GA 615 | Radical Product Thinking with Radhika Dutt

When I ask the question, how well is it working? I'm not asking, did you or didn't you hit this target? I'm inviting the good and the bad. I'm asking really what worked well, what didn't work well? And so that is the change that puzzle setting and puzzle solving brings in over goal setting.

Today, I am excited to welcome Radhika Dutt to the show. Now, we had a lot of fun on this talk. In this conversation, it's actually a little bit longer than a Nor Gemba Academy podcast, but because the conversation was pretty deep and really a lot of fun to do. So Radhika has a belief that what some call OKRs or objectives and key results really aren't the way that companies should sort of operate or the type of framework that should be used. Instead, she proposes a system that focuses more on objectives, hypotheses and learnings. Now, if you're been in the lean world for a little while, you're probably shaking your head up and down like, right, that's scientific thinking, right? What we're trying to do with Mike Rother's Toyota Kata framework. And so during this conversation, we kept kind of going back and forth and she was proposing her thoughts, and then I was sort of weaving in what we think about when we're practicing scientific thinking, or what Mike rather and team would call Toyota Kata, the framework. So, again, I don't think they're perfectly or exactly aligned. And I think there are some things that Radhika is proposing that might be a little bit different. But I think overall there's tremendous harmony between sort of the approaches that. Cause in the end, my proposition to her was that what we're trying to do within the lean world is learn our way forward, right? That's really what we're doing when we're setting target conditions and experimenting against obstacles that are in our way towards where we want to be. We're just constantly learning in that there's no real failure. Now, where she kind of brought in some really interesting ideas is like, what if you're just sort of going in a completely wrong direction? And that's very fair because within scientific thinking, if we're going in the wrong direction, and even being successful, if you will, and hitting target conditions, but we're not doing what sort of our customer or the world wants, then why are we doing it? Right? So I think there's a lot to learn and reflect on. Again, this is a little bit longer, so maybe listen to it in a few different chunks, but it's A really good one. And I appreciate Radhika for taking the time to visit with us. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 615. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 615. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Radhika, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm good. Thank you so much for having me, Anran.

Yeah, my pleasure. Where are you calling in from?

I'm based in Boston.

In Boston. Okay. All right. Lovely part of the country, so. Well, I'm excited for today's conversation. As you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

So here's my favorite one, and I only found it this year. The quote goes, we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. I so love that quote. Right. Because, you know, just to think about, like, how often do we have time to reflect? But that's the biggest piece of how we learn.

I like it. Say it again.

We don't learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.

Yeah, I like that. In our lean world we have a term referred to because honsai, and it has a sense of deep reflection and learning. And in some way the formal definition, definition is like more of like almost like a repentance, but it's not necessarily, you know, negative per se, but it's just a deep, deep, deep understanding of what has been, you know. So, yeah, I like it. All right, well, hey, tell us a little bit about your. About yourself. Tell us about your background and your line of work that you're in today.

Yeah, so my background is that I started off as an engineer. I did electrical engineering at MIT. That was way back when, finished in 2000, and since then got into the startup world. So our first startup was something we started right out of our dorm rooms at mit. And that sounds all glamorous and great, Right? Except the reality is we made a ton of mistakes. We really just made so many of the mistakes that I see now in the startup world. Anyway, so one example I'll give you is the product disease I now call hero syndrome, which is where we didn't have a clear vision. Like our vision was revolutionizing wireless. And I still don't know what that really meant. Right. And so it was all about going big and scaling, etcetera, without really knowing what problem were we setting out to solve. And there were other such product diseases that I ran into early in my career that I'd caught these product diseases. And over time in my career, you know, as I gained more experience, I built an intuition for how do you avoid these product diseases to build better products. And I was part of five acquisitions, two of which were my own startups. But you know, along the way, like the big question that came to me was is it that we're all doomed to learning these hard lessons from just trial and error or can we create a systematic step by step guide for how do you build these world changing products and how do you systematically translate vision into action instead of just iterating and you know, iterating without this clear sense of direction, which is often the trap we fall into by the way, in terms of continuous improvement, the iterations without a clear direction. And so that was the topic of my first book, Radical Product Thinking, which is behind me. And that came out in 2021. And what I'm working on now is my next book which is about why goals and targets and OKRs, why they backfire and what actually works instead. And it's very related to continuous improvement.

