Building a “digital operating rhythm” with OKR software

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Hello and welcome to McKinsey on Startups. I'm Daniel Eisenberg. Today we are excited to have Deidre Paknad, co founder and CEO of Workboard, joining us on the pod. Workboard is a leading platform provider in the fast growing space of OKR software, a subcategory of enterprise planning software focused on strategic prioritization and execution. These products generally feature dynamic dashboards and other automated tools to help customers manage and track their progress on objectives and key results, or OKRs, the increasingly ubiquitous corporate planning method invented by intel and popularized by Google. PacNutt is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose prior startup had been acquired in 2011 by IBM where she then oversaw a high growth information governance business for three years. It was during that period, as Paknut explains in our wide ranging conversation, that she realized how many organizations had no digital tools to provide what she describes as a single source of truth around a company's strategy, alignment, execution and outcomes, all feeding into the various regular, weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews and status reports. Instead, they have tended to rely on unwieldy, largely manual labor intensive process full of meetings and slide decks. Since 2014 when Pakhnath and her husband Darius Pakhnot, a technologist and engineering veteran of Adobe and Netscape, co founded Workboard, the demand for what the company calls a digital operating rhythm has steadily grown. It has roughly doubled its revenue in recent years and tripled its headcount last year as the pandemic fueled growth of remote work and more frequent strategic planning has made corporations even more interested in using and tracking OKRs. Most recently in May of last year, Workboard raised 75 million in an oversubscribed Series D round, bringing the company's valuation to north of 800 million. Deidre, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you with us today.

I'm delighted to be here.

Tell us about Workboard and also how you came to found the company.

So Workboard is a software company that provides what we call a digital operating rhythm for organizations that helps them execute their strategy faster and achieve more with the people they have now. By operating rhythm I mean a single cohesive system for the long range strategy and where we communicate that the quarterly objectives and key results that are how we are executing on that strategy in the quarter, the monthly business reviews and OPS reviews, where we drive accountability for our progress on that strategy. And the weeklies, the one on ones, the reports, the executive touch points that help us de risk and optimize our execution against that strategy. We think of that as a whole cohesive set of behaviors and activities. The operating rhythm that needs to be digital in order to be effective. Now. I started the company with my co founder after IBM bought my last startup. And I was trying to run a pretty large business that was growing really quickly. I was trying to run it with the same speed and mission metric alignment that my startup had. And I found it extraordinarily difficult in large part because I was through meetings after meetings after meetings and slides and slides and slides, communicating the strategy driving the OPS reviews, driving the business reviews, getting status reporting was just all manual and labor intensive. And I started to think of the labor that went into trying to drive alignment and get transparency is actually really competing with our ability to create value for the business and for its customers. That why is this so manual? This is a process that ought to be the most reliable process in the whole business. And you know, then the light bulbs went off and we said, huh, maybe we should start a software company that makes this the most reliable process in the business.

Right. So it was your experience in a large organization that made you realize the need for this kind of a solution and a platform?

Oh, absolutely. Every business and every leader has a strategy and urgency to achieve it. And very few companies have a single source of truth on. So what is the strategy and how are we doing on it right now? What are our biggest risks and where are the biggest opportunities and are we really aligned? Answering those fundamental questions, that's really hard for large companies to answer because there's no source of truth.

Some people might just assume that these large professional organizations have that sort of system in place, but your experience didn't really exist in terms of a single place where you could get a snapshot. So was it a surprise to you that nothing like that existed?

That's a great question. I think it's not just what's the strategy, but are we executing on it? And at first I thought this is a problem at IBM. IBM doesn't have a system. That is the strategy, what we're executing on in the quarter, how we're aligned on it, who's driving, which metrics, which needles are moving how far this quarter and where are we? I thought, okay, maybe, maybe that's just an IBM problem. They don't have a system for this. And then we went out and interviewed 60 other companies, including Facebook, and realized there isn't a system. And when you think about it, you know, the CRM system and the supply chain system and the HR systems, we know the names of all those systems. And when you think, huh, have I ever heard of a system that is the source of truth on the strategy, current execution against it, how we're aligned, that flows right into our ops reviews and our business reviews. Nothing there. We use people glue and slide decks for that. And it's 2022, it's time to be digital.

