The OKR Podcast

Bryan Hope, Director of Unified Communications & Collaboration at VMware, joins Deidre Paknad to discuss the importance of harmonizing Team and Personal OKRs for greater impact, why and how VMware is doubling down on Generative AI to increase productivity and automation for both employees and customers, and how an efficient operating rhythm is the most critical, and often overlooked, component of great strategy execution.

Summers Hutchings, Director of Product Delivery & Portfolio Management at CarMax, joins host Deidre Paknad to share how CarMax has leveraged OKRs to bring their corporate and product strategies to life, and emphasizes the importance of empowering cross-functional teams to solve problems and create great outcomes that are connected to the corporate strategy.

What every executive needs to know about OKRs: The power of learning and iteration and the 6 executive failure modes you can avoid from the outset. WorkBoard CEO and OKR Podcast host Deidre Paknad shares her expertise and advice on this podcast so you can gain the wisdom of hundreds of enterprises that have gone before you to elevate your strategy execution and OKR discipline.

Cole Wise, OKR Specialist at Pax8 (aka 'The OKR Guy'), sits down with Deidre to discuss how the company pivoted their OKR program to implement a new methodology and platform that promoted broad visibility into the organization's priorities and team ownership and accountability for their aligned results. With strong executive support, insights from a community of peer OKR practitioners, and a creative communications playbook, Cole and Pax8 have transformed their OKR program into an engine for accelerating strategy execution.

Tarun Chopra, Vice President of Product Management, Data and AI at IBM, sits down with Deidre to explore the power of OKRs to build strategic clarity and cross-functional alignment in product orgs tasked with continuous innovation, why leaders must model the right OKR behaviors to drive accountability across the org, and the opportunity to use OKRs as a collaborative coaching tool.

Brianna Ringen, Director of Performance Management, Global IT & Digital Business Office at National Grid, sits down with Deidre to discuss how a single source of truth on strategy execution ‘make lives easier’ while increasing accountability, and the best practices National Grid adopted to implement WorkBoard and OKRs, drive fast adoption, and realize value in less than one quarter.

Jeff Gothelf, business agility and OKR framework expert, organizational designer, author and speaker, sits down with Deidre to share his unique approach to cultivating a product-focused mindset across large, complex enterprise organizations. Jeff uncovers how agile organizations that manage to outcomes are fundamentally in opposition to legacy, command and control leadership practices - and more importantly, how leaders can empower their people with the right framework for autonomy, discovery, and learning.

Anthony Coppedge, Principal Agile Digital Sales Global Transformation Lead at IBM, sits down with Deidre to share how he introduced OKRs across Sales and Digital Marketing to ensure the creation of customer value is the focus of every employee in the org, and why a self-directed culture is at the core of successful business transformations.

In this HCI Podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Sameera Moinpour about how to scale OKRs in large, complex organizations.

Cindy Hoots, CIO at AstraZeneca, sits down with Deidre to share her unique perspective on driving innovation at speed and scale. Cindy shares the importance of operationalizing the strategy and how it helped get everyone aligned and focused on outcomes.

5 ways OKRs go sideways and why. Tried OKRs and they didn’t work or hearing that from a colleague? This episode talks about why OKRs fail, the root issues, and gives a fresh perspective gaining their true value.

Vikas Butaney, Chief Product Officer and GM at Cisco, shares how the organization implemented OKRs, the power of every employee being aligned on the mission, and advice for new business leaders who need to connect distributed teams.

Zendesk CIO Colleen Berube says 'it's just how we run the business' as she shares how OKRs flow into WorkBoard Biz Reviews and they ensure every major initiative has an OKR that clearly aligns to the company objectives. Teams, time, and effort align and they're building stronger accountability muscles as they grow from 6k people to 10k.

Margo Georgiadis, former president of the Americas at Google for 8 years, leads a master class for executives on how Google uses OKRs. Margo shares her learnings from that period and highlights why the choice of measures is really a strategic decision, and how clarity and alignment on the right measures are growth fundamentals.

WorkBoard CEO and OKR Podcast host Deidre Paknad appears on the McKinsey on Start-ups podcast to discuss how OKRs and a digital operating rhythm provide the transparency and accountability around strategy and execution that companies need.

Tina Murphy, President of GHX, joins Deidre for a discussion on the leadership lessons of 2021. She shares how GHX reset its operating rhythm from annual plans and QBRs to iterative OKRs and MBRs, and the power of purpose to galvanize greatness.

Hootsuite CEO Tom Keiser joins Deidre for a CEO to CEO chat on cohesion in chaos, the changing nature of connection and community, and leading the way forward in transformative times. Tom and Deidre first met when he was COO at Zendesk launching their OKR program on WorkBoard several years ago and he brought it with him as he took the helm as CEO at Hootsuite.

Iterable's Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Samuels, and Chief of Staff, Nicole Watkins, join Deidre Paknad in this OKR Podcast to share the inflection points in Iterable's hypergrowth journey. For Iterable, the OKR framework and WorkBoard made it easier to operationalize and align efforts on their strategy even as they double headcount and revenue almost annually.