Okay, so just in case to level set and make sure everybody's on the same page, you mentioned okr, let's start with definitions just of okr. I think everybody knows, but never want to presume.

No. And in fact you're lucky if you don't know. So okr stand for objectives and key results and it's a methodology for goal setting that was introduced by billionaire VC John Doerr in 2018. And Larry Page talks about it as the secret to Google's success. So there's all this momentum behind okrs. But the reality is that I found and also done research to see that okrs don't actually work all that well, but neither does goal setting in general.

Okay, that's super interesting. So let's just go like why, why, like why do you think? That's a really strong passion statement. People are listening. Like what is she talking about? You know, because many people, you know, have, you know, sort of annual objectives or breaking down into quarterly buckets or whatever it might be. And so your, your, your belief is that those don't work. So tell me more.

Yeah, so here's what happens with goals, targets, OKRs, whatever you want to call the methodology. But when you set goals and targets, what really happens is the incentive you're creating for your team is to show you the numbers that you want to see, that you hope to see. And so what happens in the team, they're looking for those positive numbers to show that Growth to show what's working well. Whereas what you really want in the team is you want them to look at those bad numbers, to look at the bad numbers and play detective and go like, what is happening there? Right? Is that a problem? Is it an opportunity? But when you have goals and targets, the desire, like the just subconscious desire even is to please you, but to also not please you, but like to look like the high performer. And so you're even subconsciously looking out for the positive numbers and you want to ignore the bad numbers. Right. We see this often in organizations and I'm going to give an, an example from my own experience. But like I see this in so many quotes. So one example of a quote is I working with a team and they'll say to me, how do we frame these metrics for management? Another example is where, you know, at the end of every month when I work with teams, I see, you know, everyone is like working on spinning numbers to be able to show okrs and show red, green or yellow. And a lot of it is spinning numbers, right, so that I can show the right thing in that meeting. So I see that very often. But even Andy Grove at Intel, he often talked about how when you have a leadership team, you're really the last to know that you don't get the real information from the trenches. So one of the things that Andy Grove would do is he never had a corner office. He had a cubicle, a standard sized cubicle like everyone else, because he wanted people to tell them the truth. And if you look at his entire philosophy, a lot of it is based on how do I get people to experiment, learn and adapt and tell me the truth about what's really going on. So this whole philosophy, philosophy of actually just setting targets and these goals, you start to see, you know, what you hope to see. And that's why leadership is the last to know.

Are you familiar with Mike Rother's work and Toyota Kata? It's really big in our sort of our lean world. Are you familiar with his work?

I am to some extent, but I'd love to hear more.

I want to bounce his framework off of you to see what you think of it. So in this just, and I'm really generalizing this, so apologies all the Toyota Cutter fanatics out listening right now and ah, wrong. You do this, said it wrong. So he would propose that we would, we sort of begin with setting what we would, he would call a challenge of like a really long sort of vision of where we want, the want to be whatever it could be. I mean, it could be a weight loss journey, for example. You know, if someone's got, like, vastly overweight and they're setting this really, you know, I want to lose 50 pounds or something like that, okay? So this is our challenge. But that in of itself is intimidating and just overwhelming. And we just, oh, my gosh, what do I do? I don't even know where to begin. So many people would just give up right. After a day or two. So then his. His. His belief then is to set what we would call a. A target condition. Okay. And so this could just be like, where could we be in a. Not necessarily even wait. It just like, where could we be with. Within a few weeks or something? Just much more attainable, right? And then you'd begin to sort of experiment your way forward towards this target condition. And then once you get to the target condition, you say, oh, great, we made a target. We had a little success. And again, maybe you haven't even lost weight yet, but you've moved your way forward. And then we set another target condition, another small, you know, milestone. And then eventually, six months, a year, whatever, you look up and you're like, wow, look how far we've come. So we've sort of iterated and learned our way forward, overcoming all these obstacles. And, you know, and it's, again, I'm really generalizing the methodology, but, like, what do you think about, like, that sort of framework?