Let's dig a little bit into okrs. Tell us what they are and how they bring value to companies versus whatever would have come before.

Yep. So okrs, or objectives and key results are a technique for aligning on outcomes. And they are. They were made popular actually quite a long time ago at intel and then at Google. They are particularly suited to iterating on the outcomes we're trying to drive in a quarter. And they're a team sport. So teams set objectives and key results that align with each other and align with the company's objectives. The objectives are a statement of intention, what is it we're trying to accomplish?

And.

And the key results are what's success in the next 90 days? What will we have more of or less at? What are the outcomes we believe are real victory in the next 90 days? Typically three to five objectives each that have four to five key results. And what you're trying to do with them and why they're so powerful is you're trying to define and get real clarity on what's most valuable for us to put focus and effort on in this quarter. What outcomes are the biggest impact, the best possible outcomes in the next 90 days? It's a technique for focusing energy and effort where it creates the most value. And then at the end of that 90 days, it's a technique that is very effective at saying, okay, great, what did we learn? What got in our way? What's changed outside in the world? What's changed inside in our capacity? And now what do we think are the next 90 days outcomes that drive the highest value to the company and its customers?

And where do KPIs play into this? How does that interact with OKRs?

The answer is it varies a lot from companies. But a way to think about KPIs is their operating metrics. And we've got dashboards of them, millions of them really in big companies. And they tell us where we are, right where there's A big difference in okrs and the way people use that technique most is of the million things we could measure this quarter, what we want to do on these five or these 10 measures, we want to move the needle, and this is how far we want the needle to move in the next 90 days. Moving these 10 needles creates more value than the other 89 that are on the dashboard. And so it's really about deciding what matters most, being very specific about how far you want to go in the period. Right. Where KPIs can be a bit more like, here's the status. They don't always tell you how much we were trying to gain and they rarely tell you of the 90 KPIs which are the most important now. And that inability to know what matters most now is a huge drain for organizations. Energy, effort, brain power, all go to stuff that doesn't matter all that much because people can't tell the difference between where we want to put energy and where we don't really care. Now, OKRs are a way of aligning on what matters most right now and then iterating on that because it's not constant. So take a KPI on, for example, NPS or consumption of an application. Do we want to move NPS this quarter? No. Do we want to move consumption of a particular product? Yes. How far do we want to move it in the quarter? Well, quarter is not very much time, so we probably can only move it about four points. And we need to execute on these tactics in order to move at four points. And we believe if we move the consumption measure this quarter, by the end of the year, we'll see a movement in nps. And NPS might be a constant KPI that we just can see, but where we're putting our energy is moving consumption in the next 90 days. Running a set of experiments, hypotheses on how we drive consumption, measuring to learn and iterating from there.

And it sounds like it's a way in some respects to focus an organization's finite amount of time, labor, scarce resources, so that folks are working on what is going to actually bring the most value.

That's right. It's a mechanism for coming to agreement on what matters and then channeling our energy. You know, startups sort of by their birthright are constant calibrating like they have huge ambition and very little resource. Like their capacity relative to their ambition is wildly mismatched.

Right? Yeah.

