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com
What they have in common?

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Reinvention
“Le Cirque
Réinventé” felipecastro.com
@meetfelipe
felipecastro.com
@meetfelipe
We have to reinvent goals

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 Your company has

21st-century technology,

mid-20th-century
management processes,

built atop 19th-century

management principles.
Gary Hamel

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Management was
not invented to
create adaptable,
innovative and
engaging
organizations.
Gary Hamel
What problem they were
trying to solve?
Making people do the same
thing over and over…
The underlying worldview

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 One of the first
requirements for a man to
handle pig iron as a regular
occupation is that he shall
be so stupid that he nearly
resembles the ox.

Frederick Taylor
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 Why is it every
time I ask for a
pair of hands,
they come with a
brain attached?
Henry Ford
The work of every
workman is fully
planned out by
the management
in advance.
Frederick Taylor
 Do you
believe in
plans?

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@meetfelipe
“Falling in love with
your solution.”

Ash Maurya

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“Predictive
hubris”

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Daniel Kahneman

Nobel Prize Winner

 Cognitive Bias
The systematic pattern of
deviation from norm or
rationality in judgment.

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The Planning Fallacy felipecastro.com
 The Planning Fallacy
We underestimate the time,
costs, and risks of future
actions.
While overestimating the
benefits.
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Or, as I like to explain…
Wile E. Coyote lives
inside our heads
Por que nossos
planos não
funcionam?

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How can we fight
Wile E. Coyote?

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Full-Stack Agile

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The Organizational Stack

Culture
Goals
Strategy

Tactics

Operations
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The Traditional Stack
Top-Down, Command
Culture & Control
Goals
Waterfall Annual Static
Strategy Planning
Goals

Big bets, long feedback

Tactics cycles

Operations Waterfall development/

project management
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Delivery Agile
Top-Down, Command
Culture & Control
Goals
Waterfall Annual Static
Strategy Planning
Goals

Big bets, long feedback

Tactics cycles

Agile Development +
Operations scattered experiments
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Delivery Agile L e g a c y
C e n tu r y
19th
Top-Down, Command
Culture & Control
Goals
Waterfall Annual Static
Strategy Planning
Goals

Big bets, long feedback

Tactics cycles

Agile Development +
Operations scattered experiments
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The 19th Century Legacy is in
direct conflict with Agile

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Legacy thinking creates
organizational debt

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Full-Stack Agile
Aligned Autonomy
Culture “Mission Command”
Goals
Data Driven, Iterative,
Strategy OKR Hypotheses Validation
(Agile Goals)
Safe-to-fail Experiments,
Tactics Short Feedback Cycles

Agile Development
Operations
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 Silicon Valley is
reinventing goals
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 OKR
Objectives and Key Results

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Created by Intel

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Agile Goals
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@meetfelipe
Simplicity

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 Adopted by
Google in 1999
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Who is using OKR?

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OKR: Components
1.Objective: An inspirational and memorable
qualitative description of what we want to
achieve.

2.Key Results: How are we going to measure

our progress?
•2-5 per Objective.

•Quantitative & Measurable.

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OKR: Example
Objective:
Create an Awesome Customer Experience

Key Results:

•Improve Net Promoter Score from X to Y.

•Increase Repurchase Rate from X to Y.

•Maintain Customer Acquisition Cost under Y.

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 “Leadership is

Poetry and

Plumbing”
James March
Stanford University
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When properly used,
OKR can change the
“cultural plumbing”

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Creating Value-Driven
1
Teams felipecastro.com
The Agile Manifesto has expired

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 a b l e
V a l u
“Working software is the
primary measure of progress.”
Agile Manifesto

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The Feature Factory
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 “Teams today are all too often
feature factories, with little
regard for whether the features
actually solve business
problems.”
Marty Cagan,
Silicon Valley Product Group
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Value-based
Key Results

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 Value-based Key Results
Measure the delivery of value
to the organization or the
customer.

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Value is like
a joke felipecastro.com
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The often forgotten column

John Cutler
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What problem
they wanted
to solve?

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Agile was created to uncover better
ways of developing software.

It is focused on managing
deliverables (user stories or
features).
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Agile has no ceremonies
for tracking results.