Yeah. You know, a lot of this philosophy of breaking down a big goal into smaller milestones. Right. We hear that often. The only thing. And I think that makes a lot of sense. Right. The only thing I shy away from is how we apply these ideas in the corporate world. So what happens in the corporate world is not just that you're setting target conditions, it's this mentality of measuring people against those targets. And if you look at kind of how John Doar talks about it, right? He goes like, well, setting targets makes it really simple. I can tell. Have you or haven't you achieved this goal? Right. And so let's take this weight loss example. When you start thinking with that mindset of setting a target condition, that is a smaller win that you could look forward to. Right? But if you ask this sort of a binary question, have you or haven't you hit this target condition? What if the answer is no? It's discouraging. What have you learned from that? Like, what. This is what I see in sales, for example, Right. Very often, if you haven't hit the number, it's not about this reflection of what happened. What do we do differently? What have we learned from this? Right. Targets force us into this mindset of, well, either you're hitting the target and therefore you feel like, oh, phew, I can relax, or you're not hitting the target and then there is either frantic activity or you sort of freeze and go like, this isn't working anyway. These are the two behaviors. I see. Right. And it sounds like it resonates for you.

Yeah, no, that's fair. But I would, I guess the counter I would give in our framework would be like, if you didn't sort of achieve this. Let's just say that my first target condition for my weight loss journey is that I want to. And it could just. It could be an activity. Like I want to come up and meet with a dietitian to come up with a. A meal plan, and I want to have it done by Friday. And so then what do I need to do to that? Well, I got to research, you know, so you. And next thing you know, you look up and let's say you didn't hit it on Friday, but you, you know, was, oh, I didn'.

Friday.

And I didn't get it done. Okay. So I got to sort of move it out a little bit or something like that. So it's not necessarily, I would say like a binary on or off pass or fail. It is, did we, did we get it? If not, what? Or maybe, maybe it's more. Let's just say I want to lose one pound. Let's just say we go that direction.

Yeah.

And we gained a pound. It's like, oh my gosh, not only did we not lose a pound, we gained a pound. What a I'm a failure? Well, no, it'd be like, well, what did we learn? And that's the framework behind this methodology is it's one to learn our way forward. So not necessarily a binary on or off. So it might be that we're saying similar things. I don't know.