Which is, you know, the awesomeness and also the horrifying part of being in a startup. But what okrs do is kind of bring that same scarcity mindset which you just described. We don't have unlimited time and unlimited money and unlimited resources. We all have like fixed amount of time in a given day, in a week, right? And resources are not on tap. If we had to make trade offs of what mattered most, what would we trade in, what would we trade out? And startups are just sort of doing this genetically all the time. OKRs are a technique for larger companies to operate with the same sort of notion of constraint. And that constraint helps drive choices. The other thing that's really powerful about OKR is very different than what preceded them, is okrs put this emphasis on what do we think awesome looks like, like what would be great as opposed to what would be safe, what would be the most predictable result. Instead it flips it to saying, okay, in the next 90 days, what are the best possible outcomes we could achieve? And so not only is it constraint in thinking about I don't have unlimited capacity, but then it's trying to allocate that capacity to the best impact. So it's not about trying to look good in your KPIs, it's actually about trying to be amazing. And I love that combination of, well, let's bring our ambition fully forward. And then given constrained capacity, what are we going to do first? What do we think moves the needles and which needles matter most?

I'm just wondering, in terms of the migration of the okr culture moving out of core tech into other sorts of sectors, what is driving that exactly? And is there a real difference in the nature, the intensity, the operating rhythm for OKRs depending on the sector?

They're part of the operating rhythm and particularly they are the part of the operating rhythm where we align on the outcomes, the results we're trying to achieve in the quarter. What's driving the use of OKRs as a technique and the acceleration of the operating rhythm overall in large enterprise are a couple things. First, of course, is the pandemic. Each quarter the world changed, right? From Q1 to 2 in 2020, from Q2 to 3. Each of those quarters was dramatically different and new things that the organization had to face, encounter, thrive or drive through. Startups were no longer the only companies that had to do that iteration. Every company had to iterate. And then the second part of that is it's not enough for the leadership team to iterate on what it thinks is important. If it doesn't bring the organization along, if it doesn't mobilize people on the iteration, it didn't really iterate, it is standing still, telling itself it's moving. And so OKR is this technique where not only do we align on the objectives and results at the leadership team level, we align objectives and key results across every team. It's how we both iterate and mobilize quarter over quarter as the world changes and moves. And that dynamic now is universal. Right along with that is transformation in literally every industry, sector, automotive, healthcare, energy, like everywhere you look, transformation in the business model, transformation in the structure of the organization. And when we're doing transformation, when we go in new directions, we need to bring people down a new path, one that maybe they can't imagine, one where they don't really know what to do next. Alignment becomes more important, and in transformation again, every organization looks like a startup, learning and learning each quarter as it drives a new business model, new sectors, and operates in new ways. The conditions in large enterprise look very, very much like the conditions have always looked in a young company trying to create a segment or category or launch a new product.

There's not a particular characteristic or way that okrs sort of manifest themselves or are used in terms of one sector versus another.

I think the variation is actually the culture of the company, not so much how they ultimately are using the culture has a lot to do with how quick you can realize the advantage of the faster operating rhythm and OKRs at the center, if you will, an outcome mindset at the center, where there's a culture of compliance, right, where everybody gets paid for coming in on a hundred percent of their numbers. There you have a deeply ingrained mindset to aim for safety, not aim for great. Like to optimize for your personal income as opposed to optimize for the acceleration of the organization. There's real work to overcome kind of the everybody optimized for their paycheck instead of everybody optimized for the growth of the entity. Elsewhere where you have a one team mindset or where you have a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit, entities can more quickly take advantage of what OKRs and a digital operating rhythm can offer them to accelerate strategy execution.

I know that services or coaching is a pretty big important part of your business, and some of that is about how folks can learn to use what Workboard has to offer. Can you talk a little bit about services in terms of the broader offering from Workboard and its role?

