind of borrow phrases from someone else, you know, I think it's so critically important. And I, yeah, I think that, you know, something you mentioned as well, which I just want to say my favorite way of doing all of these things is when it's an evolution and when people come to their own conclusions. And OK is going to be a great way to begin some of the shifts in thinking towards considering outcomes. And then over time, if they then realizes actually there's a huge amount of strategic work to do, there's no point in kind of pushing, OK is much farther ahead until they get some of that foundation in place. And then I think you want to, you know, you're on your way to a winner. If then people realize that actually the organizational structure and the operating model needs to evolve, evolve somewhat. I mean, you can effectively begin to try and execute upon some of your strategic ideas and all the better. But I think there's a, there's a lot of great work to do out there of a lot of great companies. And I don't think that Seb, you or I will ever be too short of work. No. And I think, look, in many ways, I think it's also where the opportunity lies, right? Like, you know, we talk about the link between problems and opportunity. I think the problem itself is so complex as you were saying it, It's very multifaceted. It it has many different layers where like from the we're talking about ego, we're talking about process. We haven't talked about data, by the way, You know, there's little things like, you know, we talked about strategy, we talked about culture, innovation, you know, impact on the company. You know, the problem is very complex. And I think again, like I think that there is value in trying to be a bit more thoughtful and a bit more in depth in in those reflections because you know. The, the product itself is going to be necessarily more complicated, but then, you know, you're going to know that you are having the, the right conversation. And that's the only thing I care about. But it's like, and I think you can break it down into little conversations like smaller bits, but the point like you just need to make sure that that quality of conversation is as high as possible. And so I think This is why, you know, I think nobody has done it before because, you know, you've had people doing I'm, I'm modeling your business. So I'm giving you a generic tool or I have ChatGPT or I have all these things, But like nothing has been really taking on the whole problem of strategy. And This is why a platform just for KRS is, is minute when you compare it to the whole industry of, you know, business consulting and strategy management consulting. And it's taken an army the last three decades to make it into what it is today. The point is, can you actually get the best of those two worlds? Can you even combine them, which is what I'm really thinking about. But, you know, have a, a platform that is that much more powerful as a way to simplify, as a way to give you the insights and everything, but gives you the best, you know, again, like the sort of the golden top of the pyramid. Yes. Then you can have the, the consulting in terms of, OK, what move should I make? You know, where am I going wrong with my diagnostic? Is that like that is really added value. But if you think about most of the time, like you know what you're really saying when you're paying consultants, whatever is you reverse engineering your business model, you're redefining your market. And that's the problem with continuity because you should have that information before. You should have that conversation while you're having it with the with the consultant and you should have it after once they left, right. So the point is like you need to have that almost like super tool in order to drive everything else. Because that's the thing. Every company even start up, as you know, 15 to 20 different tools, CRMSHR, everything you think about what system drives those things, because if you're truly saying that management is driving the company as an organization and process, then they should be a, a tool that reflects that, right? And at the moment, if you think about it, part of the problem in the ecosystem of enterprise systems is that you don't have that orchestrator. If you think about it that way that you know, is that 10% of the iceberg that actually coordinates things, you know, that is able to take data from the the operational system, but is also able to send definitions. Because that's the thing, for example, when you saying ICP, the ICP is operationalizing your CRM, right? There's a questionnaire that a sales person is going to go to the customer and ask and say, OK, what's your profile? Where does it come from? It's actually a strategic decision, right. So you need something like, you know, at the moment we are putting it in a spread, you know, in a, in a, in a slide somewhere and hoping it makes its way into the CRM. Actually it should be something that is more like, you know, hard facts. You know, we are committing to that ACP because we believe in that vision. We believe it's going to be more efficient. They feel more the pain, there's a bigger market behind it and all these things. Once you have that, then you have a healthy conversation. Yeah. And if it means there's one less PowerPoint inside in the world, you know, I don't mind about that zillion. I mean, you know, I'd like everything when I say everything. And this is more like a sort of principle or, you know, like something lofty and inspirational. But I, I truly believe in it from product strategy point of view to have everything in the tool, right. So if the tool is about strategic conversations, why not have the conversations directly in the tool? Yeah, No, I said, what about? I look forward to the demo. Yeah, There you go. Yeah, Yeah. But, but let me know when your website's live and I'll I'll book my free demo. So thank you so much for Yeah, for a passionate conversation, one which I think. Yeah, it was good. It was good. I think we like. Yeah, about the really important stuff. And listeners, I hope that you've got something from this because I don't. I don't think that enough. I don't know, I don't think there's ever enough said about really what a strategy is and helping people realize how it manifests. And it's criticality to so much about what we do. And I think there's always a bit, there's always, there's always a bridge for me to, to be built over the void of misunderstanding and, and just having the knowledge. So said, thank you. Thank you for coming on and bringing your skills, your knowledge and your stories and your experience. If people want to get in contact with you, they can do so via LinkedIn. Yeah, that's definitely just reach out to me. I I'm still the kind of person doesn't require an e-mail for your first to connect. And you can, you know, if you ping me, I'll reply back as well. Ah, well, get on the get on the Internet, people. Go to LinkedIn, find Seb. We'll put his LinkedIn profile into the show notes and drop him a message, say hello, ask him a question, challenge him on something. But you know, this podcast exists to connect you, our listeners, to awesome people like Seb. So please do take up this opportunity. As I said, Seb, thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything you want to share before we wrap up? No, I think Stratified dot me is the name of the website. It has a very basic page at the moment, but you know, the proper version is coming very soon with the product in beta by the end of the quarter if everything goes well and according to the road map. So and when do things ever not happen as per the road maps ever. I mean, that's unheard of. That's a whole new podcast. X OK, everyone headed to Stratified dot me. We'll put a link in the show notes as well. And everyone, thank you very much for listening. We'll be back probably this time next week. So every Thursday morning, we're here delivering you through some excellent insights, some of the world's best and most interesting people in products and agile. So do make sure that you subscribe to us in your podcast platform of choice and we'll speak to you all again next week.

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Ben Maynard

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