Yeah. So in fact, let me propose for you what I'm writing about in terms of what is the solution if I say goals and okrs and targets don't work. And I think this is going to resonate for you in terms of this continuous learning mindset and the learning aspect. So the way I think about it is instead of a goal driven mindset, it's a puzzle driven mindset. Right. And so when I say puzzle, what I mean by that is instead of goals, we're thinking about setting the puzzle and then solving the Puzzle. So let's talk about setting the puzzle. So in an organization, right, if you're, I talked about sales, let's, let's take the sales example. You would typically set the sales target as achieve X million, you know, ARR. By the end of this year. And you know, if you are doing this target conditions, you might do like a quarterly target. Right. But let's take a different way of thinking about it. I'm going to set a puzzle for sales and yes, it might be that, you know, I, we really need to get to this target by the end of this year, that we want to get to this revenue number by the end of the year. But I see a puzzle in front of us and here's the puzzle. In the last three years we were growing, but I'm seeing sales plateauing. So what might be going on? And here are some guiding questions as a leader, things I genuinely don't know the answers to. So one, maybe it's that there's something that's fundamentally shifted in the market that maybe there is a competitor that's come along or there's a change in the market. Yeah, exactly. That, you know, something has basically shifted so fundamentally that we haven't really caught up. Two, maybe it's that we were selling to the early adopter and our message and our approach to selling to the mass market is really not working. Or it might be that maybe our product was working for the early adopter but it's not really meeting the needs of the mass market. And as a leader, you know, I'm really asking these open questions, things that we want to explore into that problem statement that I mentioned, where we grew for the last three years. But we're starting to plateau and now there might be different pieces of this that different teams take away the sales, might take away the sales piece of the puzzle, which the product team might take away the product piece of the puzzle. Manufacturing might have a different piece of the puzzle. Right? And we all go off and then we can work on our puzzles. So, you know, it's similar to breaking down this big problem into smaller pieces, but it's puzzle based. Now we've set the puzzle and we've aligned hopefully through all of these questions on what is happening, what do we need to explore and figure out answers to. The second step is then solving this puzzle. And when it comes to solving again, I think this will resonate for you because the focus is on learning. In solving the puzzle, it means asking three questions. The first question is how well did it work? Whatever Your first attempt was how well did it work? And so let's take the sales example, right? Let's say I tried out new messaging because my messaging was working for early adopters. But maybe I'm not getting enough leads at this point as I approach this bigger market. And so I test out this messaging and my question is how well did it work? And aha, ta da. It turned out that that is working well. It looks like I'm getting more meetings with decision makers. Now comes the second question. The second question is what did we learn in this question? I look at, okay, so I'm getting meetings with these decision makers, but what's happening? It turns out that ah, there's a different group in the mass market that also is part of the decision maker that we had never ever talked to before. So now we've learned that we also need to address their thinking, get them on our side. Now comes the third question. Based on how well it worked and what you learned, what will you try next? If you had a magic wand, what will you try next? Now I'm going to plan my adaptation based on these learnings. This is where I'd say, okay, how am I going to address this additional group beyond the decision maker? Maybe I'm going to do webinars for them to get them on board. Maybe it's stuff that they can easily forward the decision making can forward. And this is a way of getting them quickly on board without having to spend all this extra effort. So this is the framework for puzzle setting and then puzzle solving and I call it Ola O H L A Objectives for setting the puzzle and you summarize the puzzle hypotheses, learnings and adaptation for solving the puzzle which you saw in these three questions that really create structure and scaffolding for it.

Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, and in fact it's, I would say it's, it's, it's very similar to sort of what we're trying to do when we, Mike Rother would, would call his framework scientific thinking. And it's how companies like Toyota operate. This is what Toyota leaders are doing. They're, they're basically breaking down the problem. What's the target condition? What's the actual condition now? And then we identify obstacles that are preventing us from reaching the target condition and then we experiment our way forward against those obstacles. Right. And so I feel like maybe we're saying very things just using different, maybe different words or different terminology. Would you agree?

I definitely think so. I think the ideas are very, very Similar. Right. I think a lot of what I have seen is the principles are very similar, but sometimes using different vocabulary and a shared vocabulary makes things more accessible. So let's talk about the psychological aspect of this. Right. Because the scientific method has been around for hundreds of years at this point. Yeah.

And we would say scientific thinking isn't the scientific method. They are clearly different, but there's harmony, there's synergy, if you will, between them, but they are not the same.

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to dig into that a little bit more, but maybe. And before we go there, let's talk about sort of why this vocabulary of puzzles, because we never talk about this puzzle based approach in business. What is really entrenched in our minds is goals. And we need to set goals, we need to set targets. And this is the same vocabulary we're using even in this continuous learning. But what I found is this whole mindset of goals sort of detracts from what we need to do and the learning, the focus on the learning. Why do I say that? So if you look at kind of how goal setting has come about, you know, okrs sounds like it's new from the 20 from 2018 when John Doar and Larry Page talked about it. Right. But if you look at history, actually it turns out that OKRs were something instituted by Andy Grove at Intel in the late 1970s. Then you go back to, well, where did Andy Grove get this from? And it turns out it's from Peter Drucker's ideas in 1940s. And he just tweaked it a little bit. And if you go back all the way to 1940s and say, okay, what problem was Peter Drucker solving? It turns out that it was in manufacturing. And in the 1940s the idea was, or rather the problem was that he was working with General Motors. The workforce was primarily working on repetitive tasks. There was very little automation at the time. And in that case, it was very easy to tell that Andy was a better performer than Bob because he installed 45 tires, whereas Bob did 40. And there's only one right way to do tires or to install tires. Right. And so in that case, goals worked really well. And that was when it was revolutionary, in the 1940s. And what is interesting is that historically he had tried to get GM to adopt these ideas, but GM didn't like it. So he actually went to Japan and a lot of the automotive manufacturers, you know, they saw this and they said, yes, you know, let's do this, this. So in fact, a Lot of the Japanese manufacturers started using this goal based approach and which is why you're seeing this target vocabulary in manufacturing. And it got into Toyota's, you know, lean thinking, et cetera, or sorry, continuous improvement.

