Building Customer-Centric Products with OKRs – A Conversation with Jeff Gothelf
Episode 2
In today’s fast-moving business world, companies need to be flexible, customer-focused, and data-driven. Jeff Gothelf, an expert in lean and agile methodologies, recently joined us on the podcast to discuss Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and how they can drive meaningful change in organizations. As he prepares to lead a workshop at EO San Francisco, Jeff shares insights on shifting from output-driven to outcome-driven work, empowering teams, and fostering a culture of experimentation.
The Shift from Output to Outcomes
Many businesses traditionally measure success based on outputs—how much they produce, how many campaigns they launch, or how many projects they complete. However, Jeff emphasizes the need to move towards outcomes: measurable changes in customer behavior that directly impact business success.
For example, rather than setting a goal to “launch a marketing campaign,” teams should focus on increasing customer engagement by a specific percentage. This shift encourages innovation and experimentation instead of simply checking tasks off a list.
Empowering Teams Through OKRs
One of the key benefits of OKRs is that they allow teams the freedom to solve problems creatively. Instead of prescribing solutions, leaders define the desired customer behavior and let teams determine the best approach to achieve it.
Jeff explains that when teams are empowered this way, they take ownership of the process and are more invested in the results. This approach also fosters a culture of curiosity, learning, and continuous improvement—key traits of successful organizations.
Real-World Example: Marketing Teams
A common mistake in marketing is setting goals based on activities rather than results. Jeff gives the example of a team tasked with launching a campaign. Traditionally, their success is measured by whether the campaign was executed. But what if the campaign doesn’t drive traffic or sales?
A better approach would be setting an OKR like: “Increase website visitors by 50%.” This goal forces the team to test different strategies, analyze what works, and make data-driven decisions rather than just completing a task.
Safe-to-Fail Experimentation
A big concern among business leaders is that experimentation sounds risky. Won’t it waste time and money? Jeff reassures us that the key is running “safe-to-fail” experiments—small, low-risk tests that provide valuable insights.
Since failure is inevitable, the goal isn’t to avoid mistakes but to minimize their impact and maximize learning. By iterating quickly, companies avoid large-scale failures and find solutions that actually work.
“No matter what you do, you’re going to fail a little bit. The key is to fail in small, controlled ways, learn, and course-correct.” – Jeff Gothelf
How OKRs Foster a Culture of Growth
Implementing OKRs changes more than just goal-setting—it reshapes an entire organization’s culture. Jeff explains that it impacts:
How teams work – Encouraging creativity and problem-solving
How success is measured – Focusing on real-world impact, not just deliverables
How people are rewarded – Valuing learning and adaptability over rigid execution
How businesses stay competitive – Allowing companies to pivot and respond to change
This adaptability is critical for long-term success. Jeff points to companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google, which constantly experiment, adjust, and evolve to stay ahead.
“If we fixate on delivering a thing, we are not putting ourselves in the best position to react to unexpected changes in the world.” – Jeff Gothelf
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
While OKRs are powerful, they must be implemented correctly. Jeff highlights two common mistakes:
Top-Down Goal Setting – Teams should create their own OKRs based on their unique influence over the business, rather than having goals imposed from the top.
Not Allowing Teams to Experiment – Teams need space to research, test, and adjust. Learning is part of the process and just as valuable as building.
Leaders must also embrace humility—being willing to change course when new data emerges. This doesn’t mean giving up control but rather making decisions based on evidence rather than stubbornness.
Final Thoughts: Resilience and Agility Win
The business world is constantly changing, and companies that can’t adapt will struggle. OKRs help bake adaptability into an organization’s DNA, allowing businesses to make smarter decisions, empower their teams, and stay competitive.
Jeff’s insights show that success isn’t about simply executing plans—it’s about setting the right goals, learning from experiments, and adjusting as needed. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or team leader, adopting an OKR-driven mindset can transform how you work and innovate.
Full Transcript
00:00
Dafne Canales
Hi, Jeff. Welcome to our podcast.
00:02
Jeff Gothelf
It's a pleasure to be here. Daphne. Thanks so much for having me.
00:04
Dafne Canales
Thank you. You are teaching a workshop at EO San Francisco. It's who does what by how much. Building customer centric products with OKRs. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what to expect, what's exciting about the workshop?