3M Automotive & Aerospace Division president Steve Shafer shares his observations on the potency of momentum to accelerate transformation and outcomes. It's hard to define, obvious when you see and when you don't have it — but it's what winning teams have in common. Hear how Steve uses OKRs and a growth mindset to amplify his organization's best possible outcomes.

Sameera Moinpour, VP - Strategic Services and Susan Mallaney, Manager - Strategic Services have coached thousands of product and engineering teams to great OKRs. In this episode, they discuss common OKR questions, concerns, and learnings across many product and engineering organizations.

Denise Kanfield drives the OKR and results program at Cisco. Before that, she was a business agility and transformation leader at Thomson Reuters for three years. Denise has done OKRs at three different companies, and she intentionally sought out a role to lead OKRs and results management. We sat down with her to tap the breadth and depth of her knowledge in the OKR space.

OKR Podcast host and WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad first met Rob Frohman, Co8 Group Cofounder and CEO, when he was working with Cisco on their move to Agile and she was working with them on the move to OKRs — peanut butter and chocolate! Deidre and Rob discuss how strategy and execution improve and accelerate with these frameworks.

Erin Rifkin, General Manager at Microsoft, talks about alignment and measurement muscle, how shared OKRs drive the One Microsoft vision, and why learning is the key to, well, everything.

Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard, joins Jeff Richards, Managing Partner, GGV Capital, for an unscripted and honest conversation about purpose-built software, iterating rapidly on strategic priorities, operating with an acceleration mindset instead of a safety mindset and so much more.

Tony Merritt talks about the cost of drift and the power of time and purpose to accelerate transformation. After more than two years with OKRs and WorkBoard, he shares how Secureworks shifted from reporting results to elevating them and how his team increased their own velocity. What started as "ivory tower OKRs" in a spreadsheet has become a business and transformation accelerator.

Artificial harmony leads to artificial alignment — hard discussions and risks are avoided, passive decisions are made and choices aren’t. Exec coach Jocelyn Kung offers simple steps leaders can take to create trust, healthy conflict and better outcomes.

Chris Cravens, former CIO of Zynga and Uber as well as former VP, Software Engineering for Splunk shares what he learned about OKRs from Zynga, his passion for clarity, and how servant leadership leads to better business outcomes. Chris is one of few people who has ridden three high growth rockets — his lessons are worth learning, including how ruthless prioritization helps people thrive as fast growth companies scale.

Sarah Frew, Senior People and Culture Generalist at Plenty of Fish, shares how this fast-growth startup drives fast, full cross-team alignment from the leadership team to squads and functional teams with OKR themes and a formal OKR Week in which the whole company gives attention to purposeful alignment. She shares what they’ve learned over 2 years and how their feedback loop improved their process.

Nanci Taylor, Vice President, Digital Strategy at IBM, talks about aligning on strategic imperatives, competing to win, and better business reviews. She explores the Capacity-vs-Ambition Gap and how sharp focus on it drives smarter decisions and outcomes.

LexisNexis Special Services & Risk Solutions Government CEO Woody Talcove talks about creating rapid competitive advantage with alignment and focus — creating customer value faster than competitors. He shares the fast wins and culture building experience OKRs enabled and how he got great outcomes in tough conditions.

Michael Marcellin, CMO at Juniper Networks, talks about the power of their OKR practice and platform during the sudden move to work from home Spring 2020, what his personal leadership essentials are, and how his team achieves its best possible outcomes.

Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard, discusses how leaders can turn current events into a catalyst for revisiting and improving the way teams come together, create value, and drive strategic priorities.

David Kreiger, CEO of SalesRoads, talks about how OKRs have helped his autonomous teams stay aligned, avoid the meeting trap, and drive results.

Sarah Davis, Director of Portfolio Programs - Data and AI at IBM, discusses how she’s using OKRs to enable a very global organization to do its best work for customers.

Ryan Padilla, Head of Global Planning at GHX, discusses the organization's experience with implementing the OKR practice and how OKRs helped give the GHX team the clarity to stay focused on value to customers.

WorkBoard CEO and OKR Podcast host Deidre Paknad appears on the Build Podcast to talk about why OKRs matter, how to use them, and how to get the doubters on board.

Cisco Security Business Chief of Staff Anna Birch discusses the importance of alignment to drive growth in large enterprise.

There’s often an inverse relationship between a company’s growth and its alignment. As a company scales up, alignment far too frequently goes down just as quickly. Tien Tzuo, CEO and Founder of Zuora, shares ways that a company can maintain its alignment and objectives as it undergoes hypergrowth.

In this fun interview Marcin Kleczynski, CEO and founder of Malwarebytes, tells the fun story of growing his company from its start when he was a teenager to $30 million in revenue from a college dorm room to $200 million and 800 people today.

Mark Organ is a visionary who founded both Eloqua and Influitive and is the author of the best-selling book The Messenger is the Message. In this episode, Mark talks very candidly about the challenges Influitive faced in 2017 that led him to adopt OKRs and the WorkBoard platform – they’d hit a growth wall and the great people in the org didn’t have great clarity on how best to contribute.

For executive leaders, OKRs represent a communication opportunity. They can provide direction and motivation, clarity and inspiration – a motivated, inspired organization wants to achieve its best possible impact.