To ask a bold question, are you proposing that Toyota's system is not sort of scalable to any, to other groups outside of manufacturing?

No, no, not at the contrary. I think the continuous learning part is super important and I think their approach obviously works. Right, the continuous learning part. What I am actually saying is this mentality of targets in the corporate world, like if you think about how that is implemented and how we're actually using this, if you think about how short term our view has gotten, right, the way we implement or the way we achieve targets, it's about constant short term thinking to hit one target after the other. You know, I had promised this example from my career. I was working at a company called Avid and again, a sales example. We were hitting all of our targets. What was Avid doing? We were big in the movie industry. We made video editors. Every movie ever edited that was winning an Oscar at the time in 2000s was edited using Avid. We were huge. We were hitting all of our targets. So if you looked at the numbers, you would say, wow, we're doing really well. But what happened? It turned out Apple and Adobe was eroding our low end. Our mid tier was being eroded too. The way we were hitting our targets was by moving further and further into the high end. So going back to what is missing from continuous learning, what should we have done? We should have looked at the good and the bad numbers. We should have learned from, okay, the market is really getting commoditized in video editing. You know, we can make revenues until it won't work anymore in the high end by just pursuing the high end. How should we actually address the movie industry? What should we do? Is it based on selling video editors or should we adapt? Right. And that is the piece that didn't happen. We kept pouring money into more and more high end stuff, into pouring. We poured more money into the low end too, into acquiring a company to be able to have low end video editors. But that was not the right answer. The learning parts, the reflection, that was what was missing. Right? And that is because the focus on targets makes us feel like if we're hitting targets, yay, we're doing well, let's keep doing more of it. If we're not hitting targets, is this frantic activity or this free? This is what I want to change from by introducing this mentality. Of puzzles. Because puzzles give you this feeling of curiosity. Right. Let's. This is an experiment I do often and maybe for our listeners, we can try this experiment and you can try it live. For me. I'm going to ask two questions. Just think about what feelings are triggered for you with those two questions. So here's the first question. Just think about how you feel. Okay. What goals do you want to achieve for your organization this year? What goals? And here's the second question. What puzzles do you want to solve for your company this year? What's the difference in the feelings that are triggered for you?

Maybe with the puzzles, it's maybe taps it more into sort of like curiosity or something like this maybe versus. Yeah, I guess the first part is just like kind of a linear. What do I need to do?

Yeah, you know.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Goals trigger this left brain thinking, yeah, of what do I need to do? But also. Right. It is often task driven based on previous years. It is driven by like, oh, what numbers did I set last year? What were the goals last year? And then recalling that and then saying, what do I need to do this year? Right. Whereas puzzles, what a lot of people in my workshops say is it comes from this feeling of internal drive. Like, oh, I want to do this, I want to do that, but it's my internal drive. It's not someone else making me do it. And puzzles, therefore, taps into this natural energy that we have. Because. Because it's from this internal drive, nobody else is making me do this. I really want to do this for the company. And that is what I want to tap into. Right. Instead of hitting goals, it's about continuous learning, the internal drive that drives better results. But also by creating the scaffolding that I talked about, the three questions of how well did it work? What have we learned? What will we do next? As a leader, that gives you more sense of both control, but the ability to course correct. Because I can see what is actually happening from the trenches when I ask the question, how well is it working? I'm not asking, did you or didn't you hit this target? I'm inviting the good and the bad. I'm asking really, what worked well? What didn't work well? And so that is the change that, that, you know, puzzle setting and puzzle solving brings in over goal setting.