Yeah, in the early days. So go back five years or a bit more when we were talking about new ways of iterating and leading and aiming for our best possible Instead of aiming for our most predictable outcomes, it was something that resonated quite well and easily with business leaders. Like, they have a lot of ambition for achieving their strategy, right? They're always aiming for great. They needed the rest of the organization to go there with them and they were looking for help. They understood why they didn't have the internal capacity for how to make the move forward to that digital operating rhythm. And so early on we decided, you know, let's provide that help. Right? And we do that in a couple ways. One, of course, is the overall change management, how to stand up and move the operating rhythm forward, make it more robust, make it digital, make it reliable, data driven. And the second is helping teams have the right conversations where they clarify what their objectives are and set their key results. And in particular, set the key results that reflect what their best possible is, not what their safety number is. And that coaching helped kind of unlock the ambition of teams, like helped them trust that they could aim high and move forward. And it helped coach leaders on how to change some of their vocabulary from what the hell went wrong here to okay, what are we learning? The combination of those things have helped them take advantage of the technique and the systems in a faster way. Now we are in 2022 and many, many companies in really every industry sector are either trying okrs or have them in spreadsheets somewhere. So we do a little less coaching and services now than we used to. In the early days as organizations didn't have the internal competency and know how or the capacity, it was really important for us to provide that so our executive sponsor could actually get the benefits that they hope to from the system.

We've spoken before about how services from the investor view for software companies can sometimes be viewed as taboo. You know, that can be a drain on margins or not the kind of business we want to fund, that sort of thing. Can you talk a little bit about how you had to navigate any investor skepticism of services being part of the business and what you learned about navigating that and finding the resolve to stick to your conviction?

Yeah, great point. So dial back like four or five years. There was a prevailing kind of, I don't know, mantra or mindset, which is services are bad. Software companies don't provide services. Partners provide services if you need them. But if a customer needs services, to adopt your software, your software must be bad. And that was just the prevailing think that if you had services, it's camouflaging a problem. There was a fair bit of pressure from VCs that I would talk to when I was trying to raise money. And you know, obviously those conversations, we're a little bit short, but there's just a disconnect from reality there. So if you're trying to sell the 13th generation of something everybody understands and your total user community is a hundred people or less, you probably don't need services because the customer has the competency, they have the know how, they know why. And you're only talking about getting a hundred people to do something new at the same time and in the same way. Now in our case, a large automotive maker bought 20,000 seats. They weren't already doing okrs and they didn't have a lot of internal competency. And it takes a little bit of services Finesse to get 20,000 people to do the same new thing in the new way at a new time. That sort of orchestration of new system, new way of operating and large scale. It's irrational to think that no change management is required. And so I just ignored people who thought that was a big problem in a software business. And I fundamentally viewed it as an essential requirement for us to create the category we wanted to drive the value that we wanted to help our customers actually realize the full benefit that we wanted. Now the knock on effect which makes these conversations with our investors much easier now is when we deliver that coaching help with the change management. Our customers quickly move from 20,000 users to 30,000 users to 40,000 users. Right? We expand our footprint faster when we made sure that customer got value quickly.

Whether it's services or another aspect of an entrepreneur's business vision, do you think that there are a fair amount of entrepreneurs who can be too easily swayed by what a venture investor might be telling them about how you should be doing this? I'm just wondering, given your experience of encountering skepticism initially and then sticking to your guns, if you think that that sometimes can happen with other entrepreneurs.

Oh, for sure. I don't know if it's sticking to guns. I mean, building a business is a giant hypothesis, right? And so nobody knows how the story is going to come out. The fact that it's just all hypothetical, you have imperfect information and you have imperfect, perfect amounts of time to execute on your imperfect information. It's just a series of best bets you can make in the moment. A lot of times for startup CEOs and founders, you have very little data on what other companies are doing. I mean, we're all private, right? So nobody's telling you whether the other metrics in the other businesses are Better, worse, faster, slower. You just. You're really operating with a lot of dark. Right? You look to your VCs, who in theory, see other companies that pitch them as people who have pattern information that's valuable to you. And it is, of course, really valuable to you. What is a little hazardous, though, is that the pattern is sometimes not deeply understood. The causes in the pattern are missed entirely. And so the pattern by itself isn't a conclusion.

Right.

It's correlation, not causation. And so for startup CEOs, you can say, best data I had at the time, and given when I needed to raise more money and given the market conditions, I decided to take the advice. Even though fundamentally it didn't sit well in my stomach, that still may have been the best decision at the time. I don't want to diss other startup founders who, you know, didn't stick to their guns. I think guns are hard to stick with in a hypothetical world.

