Who Does What by How Much?

A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs

De: Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

Narrado por: Chris Abell

The authors of Lean UX and Sense and Respond return with this deeply practical guide to Objectives and Key Results. OKRs are a simple but powerful goal-setting framework used by leading companies in every industry imaginable. This book will help you learn how to succeed with OKRs by using them to put your customers at the center of everything you do.

Every team and organization wants to improve. OKRs help you get better, because they help your teams focus on the right work. Too many companies waste time, money, and energy working on the wrong things. Why? We lose track of what our customers want and need.

Everyone has a customer. (Yes, everyone—that includes you.) We all make something in our work, and we make it for other people. Those other people are our customers—though you may call them patients, students, constituents, or even coworkers. Our success depends on how those customers respond to what we make—and they’ll only respond positively if we deliver something that’s valuable to them. So, to succeed, we must figure out who our customers are, what customer responses drive value, and how (and how much) to change our customers’ behavior to achieve better results.

Objectives and Key Results help organizations do all of this by focusing teams’ goals on the question, “Who does what by how much?”

However, using OKRs isn’t just about writing goals in a new way. It requires changing the way you work, the way you think about your work, and the way you plan the work you’ll do in the future.

In Who Does What by How Much? coauthors and OKR experts Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden provide a clear, how-to guide for employees in all industries to learn how to put customers front and center, so you can get to work on the right things, navigate uncertainty and achieve greater success.

©2024 Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden (P)2024 Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden

Now OKRs Make Sense!

Almost 10 years ago, I read “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr and tried to implement OKRs in my startup. The results were not good. While it was fairly easy to define the O (Objectives), such as improving customer satisfaction, defining the KR (Key Results) often became challenging. E.g., was it to build another feature, to make the app faster, or to count the number of reports we generated?

Jeff and Josh make the obvious but still genius statement (that was missing in the OG OKR book) that the only thing that matters is the outcomes (what a customer does), not the outputs (what we create). Once that is clear, the definitions of the KRs become much easier. E.g., we know that customers are satisfied when they use the product more or recommend it to their friends more often. What we built to accomplish that, is not relevant for the OKR definition but should be decided based on experimentation and actual results.

We are back to using OKRs in 2025, thanks to this book, and with much better results. Strong endorsement!