Yeah, no, that's good. I. Yeah, I think that if I would like. I was. I'm going to send you a copy of Mike's book because I think that it would resonate with you because I feel like we are saying very similar things because within the scientific thinking framework there is a sense of, of experimentation really. I would say that's like more of like a scientist where you're sort of, you, you set a, you set a goal and you make a prediction of what you actually think is going to happen and then you let, you run the experiment and then you see what actually happened and then you compare what actually happened to what did I think was going to happen and then, then you ask what did I learn? So this is this continuous loop of, of, of learning, learning our way forward. I don't know how else to say it. So yeah, what do you think of that?

There is, there's a really interesting point that you just brought up, right. That we come up with a goal and a prediction and then we experiment. Right. But here's the challenge that I have found and I'm going to give you an example of this. When you set this goal and a prediction, sometimes we don't stay in the problem space long enough. We haven't understood the problem long enough and we've decided what the prediction or the hypothesis is and therefore we jump into the solution and therefore an experiment and learning from that experiment. So let me share how this sort of played out. So I was working with this company where they were in the maritime or I still am, but like two years ago I started with this company in the maritime industry and they had a data platform for the maritime industry that helps you match which shipping vessels are best for which cargo so that you can maximize profits. Sounds brilliant. Their product was so accurate. Like you would say, why isn't this changing the industry? Why isn't everyone lining up to use this? And what we were seeing was, you know, it's really interesting, but only the tech savvy users were using this product. So instantly we moved to a prediction and a goal. We said, aha. If it's the tech savvy users that are using our product and they're making lists, then Right. Our hypothesis was let's just make creating lists super easy so that the tech averse people will use it. Let's just make lists super easy to filter. We'll make filtering much simpler. All sounds perfectly rational, right? Like you can't find fault with it, could you? Yeah, sounds rational. Sounds like, you know, there's the right prediction. And we experimented, we tried it out and it wasn't working.

What did you learn?

We were learning that the filtering wasn't making a difference, but we weren't really Learning much more from that experiment. So what did we need to do? We had to go back all the way to the problem space. We had to stop the experiments for a moment. Let's just go talk to users with an open canvas, with a blank canvas and really understand how do they think what's going on. How do you actually work Today we had to understand the puzzle. What we were doing with the experiment and the filtering was it's like we had looked at this Rubik's cube and we had just jumped to trying to solve it. But it turned out this is a different Rubik's cube, that it's a very twisted version. We couldn't just apply the same algorithms we already knew. My point is, when you think about it like a puzzle, the first step is understand the puzzle well enough, define the puzzle well enough so that you can actually see that puzzle well enough so that your first attempt is the most useful possible. But even your experiments sometimes don't tell you enough. Your experiments can focus on the local maximum as opposed to finding the global maximum. You know, if we had just focused on improving the filtering. Yeah, it's sort of, it was fine. It would have made it slightly better, right? It did make it slightly better, but it didn't lead to a dramatically better and huge improvement. It did make it better, but this is the point. Sometimes with continuous improvement, you can end up with a local maximum as opposed to a global maximum if you don't think about it as a puzzle and truly understand the puzzle. Puzzle.

Got it. So you're not a fan of okrs, clearly. So, so tell me then about I I from researching your work, I understand you're, you're more of a proponent of what we would call an ohl. So talk about, talk about an ohl then.