Talking about investors and funding, there's obviously been a lot of momentum, both for Workboard and other folks in the OKR software space. I think your last raise was May of last year. I'm a Series D. I'm just wondering, in terms of scaling, what are the biggest challenges that you have encountered at Workboard and what lessons has that given you?

We raised 75 million and tripled our headcount in 2021. For many entrepreneurs, one of the most challenging things is growing the team when you can't see any of them and you don't know any of them in person. Right. We all had to get really, really intentional about onboarding. And what are the culture drivers when shared energy in a physical space is not one of the culture drivers for startups, often a big, big part of the culture is the feeling you get in the physical space together. And so the thing that was super challenging for us in 2021 was how do we turn what was effectively a Volkswagen bus into an Airbus while it was flying, while we were doing all of it on Zoom? That was pretty challenging. Right? But we spent a lot of time trying to really, really make an onboarding experience that created connection and opportunities for people to see each other across the company, not just have their world shrink to the seven people that are on their team that they're on Zoom with all day, but actually get to know the bigger pool of people and shared talent.

And you were not just expanding the whole organization, but bringing in key hires of your executive leadership team. You had a new Chief revenue officer, Abby McBride came in in the midst of this sort of unprecedented period of change and lack of physical connection that had to be difficult to navigate, I would imagine.

You know, the big takeaway, I think if I would boil it to one, and Abby's just such a great case in point. The big takeaway is in that hiring environment. Hiring to your values becomes the first and most important thing. You have fewer levers on culture and value in a digital and distributed world than you did in an in person world. And so one of the most important things is on the way in the door, you should be sure you have a values match because it gets away from you faster, because you're more reliant on each person coming in to really be an ambassador for the culture, not a detractor from the culture. And so I would say that maybe is our biggest learning over last year.

Although I can imagine that would be hard also. Right. You're trying to figure that out as you're doing the hiring process.

You got to really do the work to say, okay, what are the tells? What are the things that would indicate to us that this isn't a values. The other thing that really gets at values is a diverse panel of interviewers. And in particular, where that diversity is both age and gender, you also get a decent number of tells in people who are dismissive to people who are different gender, different culture, younger than them. Those things, if you're intentional about it, I think you can put more rigor into it than you had to in an in person world. And you probably had rigor in the in person world, but it was osmotic and it was through presence versus questions.

In the same vein, software talent and technical talent is obviously critical for any startup and especially one like workboard that is scaling at the extent you were talking about. What is your approach to that process when the talent can be such a.

Challenge these days for us? A couple things. One is talent's not concentrated in any one location, in any one state or any one country. That mindset from the beginning is super helpful. I think the next is, yeah, it's all accretive. So if you do values match and you aim high from, you know, 10 people and 100 people, then that's kind of built into the DNA. When you're aiming at 500 people, I think the next is we run panels and practices and we find those are super instructive on the person's ability to team well and the quality of their thinking and the quality of their work. Even in an executive hire, we still do a panel where there's an assignment and it's a thinking exercise and it's real world problem solving. And then you present that to a panel of peers or teammates, that's pretty helpful. And when we don't do it like we skip it for some reason, it backfires more often than any other thing we miss in the hiring process.

Right. And then in terms of being able to retain the best software talent and keep them engaged and wanting to stay on, what is your approach there?

I think it's a full time and continuous job in a company, not a one and done thought. And in particular this sort of what's a great place to work or how do you maintain or build momentum for the mission we're on together? I think those are constant effort, like intentional. We intend to execute on creating a workboard experience that is an absolute career accelerator and joy maker. And if we're not actually putting headcount and money and time and my time on that, it's not happening. And so it's like thinking about executing any other strategy or strategy pillar you have, actually map it out, set objectives and key results, measure to learn, measure to improve and execute against the outcomes that you set out to, and then really do that with the same kind of investment of focus, attention of mind share as you would an international launch strategy or a revenue play or any other thing in the company. And for us, that includes my paying attention to us, my being vested in what it's like to work here and the impact that we can have in the world. If I don't care about it week to week, why should I think anybody else does?

