How Personal OKRs and Personal Strategy Can Impact Your Life & Career
My journey learning and putting into action the world's leading Strategy and OKR expert's frameworks
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw
Welcome to the latest edition of the Upstream Full-Stack Journal, exploring the full end-to-end Value Delivery stack, from Strategy through OKRs, Product Management, and Agile Systems of Delivery.
In this edition:
Personal OKRs
Personal Strategy
Highlights from Lenny’s interview with a leading OKR expert
Why you don’t need to build anything to learn something
Let’s dig in!
Personal OKRs
I first found out about Christina Wodtke and OKRs when my tech lead/architect gave me “Radical Focus” to read about 4 years ago.
I was immediately blown away by the slim volume in some very powerful ways.
Having worked in tech and engineering consulting for over 20 years, this fable of how a startup went from chaos to focus revolutionized many of the mental models I held for building a team and delivering a great product.
Meet Christina Wodtke
Christina Wodtke had a long and successful Silicon Valley tech career across numerous roles, including General Manager of Zynga.com at Zynga, General Manager of Social at Myspace, Principal Product Manager at Linkedin, and Senior Director of Design at Yahoo!.
Over time, Christina burned out on the relentless pace of tech startup life, and took time off. At a low point, she turned to the OKR framework she learned at Zynga, and started applying OKRs to her own life, a journey she chronicled on her personal blog here initially, and revisited on Medium three years later here.
Christina Wodtke’s Journey
What makes Christina’s journey so extraordinary is that at her burned-out, bored, riddled with health issues lowest point, she set this as her initial personal OKR:
Objective: Be financially stable while preserving health and doing work I like to do.
KR: earn X over three months doing work I’d do even if I wasn’t paid
KR: have a manageable budget to predict expanses (sic)
KR: zero acid reflux, zero back pain
Christina Wodtke, Personal OKRS
I’ll invite people to put aside any judgment on these OKRs, and instead focus their attention on what Christina ultimately achieved by pursuing them.
Christina, 3 Years Later
Summing up all she’d achieved through her personal OKRs:
“To say OKRs have changed my life would be an understatement. They have made my life possible. They are the backbone that holds my life together.”
Christina Wodte, Personal OKRs, Three Years Later
Christina found a job as a professor she loved, gave talks around the world, and wrote “Radical Focus,” the breakthrough book that introduced OKRs to broader audiences outside of Silicon Valley for the first time.
How did Christina Wodtke turn her life around?
I dig deep into Christina’s method, cadences, and approach.
Read the full story on Medium here:
Or on my personal blog here:
My Personal OKRs
Christina Wodtke’s Personal OKR journey has profoundly impacted my own approach.
Much of the writing, learning, speaking, podcast appearances, and this newsletter come as a direct result of the Personal OKRs I set:
Objective: Grow my personal presence as an author and thought leader
Key Result 1: Increase my reach through daily community engagement across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium
Key Result 2: Engage more directly with my audience on a weekly cadence
Key Result 3: Connect the value of direct communication through my top-10 highest-traffic articles
Key Result 4: Publish one new piece of content every week
I’m still working on these, and report to my accountability group on a weekly basis, but I completely agree with this quote:
“Your OKRs exist to protect the dreams you’re afraid you’ll abandon.”
Christina Wodtke, Personal OKRs, 3 Years Later
As a busy husband and father with a full-time job, Personal OKRs give me a way to keep my dreams and goals in front of me when they would otherwise get pushed aside.
Personal Strategy
How Roger Martin defines Strategy
I’ve seen a number of different definitions of strategy, and feel Roger L. Martin’s definition creates a clear distinction from what most people believe strategy is — a form of planning.
For Martin, strategy isn’t a plan, but a set of choices:
“…strategy is choice. Strategy is not a long planning document; it is a set of interrelated and powerful choices that positions the organization to win.”
And there’s a simple, proven framework for making those choices — the Strategy Choice Cascade.