So I used to call it ohl, now I call it ohla Ola. It's easier to say and it rolls off the tongue. And basically ola is this framework for puzzle setting and puzzle solving. Okay, so the objective is what you use to summarize the puzzle. Right? So when I remember that sales example, or we can even look at this maritime example where we were setting the puzzle. So the problem statement was only tech savvy users are using our product. Some guiding questions like now if we go back to that puzzle setting model, we should have asked more questions about that. Why are only tech savvy brokers. And by the way, it was mostly brokers who are using our product. Like why are only tech savvy brokers in the maritime Using this. Why aren't other people in other roles, the not brokers but like, you know, people who are fixing vessels. Why aren't other people who are tech averse using this product then understanding their mental models like how do those people actually work? How do they go about their day? These are, you know. Now it sounds like it's basic questions, but this is the reality in most companies. When you start to define the puzzles and you describe a problem statement and then you ask these questions, it's like wait a minute, I don't know these answers but why don't I know them? It's okay, like this is the first thing as a leader, it's okay to be vulnerable and talk about these questions that you don't know answers to. Puzzle setting and this framework and mindset of puzzles makes you realize that it's okay to not have the answers if we all knew the answers. It's not a puzzle. That is a fundamental mindset shift. So first you ask all of these guiding questions like how do these people think? How are they different from TechAverse brokers? What do these people need instead of said. And now I summarize the objective and that summary is how do I solve this puzzle and address the needs of the tech averse people in other roles so that we can grow as a company? That's the puzzle. So that's the objective. And it sounds like an OKR sort of objective except now it's a puzzle that I've framed, right? And then the hypotheses, learnings, adaptations. It's basically the three questions that I talked about. How well did it work? What have we learned? What will we try next? If we had a magic wand. So that's the framework.

Got it, Got it. No, I, I think that it, there's, there's actually good harmony. Maybe it's not exactly, but I feel like it is very similar to what we're preaching and, and what companies like Toyota. And it's not just Toyota. I mean my company, like we're practicing this framework of learning our way forward and it works. I mean, I'll just tell you it works, works extremely well. It's not easy though. And there's a lot of bumps along the way because you run experiments and you make, make sort of predictions and it doesn't work anything like we thought it was going. But guess what, that's beautiful. Why? Because we learned, right? And as long as we're learning, you know, good things are genuinely going to happen. Now again, you could be going down a completely Wrong path. Right. And I think maybe this is what you're saying. If you're experimenting your way in a completely different direction than where the world is going, it doesn't matter. Right. Like how good you are at experimenting and. And all the rest of it. You're on a. You're going in a wrong direction. Right. So this is maybe the tricky part of sort of trying to learn. Learn a way forward. You've got to have constant feedback from the world or whatever it is that you're, you know, you're trying to sort of work with.

Exactly. And this is where, you know, sometimes you might experiment. You realize you're not really getting anywhere, or you can see that you're finding a local maximum. But really, you know, that just means you have to go back to the puzzle setting and say, maybe we're thinking about this puzzle incorrectly. And that's what we had to do at this company, signal a couple of times. And by the way, in taking this approach to puzzle setting and puzzle solving. Right. We drove much better results than with OKRs. So when I started working with a company, sales had plateaued. And that was in 2023, and that was when they were using okrs. Now we started using puzzle setting and puzzle solving, and we doubled sales in 2024. We again doubled sales in 2025. And you know, we also dropped customer churn from 26% to 4%. And this was by applying this puzzle setting, puzzle solving to every part of the product. We use this approach to figure out how do people who aren't using it and to figure out, like, how do we make this product better for the people who are using it. And that's what drove this change.

So maybe to finish this conversation up, and this has been super fun, I really appreciate you taking time to visit with us, talk a little bit about then in a OKR framework. It's very straightforward. Sort of, as we've already talked about, sort of like how to measure people's performance. And you hit your number or you didn't, you get a bonus or you don't. Right. So talk a little bit about with your proposed framework. How are we going to sort of. I don't know, I don't know how to say it. Like, measure people.