It's a good point. You really have to model that. It's a priority. So you've obviously created many businesses and you've also helped software categories in larger organizations. Broadly speaking, how would you say your past experiences, both successes and failures, have shaped your approach to running and scaling workboard up to now?

I know it's a large question that was very meta. I'm thinking, I mean, it's inevitable, right? That every one of those experiences is a layer and is cumulative. I'm not at the early stage of my career, so the thing I think about a lot with respect to experiences is to try and hold myself super accountable to knowing what I know. But being diligent about rigorous, about authentic, about looking at what I think I know right from prior experience and then releasing, is that still relevant? Have the assumptions underneath that thing you knew changed? Because if the assumptions underneath it have changed, then you don't know it anymore. Right? That may no longer be the right way to look at something, the right way to think about it. And so where I am in my career is a little bit more about making sure that I am wide open to learning what's new. And I am untethered to what I may have learned in the past that is no longer relevant to the present or the future that I'm trying to create. I don't think that's automatic, like the reinvention part, relearning, unlearning. I think they're super important. And frankly, for anybody with more than 15 years experience and at the current rate of change in our universe, it's a fair way to be. Even if you're earlier in your career.

Than I am, you almost have to be really self conscious about forcing yourself to be open to new things and learning new ways. And you may have a vast reservoir of experience and knowledge, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you know what you need to know at this point in time, running a business.

Totally. I think that's the opposite for first time entrepreneurs and young ones in particular, they have the opposite problem, which is they don't know what they know. The things that are working and that they have. Right. Because they haven't seen them before, haven't done them before. They have more doubt where they don't need it.

Yes. So in terms of other lessons or pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, what would you want to say? Those who come to you for counsel.

Or advice, I think for entrepreneurs who are in particular maybe second time entrepreneurs or people with a fair bit of experience, surround yourself by people who are not like you, create diversity around you. So people who are very different age than you, people who are very different ethnic backgrounds, people from different genders and all combinations of those things. Diversify your input so that you have a broader perspective. You have more people empowered to be heretics, asking you questions that make you uncomfortable and making you think deeper and frankly making you work harder to explain the value proposition, to explain the direction. Because when they make you work harder for those things, they make you better at those things and they increase your impact as a leader and I think they increase your impact as a company driving your market or category further forward. I think diversity of thinking around you, diversity of experience is the golden thread that carries you forward.

What's your horizon in terms of looking forward on diversification, product development, scaling. Where do you see workboard moving over the next, let's say five to ten years from now?

There's a couple big animals that matter One of those, of course, is partnerships and strategic alliances. And among those, of course, is when we talk about 20,000 people at an automaker shifting from an output to an outcome mindset and adopting okrs at scale. Clearly, partnerships are important there and will shift aggressively into our services relationships with partners being the primary go to market versus our own services. And I think that's super important to the broad adoption of digital operating rhythm and workboard. I think the next is of course, we will deepen our investment in that operating rhythm and all the components of it. I think there's a couple new areas there where we get to close the gaps between our understanding of the strategy and our execution of it. And we'll introduce a couple new products and capabilities there that are quite important. And then I think there's going to be a wholesale shift in how we interact with software and what we expect it to do for us. And I'm very excited about a set of things we're announcing later this quarter and then later this year that make the interaction in software, the collaborative aspects of software, more inclusive and more fulfilling for every stakeholder. You know, traditionally software has been forms. You go to fill in, you go to put data there and you go to get data back. And then the rest of the work you did, meetings and discussions and decisions and all that was all offline. And now we're online in a digital world all of the time. And there's, I think, an epic shift in how we want to interact with each other online and how we want to interact together within the tools we use for our business. And so we'll do some pretty novel things with respect to the experience of working together in software. And those are really, really oriented around the notion of inclusion and making it more fulfilling to do the work we need to do together.