00:24
Jeff Gothelf
Absolutely. I think this is an interesting idea. Right. It's not a new idea. Objectives and key results. It's been around for a while, but these days we've got a tremendous opportunity to reshape how we measure success for our organizations, for our teams, for the products and services that we make. And what we'll be focusing on is moving the conversation away from managing to output, which is making stuff or producing stuff or completing tasks and moving towards managing towards outcomes. Outcomes are meaningful changes in customer behavior that drive business results. And it's a fundamental mindset shift that changes seemingly a little bit about how the teams work. But the reality is that there is significant impact to the organization when you change the way that you set goals and you start to measure human behavior, customer behavior, as that measure of success.
01:14
Dafne Canales
We talked a little bit earlier about letting humans do the human thing and giving them the guide to make decisions on their own. Can you tell us a little bit how that applies to OKRs?
01:25
Jeff Gothelf
So what's interesting is when you set OKRs the right way, and by the right way, I mean, is the way that we talk about in our book, who does what by how much. We don't tell teams what to do. We don't tell our people what to build. Normally we'll say things like, go build an iPhone app or build this system or launch that campaign. When we set goals with OKRs, we don't tell teams what to do. Instead, we say, look, we need more people to come to the store. We need more people to behave in this way or that way, but we don't tell them what to make or what to build to create that.
01:58
Jeff Gothelf
We're empowering our teams to use their creativity, their innovation, their curiosity, their customer centricity to figure out to discover what combination of product, service, value proposition, pricing model, business model, et cetera, will drive the behaviors that we want to see in our customers. And that's really exciting. It's really empowering for the teams that get to work this way.
02:23
Dafne Canales
And can you give us an example? We talked a little bit about a marketing example I think that everybody can resonate with.
02:29
Jeff Gothelf
Absolutely. So imagine you're on a marketing team, right? Traditionally, the Goals for a marketing team are things like launch the campaign, something along those lines. And so your job is to launch the campaign. And then your boss comes and says, hey, Jeff, did you launch the campaign? Yep. Across all social media channels. Sure did. And the bus ads. Did it on the bus ads. Great. And then there's silence. Right. And, and did anybody convert from that campaign? Did anybody come to the website? Anybody come to the store? Whatever it is that we're trying to get them to do? That's not often the goal for the marketing team. Right. The goal is to deploy these campaigns. Instead, if we said, look, marketing team, we need to increase the number of visitors that come to the website on a monthly basis by 50%.
03:17
Jeff Gothelf
Now the marketing team has to go figure out what combination of marketing tactic, delivery, channel, messaging, creative. Right. Whatever it is going to drive more visitors to the website ultimately. And the interesting thing about this, too, is realize that it's not having the desired effect on customer behavior. They now have the evidence to justify course correction. And so we're spending less time working on things that aren't going to deliver results and more time working on things that are actually better for our customers, and that's better for us as a business.
03:52
Dafne Canales
Right? So it's like an experiment where you're trying to get to this goal. You don't really know how to get there, but it's very different from, you know, did we turn on the campaign? That's a yes or no answer. But it's not driving us to our goal. And we would take a totally different approach by, you know, trying to increase the 50%, you know, 50% engagement or 50% more traffic. You're. You're working at it a different way. Even from like a mindset perspective, it's exactly an experiment.
04:19
Jeff Gothelf
You nailed it on the head. That's. And it's a really interesting mindset shift. Again, there's a lot of mindset shifts in this. The concept is really simple. But shifting your mind from saying, look, I'm going to build a thing, right? I'm going to make an iPhone app. I'm going to build a new system. I'm going to open a new store, whatever it is, to. I have a hypothesis. I think I need to open a new branch. Right? How do I test that right before I do that? Because what I'm actually trying to do is I'm trying to get more people to be aware of my brand and then ultimately to sell more of my product. Right? Whatever it is, how do I test that before I invest in real estate, in. In construction, in marketing, and in whatever it is. Right.
04:59
Jeff Gothelf
How can I experiment my way to make sure that's the thing that's going to drive the behavior that I'm looking for? And it's that experimental mindset that is endemic. Successful implementations of objectives and key results.
05:10
Dafne Canales
So I think that resonates very well with entrepreneurs because we're always like, we begin with that experimental mindset. I have an idea, and I need to see if anybody else is going to buy my idea. And now it's taking that and implementing it into our team so that each one of our employees then has that entrepreneurial mindset ingrained in them, essentially. So you're changing their behavior from being doers to essentially being thinkers. Right, and experimenters and scientists.
05:38
Jeff Gothelf
Exactly. And sort of many, like you said, many entrepreneurs themselves as well. And what we're doing, by the way, as the organization scales, if you're working in this particular way, we are maintaining curiosity, learning, agility, and humility in the organization as we grow, which doesn't always happen. In fact, it happens less and less as companies succeed. They become kind of victims of their own success as they grow. And a lot of that rigidity kind of sets in. And if we can. If we can start from when we're small or smaller and include this way of working, we're building that. That responsiveness, that nimbleness that we're going to need as the organization grows and faces different threats in the marketplace.