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Roadmap?

Velocity Rules! felipecastro.com

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Velocity in the wrong
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direction is waste.
 Measured
by Projects
Vs.
Measured
by Value felipecastro.com
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From Delivery To Value

Definition
of Done
Success
Criteria
Acceptance
(OKRs)
Criteria

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 “The key to [defeating]
waterfall is to realize that
agilists value Outcomes over
Features. What really matters
is the overall outcome, which I
think of as value to the
customers.”
Martin Fowler
(2006) felipecastro.com
From opinions
to data

2
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 Decision by Committee

Commissioned Study by Forrester Consulting

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 Decision by Committee

Personal Opinions

HiPPO
Commissioned Study by Forrester Consulting
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felipecastro.com
The career path

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 Ronny Kohavi
Amazon, Ex-Director,
Data Mining &
Personalization
Microsoft, General
Manager, Analysis &
Experimentation
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“Humbling Statistics”
•Only 1/3 of ideas created a statistically
significant positive change.

•1/3 produced no significant difference.

•1/3 created statistically significant negative

change.

•In general, 60-90% of ideas do not improve the

desired metrics.

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Project are bets
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@meetfelipe
….with a low success rate

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 Agile was not created to
discover valuable products.

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Agile was created to
make this guy happy:
“Stakeholder”

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The Flawed Assumption
Behind Scrum

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The Flawed Review

Teams:
“Yes,
Teams: “How
your jobcan
“How can we
is done.
we This
contribute
is what ourto
contribute to the
the company
users company
need.

OKRs?
OKRs?
We
OKRs? Which
knowWhich
Which KRs
KRs we
we may
this because
KRs we may
we
maymake
impact?”
impact?”
more money than you.”

“Stakeholders” felipecastro.com
Teams don’t need someone to be
the “Voice of the Customer.”

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Teams can talk to customers
and measure behaviors.

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3 Enable autonomy
“A customer
can have a
car painted
any color he
wants as long
as it’s black”
Henry Ford felipecastro.com
“The team can do
whatever they
want as long as
it’s the backlog”
Agile HIPPO

@meetfelipe
Command&Control is still here

“Because Sam
said.”

“When Sam is
OK with it.”

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 “If you’re just using
your engineers to
code, you’re only
getting about half
their value.”
Marty Cagan,
Silicon Valley Product Group
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@meetfelipe
What is the purpose of the team?
“Delivering the
features the
stakeholders
want.” Vs.

“Achieving the
the OKRs.”
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 “Perhaps the biggest
shortcoming of Agile is the way in
which teams decide what to do.

For the longest time, answering

these questions have not been
considered the responsibility of
the team.”
Mary Poppendieck
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 4
Forget “carrots & sticks”

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There are three ways to
use goals

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Improving
Performance

Rewards

Reporting
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 Good
Accountability
Bad
Accountability

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Measurement is for
understanding felipecastro.com
From Cascading
5
to Aligning

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Goals Cascade ?

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Can you think of a more

top-down analogy than

“cascade”?

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“Research agrees with
your intuition:

Having goals improve

performance.

Spending hours
cascading goals does
not.”
Laszlo Bock
Ex- VP of People
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Operations, Google
Cascading
creates silos

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Bidirectional
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“Focus on goals that you can
control alone” is a terrible
advice.

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Never create OKRs
in isolation

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6 Create shorter
feedback loops

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“Always choose the option that
minimizes the total time through
the feedback loop.”
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

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Is your project too big?

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Value-based Timebox

You have to deliver value until the

end of the OKR cycle.
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Key Takeaways
1.We have to reinvent goals for the 21st century.

2.Our brains are wired for believing in plans.

3.OKR can help you be Full-Stack Agile.

4.Create Value-Driven Teams.

5.From opinions to data.

6.Enable autonomy.

7.Forget “Carrots & Sticks.”

8.From cascading to aligning.

9.Create shorter feedback loops.

10.Fight the Coyote!

Felipe Castro felipecastro.com
Felipe Castro

OKR Coach,

Partner @ Lean Performance

felipecastro.com
@meetfelipe
linkedin.com/in/meetfelipe

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