What innovations, whether technical or ways of working, do you see on the horizon that you think will heavily impact work board and the sector as a whole? Looking out over the next decade or.

So, I think there's going to be a giant move out of chat. Over the past two years, obviously in Pandemic, there's been a big migration to things where all our apps that we work with all the time are going to be right there next to all of the messages coming at us. I actually think it's quite the opposite. I think the interrupt driven, noisy, distracted, derailing digital world is exhausting us all. And I think there's going to be a shift away from noise to a little bit more, if you will, quiet, context, rich, contained and Effective or productive workspaces that are less interrupt driven, less message driven, less notifications drive our day. I think there's a pretty big shift coming and I'm actually quite excited for it because I'm tired of all the messages.

Yeah, right, so you mean we can actually get real work done during the day as opposed to only doing email and messages and then having to focus on real work after a certain hour?

That's right. That somehow we got to this place where literally chat messages hijack our attention a thousand times a day and there's no way we achieve our best possible impact when we let the last message drive the next hour.

I want to ask you about expansion internationally, which is obviously a critical topic and issue for startups as they scale. And I'm just wondering how important that is to Workboard. What kind of differences, if any, do you see in customer acquisition by region? How challenging has it been to bring the OKR approach to developing markets outside of North America?

Global markets are super important, important for us and actually we've had international customers for quite a long time. Reliance Industry is the largest company in India, super diverse company actually, including JIO and their oil company and so on. They've been a customer for probably four years, Right. And they started using okrs a very long time ago. And in Europe, Renault and ZF and Allianz and whole host of customers that are European headquartered. But even for our US customers, right? VMware, Cisco for example, many of the teams that are users in that world are actually in China and in India and in Europe and so on. Right. Because in a sense who our customers are, they're already global. We have also in 2021 built out a team in Europe, actually based in Germany specifically. And we think it's quite important market. The dynamic we experienced in the pandemic, being able to meet online removed a lot of the barriers to international business and international partnerships. In the past you could never do business with a German company without getting on a plane and flying to Germany or living in Germany and nobody was leaving home. So we could all just get on the same zoom and it didn't really matter where in the world we were talking to each other from. I think actually access to international markets accelerated in a work from home, closed world environment. And we anticipate those doors are opening now and they'll be open for 2022 in person business. We've staffed and built out in Europe for that reason.

Do you feel that in the last few years as you expand in those areas that you've learned anything about how best to navigate that, which can be a challenge often for startups looking to move beyond their home market.

This is one of those areas where I'll say I know what I know, which is I have made mistakes about how and where to Europe, what it would really take in other companies. And I've had an opportunity to be the person that launched software products in Europe for the first time as a head of product marketing. So a lot of experiences learned in particular in Europe, that serve us well at this moment in time on how and where and at what pace to enter and how to kind of do the math on that, where I expect us to have a little more to learn and a little less to rely on, is thinking about Asia Pacific and those markets we have collectively in our company, less experience and capability. And so I think we're in a situation there where we don't know what we don't know. You can ask me next year what we learned from those missteps.

Right? We'll get back to that in the future. Well, listen, Deidre, I want to thank you again for taking the time to speak with us today. It's been a great conversation.

Thank you. Such a pleasure to talk.

Thanks again to Deidre Pakna, co founder and CEO of Workboard, for speaking with us today. Also want to say thanks, as always, to our McKinsey on Stardust production, Molly Carlin, Polly Noah, Sid Romtree, Myron Shurgan and Katie Zamierowski. And finally, thank you for listening. We hope you'll join us again for McKinsey on Startups.

This has been McKinsey on Startups, hosted by Daniel Eisenberg. We welcome your feedback, so please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Hope you join us next time for more broad global perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for accelerating growth. Thanks for listening.