06:21
Dafne Canales
Right. And do you have any business owners that say, well, I don't know if I want to do this, because experimenting sounds like it costs money. Sounds like we're going to make mistakes. What, what do you say to those business owners? Or how do you change that mindset?
06:34
Jeff Gothelf
Yeah, it happens all the time. Right. Experimenting is expensive. Experimenting is risky. That's my brand out there. If I. If I build something and it doesn't work Right. Does that reflect poorly on my brand? The answer is we build safe to fail experiments. That's the goal here. Right. So the experimentation that we do is designed in such a way that if the experiment fails, then we are doing the absolute minimum amount of. Of damage, if you want to use that word. It's a strong word. I don't love it. And the maximum amount of learning, the reality is this, no matter what you do. Right. You're going to fail a little bit to some extent. Right. We can't predict the future. We're going to be wrong. And so if we can Be wrong in a much smaller increment, learn from that and then course correct.
07:21
Jeff Gothelf
The damage is insignificant.
07:23
Dafne Canales
Right. I love the term safe to fail, and it is inherent in any project. I tell my clients all the time, like, we're not to get this perfect. You know, we are trying something new and we're going to get things wrong and there's going to be mistakes. And if you know that up front, then you're prepared and you can, you know, try to do everything in your power to get it as close to where you want it. But otherwise you don't grow. If you don't make mistakes, you don't grow as a company or as a person or, you know, all those things. Tell me, Jeff.
07:56
Jeff Gothelf
Everybody, everybody makes mistakes. It's just admitting that you've made them. That's the, in learning from them. That's the difference.
08:03
Dafne Canales
Yeah, exactly. Can you tell me a little bit about some companies that are doing using OKRs successfully and which areas of their business they're implementing OKRs or how deep it goes into the organization?
08:16
Jeff Gothelf
Absolutely. One of the more interesting case studies that we came across as were writing our book on this topic, and they're actually a client of ours is a company called Deckers. Deckers makes shoes. They're the parent company of brands like Hoka and Teva and Uggs, I think, as well, their shoe company. Right. And so you're like, well, how to, you know, how do we change goal setting for a shoe company? And the fascinating thing is that we met with the entire leadership team for, for several weeks of that organization.
08:47
Jeff Gothelf
And so we talked to the folks who were building actual physical shoe stores, and we talked about reducing the risk of building a store in the wrong location or opening too many stores or designing it in such a way that doesn't make sense, or in designing campaigns for store openings that didn't make sense. One of the more fascinating topics that we learned about with that particular case study was we talked to the shoe designer. Right. Which is an internally facing position. They don't, they don't have an externally facing customer. The shoe designer makes designs for shoes, perhaps not surprisingly. Then who consumes that? Well, the marketer consumes that. The merchandising person consumes that. And the buyer, the person who buys supplies for making the shoes buys that. Right. Those are the customers, if you will, for the shoe designer.
09:39
Jeff Gothelf
And so the question then is if the shoe designer can do a better job, can deliver their work in a more effective way, what are the behavior changes that they're looking for in the marketer, the merchandiser, the buyer, to tell them that they're doing a better job. Right? And it's about, like, the number of questions that they ask or how quickly they can go from design to shelf, Things like that. These are all measures of human behavior that we can optimize for. And so that was a fascinating case study because it really spanned every single aspect of that business, from the tech side to the shoe design to the manufacturing, to the brick and mortar side of it. It's amazing. And okrs applied across the board, right?
10:19
Dafne Canales
So, yeah, there's so many different areas where when you dig in and like you said before, Creating okrs isn't hard.
10:26
Jeff Gothelf
It's.
10:26
Dafne Canales
It's, you know, sustaining that behavioral change, you know, that makes. Makes a difference in the company. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
10:37
Jeff Gothelf
What's fascinating about this is that the. Again, the concept is simple, right? Moving from outcomes to output. I can say that a million times. Right. But as you start to. To implement objectives and key results that are human centric, that are focused on behavior change, number one, it changes the way the teams work, right? Because all of a sudden, we're not telling them what to do. So they've got to go and do these experiments, Discover how to solve for these behavior changes. It changes how we measure success in an organization. We used to measure the delivery of things. Now we're going to measure behavior change. It changes how we reward and promote people, which means this impacts performance management criteria. It impacts job descriptions. There's a lot of growth here. And.