Roger Martin’s Strategy Choice Cascade
For those not familiar with the Strategy Choice Cascade, you can read this article which goes into it in depth.
At a high level, the Strategy Choice Cascade involves making a set of five integrated choices:
What is your Winning Aspiration (“WA”)?
Where to Play (“WTP”)
How to Win? (“HTW”)
What Must-Have Capabilities will you need to be in place? (“MHC”)
What are our Enabling Management systems? (“EMS”)
What distinguishes the Strategy Choice Cascade is how every crucial component of Strategy is built into it, from the Winning Aspiration, representing the Qualitative, aspirational goal, through the “heart” of Strategy — the Where to Play and How to Win choices — matched closely to what people would consider strategy’s “execution” component, encompassed by the “Must-Have Capabilities” to win, and the “Enabling Management Systems” to maintain and continuously improve those capabilities.
Roger L. Martin’s Approach to Personal Strategy
In an extraordinary piece entitled “Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks,” Roger Martin goes deep into his process of applying his Strategy Choice Cascade in creating the Personal Strategy that allowed him to succeed in a challenging academic role.
For Martin, the two limiting factors in personal strategy are the unique capabilities each person brings to the table, and the limited number of hours available in any given day.
The way to “win,” or meet your challenges and consistently succeed, is to create maximum value for each hour spent:
“…to have an effective personal strategy, you need to be deliberative about choosing where to deploy your limited available hours in tasks that your particular set of capabilities enable you to generate a win by creating disproportionate value for your organization.”
Roger L. Martin, Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks
Among the many challenges Martin walked into at Rotman was an underfunded, underachieving institution where professors were far more interested in research than in teaching students.
How did Roger L. Martin use Personal Strategy to succeed as Dean of the Rotman School?
Not only was Roger Martin able to radically turn around the Rotman School, he also materially contributed to the success of P&G and wrote enduring business books and countless articles.
I dig deep into his approach, which you can read on Medium here:
Or on my personal blog here:
My Own Personal Strategy
In my professional work as an Enterprise Agile, OKR, and Product Coach, I’ve shifted to focusing more on the areas where I can provide unique and outsize value for each hour I’m at work.
Much of this centers around content generation and creation – basically, documenting crucial Structures, Governance, and Metrics for the emerging scaled Agile frameworks we’ve been rolling out at KeyBank.
The other part is teaching, coaching, and facilitation in live sessions, and working one-on-one with leaders from the Portfolio and Programs I coach.
The ultimate guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Stanford) on Lenny's Podcast
At about the 10:30 mark, Christina Wodtke has this to say:
““I’ve actually been running my life on OKRs for the last 8 to 10 years because I am ADHD.
I look at my OKRs every single Monday
Am I going to work on the book?
Am I going to work on my teaching?
Where am I going to put my focus and attention?”
Christina Wodtke on Lenny’s Podcast - The ultimate guide to OKRs
Listen to the entire interview on
's newsletter here.
Continuous Discovery – Uncovering Assumptions
“…because most teams are still operating from a project mindset, they test ideas by prototyping the entire solution—doing all of the design work before they learn if it’s the right thing to build.
Or they build the entire solution, relying on A/B testing to tell them if they built the right thing *after* they’ve already built it.
Prototyping and A/B tests are invaluable tools in our toolbox.
The problem is not with the tools.
It’s with how we are using them.
Our goal with discovery is to determine if we are building the right thing *before* we design or build it—not after.
We need to stop testing whole ideas and instead shift our focus to testing the *assumptions that need to be true* in order for our ideas to work.
So to shift from idea testing to assumption testing, we have to become cognizant of the assumptions we are making in the first place. This is harder than it sounds.”
Via Teresa Torres – Discovering Solutions: Quickly Determine Which Ideas Will Work (And Which Won’t)
That’s it for this edition!
Join me next time as we continue to go Up- and Downstream to explore the Full Value Delivery Stack.