Yeah. And that's such an important part. Right. So let's talk about this new mindset of how to measure people. In the old mindset, we've been so obsessed with quantifying performance, you know, we wanted to say, okay, you are five versus someone else is a three Or a four in terms of performance. Right. But the reality is, the more you put these numbers to a person, the more they feel evaluated and the less they are likely to take feedback. When you think about this mindset of continuous improvement, we want people to continuously improve too. We want to focus on performance development rather than performance evaluation. And so research, research shows that people are a lot more open to taking feedback and continuous improvement when they aren't constantly feeling evaluated. So why are we so obsessed with numbers that you're a five, he's a four. Right. And the answer to that is because we're thinking about, well, what if I did a layoff? I want to know, you know, who are the bottom 10% that I fire. Right. That's why we want to quantify performance. Let's be honest about that. So when you think about it in that way, you realize, you know, we're just working constantly towards the worst case scenario and killing the continuous learning and continuous development in people. So how do we change that? What I do with teams is I focus on the continuous learning. I am evaluating too, but the focus is more on the development. So, for example, when product managers come to me and they're telling me about their product and they are presenting to me information in terms of how well did it work? What have we learned? What will we try next? I get a real sense of how deeply are they thinking about this puzzle. Right. When they share with me, what have I learned? If they're just regurgitating numbers and just spitting out numbers that they've collected from the dashboards, it's like, come on, tell me more. I want the story. What have you figured out in terms of the narrative? There was a product manager who came from one of those big companies, Google, Amazon, etc. Right. And she was great at optimizing numbers. But I would dig in a couple of details, and then I was realizing that thinking wasn't deep enough, regardless of sort of where her pedigree was from. Right. Like, it made me realize I need to build a skill set in terms of thinking more deeply about what have you learned from those numbers? Right. And then in terms of what are you going to try next? Then I also, again, know how well you're thinking about the puzzle solved. Maybe you're thinking of taking too big a risk. And I would then guide you to say, okay, how about, you know, like the lean startup approach? What is a smaller way we could test this so, you know, as the team gives you this information, I am evaluating, but I'm constantly working on development, it gives me the true sense of where they are and in terms of scaffolding. Right. It helps me give people what they need. Someone who has less knowledge, skills and experience, they get more hand holding from me because I know the true answer in terms of how they're actually doing with these three questions. Someone with a lot more experience and I can start to see that they're really nailing this puzzle solving. You know, I give them bigger puzzles, go forth, make it happen and come back, you know, a month from now when you're done, or two months from now. I give them more leeway. So this is how we can use this, this as leaders to move more towards performance development than obsess over evaluation. Although evaluation is always part of the process, that's not the main thing.

Got it. Wow. This has been a really fun conversation. I, I, I, I appreciate you, you know, pouring your heart into this topic and, and I, I loved our, our, our, our conversation back and forth. So maybe to wrap things up, I'm wondering if you have any sort of like final words of wisdom or, or final points that you want to make and then if you can let everybody know how to best connect with you, that would be lovely.

Yeah. So there's one leader who is at Adidas and who's been using this approach and you know, what she shared with me was as they were setting this puzzle and they were asking these guiding questions, one of the reactions from the team was, wait, shouldn't you already know these answers? How you know, it was a vulnerable place to be in. And I faced the same thing, you know, when I was asking those basic questions about how are these users using this product? Not just the product, but like, how do they work, how are they thinking? Right. They feel like basic questions. So the one tip I would give for leaders is in being able to be vulnerable and say, you know, we don't always have the answers, but this is the reality that we're in it together. In solving the puzzle, you'll find that it is actually more motivating for the team and it is vulnerable for you. But there is also this bonding experience that you're going to find these answers together. And then one last thing in terms of connecting with me, what I'll say is you can download the framework for puzzle setting and puzzle solving. I'm happy to share that for you. In the show notes, just go to radicalproduct.com under toolkits, you'll see the OHLS toolkit. And so you can start to use that and I'm working on my second book and I'm in the process of writing the book. So as you use this approach, you know, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, you're very welcome to share with me your experience. And, you know, it might just make it into the book as a case study. You know, I'm in it with you in terms of continuous learning and I've truly enjoyed our conversation. I feel like, you know, this adds to the ideas of continuous learning and adds a little bit more scaffolding for all of that creativity and how do we stay in the problem space more so that we can solve the puzzle better?

Fantastic. Awesome. I really thank you for taking so much time. It's just been a lot of fun.

Thank you so much. I've loved the conversation.

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