11:19
Jeff Gothelf
But ultimately, I think the most positive thing that this impacts is the culture of an organization, because again, it builds that learning and that creativity and the agility and humility into an organization, which, to me, are the hallmarks of a successful organization. One that is an organization that understands where it's been successful and recognizes where it's not been successful and learns from those mistakes and then acknowledges those mistakes and does better moving forward, and okrs enable that they do. It's a simple idea that really goes across the entire culture of an organization.
11:54
Dafne Canales
Thank you. And one more question for you. When somebody reads a book on okrs, researches them, and tries to implement it into their team without a coach, what are some things that they should watch out for that might not turn out as they expected?
12:09
Jeff Gothelf
One of the most important things to do is to make sure that each team writes its own objectives and key results. It's often very tempting to just give goals to the teams top down here or give everybody the same goal. Hey, you all have revenue goals, right? The reality is, number one, teams should sign up, should write their own goals, because A, they'll be more passionate about goals they set on their own, and B, they're going to write goals that are within their sphere of influence. Right. So I'm going to focus on the world that I that the part of the customer journey or the experience that we create that I can influence within my team and nothing more than that.
12:47
Jeff Gothelf
And I'm going to tell you a compelling story about how my world, when it becomes more successful, is a leading indicator for the success of the organization. So that's one of the biggest pitfalls is let your don't dictate okrs to your teams. Let them come up with it. I think that's number one. And then I think the other one that's really important is to make sure that you allow your teams to go out into the world and do some of that experimentation and some of that research. That's it. It's part of the work. And it's a way to reduce the risk of ultimately building and shipping things that people don't want. And I know a lot of organizations get anxious about that because, oh, well, the teams aren't producing, but they are. They're producing learning.
13:34
Jeff Gothelf
And learning is just as valuable, especially if it steers you away from building things that aren't going to deliver value.
13:41
Dafne Canales
Right. And again, it's the entrepreneur or the business owners, like, letting go and letting their teams kind of lead themselves and help the organization move in the direction that we want it to.
13:55
Jeff Gothelf
I want to be super clear about that. Right. Because this is another pitfall for this because we hit the management layer, the founder layer, Right. And the founder is like, no, I got a vision for this. I'm going to tell everybody what to do. And humility scares me. Right. And I think it's just because there's a misunderstanding of what humility is. Right. I think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs and leaders think that humility is an abdication of leadership. It's not. Right. Humility simply says, look, I have a strong opinion, right?
14:26
Jeff Gothelf
Based on my experience and my expertise and my gut feeling and whatever it is, the epiphanous shower moment I had last night, I have a strong feeling about what we should do, but in the face of evidence that contradicts my strong opinion, I'm willing to change my mind and to change course. That's it. Right? So humility all. It doesn't it doesn't absolve you from being a leader. It simply empowers you to change course when you find out that some of your ideas weren't exactly right. And that's reality. No one's going to be 100% right all the time.
15:04
Dafne Canales
Right? And I love that because the face of evidence is what we talk about all the time in entrepreneurial circles or business owner circles. Let's try this new product or this new offering. But we actually don't know if the market's going to love it, you know, so we're trying different things and we have to keep iterating and trying different things. And like you said in another conversation earlier is, you know, Netflix never gives up. Like, when's the end of Netflix or Amazon? Like, there is no end. They're making new shows. There's different kinds of even like movie genres coming out that we've never seen before. I don't know if you saw, but there's like a musical drama, you know, like, that's never been done before. Amazing, amazing movie. And, and so same thing with our business.
15:47
Dafne Canales
As times change and we all have to evolve, nobody can stay put. So that's where these experiments come in and these theories that we as business owners have. But we don't know what exactly is going to work in the market. And that's what's exciting about talking about these concepts.
16:06
Jeff Gothelf
Right? If. If we're fixed on delivering a thing, right, we are not putting ourselves in the best position to react to unexpected changes in the world, right? Like, Google was on top of the world for 20 years and then ChatGPT came out, right? I'm like, oh, crap, what do we do now? And then ChatGPT is on top of the world and then Deep Sea comes out this week and they're like, oh, crap, what do we do now? Right? And if you're fixated, like, if everything's focused on delivering a thing, right, and without any room for any bandwidth or flexibility or adjustment, we are going to lose to these new things that show up out of the blue that we didn't expect. And so managing to okr setting goals with okrs gives us the bandwidth for course correction, right?
16:58
Dafne Canales
And resiliency, which is, you know, we know we need that.
17:01
Jeff Gothelf
Yes.
17:02
Dafne Canales
Thank you so much. We're really looking forward to having your workshop next week.
17:06
Jeff Gothelf
It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.