The paradox of winning through listening — A luxury brand leader I knew a senior executive at a global luxury brand that dominated its sector across every major city throughout the 80’s and 90’s. Wherever luxury goods were sold — London, Paris, New York, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills — the brand was there, and was essentially a category of one. As…

How to use product/market fit to learn from and grow your product’s user base from a few die-hard customers to a viable business — Regardless whether you manage product for a startup, B2B, or a Legacy Enterprise, you’ll ultimately come up against the same two challenges: Who really are your users, and why do they love you? For those who don’t yet love your product, what can you do to win them over?

Personal OKRs and Personal Strategy may be the two best ways to maximize your impact you’re not yet using — “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw Once in a rare while, people come along who manage to accomplish great things, and successfully decode the First Principles behind their approaches into easy, proven, and actionable methods. There’s no better example of “walking the talk”…

A global strategy expert’s simple but effective approach to designing winning strategies — In Part I of this series, we met Roger L. Martin, became familiar with his long and successful career in strategy, and introduced the “Playing to Win” framework. In Part II, we learned about and stepped through the Strategy Process Map, a 7-step approach combining the strengths of Design Thinking…

Outcomes, Cadences, Product Management, and Psychological Safety make the difference — I recently appeared on the FitBots OKRs podcast with FitBots co-founder and CEO Vidya Santhanam. We touched on a wide range of topics across our conversation, centered around the theme of lessons learned using OKRs over the past two years in a nearly 200 year-old legacy Enterprise. Listen to the…

How a leading strategy expert combined Design Thinking and scientific inquiry to allow anyone to create winning strategies — In our first article in this series, we met Roger L. Martin, and reviewed a few of his many strategy successes over his long career. We also learned about the two tools Roger and Jennier Riel use in their IDEO U course “Designing Strategy”: The Strategy Process Map and the…

And a surprising key to effective product growth — Are you confused about product strategy? As a product person, are you frequently unsure how to prioritize what to build with your team? Are you getting slammed from all sides internally, trying to figure out how to build out everything your internal stakeholders are asking for? Does your Sales team…

Introducing a simple, human-centered & accessible way to win — Ultimately, it always comes down to strategy After two years of teaching, coaching, writing, and appearing on podcasts related to my knowledge of Objectives and Key Results, together with two OKR coaching certifications, it became clear that OKRs are one of the most powerful ways to deploy strategy. To truly be effective at coaching across the organization…

Insights from how a 200-Year-Old Bank is running an OKR-Based Digital Transformation — I recently appeared on the “Dreams with Deadlines” podcast and enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation with host Jenny Herald. Jenny had this incredible knack, across the depth and breadth of her experience with industry OKR leaders, to draw out key insights that have made a difference in my coaching practice, and…