Scaling your Most Important Product: Your Company with Grafana Labs COO Douglas Hanna

And while everyone's getting their audio set up, uh, Douglas, I'm just going to go over a few quick housekeeping tips for everyone, let you know a little bit more about what you can expect in the next 30 minutes before I pass it over for Douglas to take over. Um, just wanted to let you all know this is a 30-minute session and it is interactive. Douglas is going to have time at the end of his session to answer any of your questions, um, in the chat live. So please make sure to stick around for that, and we hope you'll be able to turn your cameras on and be part of the conversation. When it does come time for Q&A, feel free to unmute yourself and jump right in, or you can drop it down into the chat or even use the raise hand function that you can find in the participants area. So feel free any of those ways, and we'll make sure that your questions can be addressed. And just a reminder, these sessions are being recorded and they will be posted to the SAS YouTube channel as well as shared with you after along with the slides. So definitely will be a great resource for you to reference later or also share with anyone else. That may not be able to join. And then just a final reminder, we hope that you've already been able to take advantage of the Brella one-on-one networking tools. But if not, you have the rest of today and all day tomorrow to do that as well. So I'm going to drop the link down in the chat, but definitely hope that you can take advantage of that. There have already been some amazing conversations so far today, and really excited for everyone to take advantage of that. Okay, few more people just coming in. Thank you so much for joining. For everyone that just joined, Douglas is going to have time for Q&A at the end, so please get your questions ready to join that conversation. Douglas, without further ado, feel free to go ahead and take it away.

Cool. Thanks, Taylor. Hey, everybody. Good afternoon or morning, whatever time zone you're in. I'm Doug Hannah. I'm the CEO of a company called Grafana Labs. We're in the observability space, so we work with developers, engineers, and folks like that. On helping them get better visibility into their systems. Relevant maybe for this, this audience and what this discussion is about, Grafana is about a 250-person company. We're remote-first, we're a Series B stage company. We have people all over the world. And then before Grafana, I worked at Zendesk for about 4 years, most recently running operations there, where I dealt a lot with kind of OKRs and company planning and strategy, that sort of stuff. And then prior to that, entrepreneur twice, once successfully, once not so successfully. So I have kind of seen a couple different things, a couple different company stages. And today's talk is all about how do you scale your company as the product. So we talk a lot about products themselves and scaling our product and being ready for enterprise and being ready for mid-market, etc. But we don't tend to talk as much about the company itself. And I tend to think of if you're an operations person or, or a CEO, that you can think of your company effectively as a product that you scale. So there's this graphic that I like, product management, which is really like, if you think about the job to be done of like a car or transportation device, there are a bunch of different ways to— there are a bunch of different ways to build that. So Probably the suboptimal way is you start with the wheel, and then you go two wheels, and you have kind of half a car, and then eventually you have four cars. But if you kind of think about it more broadly, and you have this broader job to be done, like maybe you start with a skateboard, and then you go to a scooter, and then a bike, and then a motorcycle, and then a car. They all help accomplish a discrete transportation goal without kind of being restricted in the way that the above examples are. So similar to with any sort of product, you want to start small, kind of build your capabilities. And as you get more advanced, you'll be ready to proceed and eventually get that fully featured end state. So a lot of— I'm going to use these examples a couple of times. We'll talk about what's the skateboard and what's the car for a couple of different processes. And it's about thinking about scaling your company. And then we can have a discussion as a group around maybe how some of you have done that with your own teams. So this is another kind of product development example. This is really like lean product development where you, where you start with something small. It's all about delivering value, kind of measuring things, thinking about how you continuously improve. And the same is going to apply to really how you build your company processes and how you operate your company versus like your kind of waterfall development where you ship this big perfect thing ideally at the end. It rarely works out like that. And then you look to go forward with it. So the goal is how do we do this in an incremental way, in a lean way, and then really, really advance it from there. So I think the first thing I really talk about is like, what are you solving for? And I always kind of remind folks this. I talk to a lot of like biz ops people and people like that. Like you don't want to build process just to add process like that. That usually gets you in a bad place. So when you think about that, kind of related to that is don't be dogmatic. So like goals versus OKRs versus V2MOM, like in my opinion, it doesn't really matter. I talk to a lot of people kind of trying to build goals programs at their companies and they always like, this is a common question. And my suggestion is like, it doesn't really, or my answer is it doesn't really matter. It's all about, what you're trying to solve for. And like similar, like if you're talking about all-hands process, like weekly versus monthly versus quarterly with rotating versus static agenda, like the details are a little less important. And if you over-engineer the process, you're going to alienate people and kind of like with Schitt's Creek, if you're like, you're going to have people that are going to be like, hey, I don't want to participate in this, or this is stupid, or this isn't resonating with me. And if you over-engineer it, that's a lot more likely to happen. And I really like— you want to think about these processes as a business leader trying to achieve an outcome, not as like a process person trying to design a perfect process. Like, the end state is not that you have a perfect goals program. The end state is something else. And when we go through a couple examples, we'll talk about this. So let's look at a goals program as an example. I think this is one of the kind key, key programs that like an ops team or an ops function or a business leader thinking about growing your team and function to really think through. And again, I'm going to try and apply this like skateboard to car framework. So, uh, again, like the key outcome, like start trying with that, is like I think a good goals program is going to create dialogues around what's important and seeing people work towards the same set of priorities. If you're If you're kind of— a great goals program is not one in which like every goal itself or key result, etc., is like perfectly defensible in the Supreme Court. Like that's not the objective of the goals program. It's really just get people talking, get people understanding what the priorities of the business are. So if you think about that, like maybe the V1 of the V1 for an earlier-stage company is like your company priorities for a month or a quarter. Like just writing down like, hey, here's what we want to accomplish this month or this quarter. These are the most important things to us. Again, get people talking about what those priorities are. The next step could be, okay, let's apply like an OKR framework and talk about that for the quarter. And again, it's a quarter, it's not a month, it's not a day, it's not a year. Thinking about like, okay, how is it? Let's look a couple months out and just think about what our priorities are in that period. Maybe the next step, and this is kind of starting to the journey that when I joined Grafana, we were about 70 people. We really just started with our company-wide OKRs. And then our next step was, okay, our leadership team set quarterly OKRs. And that was like, we didn't ask the whole company to set it on week 1, but we kind of proved and we got people bought in at a kind of a leadership level. And then you see maybe all employees set OKRs each quarter. And that's kind of like, that's a pretty mature stage. Your motorcycle is getting pretty far at that point. And then finally, like, then you think about like a goal narrative and some like more overarching document to explain the broader context of what you're trying to accomplish. All employees are going to set OKRs and you probably spend a decent amount of time on like alignment between different employees and functions. And that, that's all really important when you're at a much more mature stage of setting OKRs. It's similar to like, your product that maybe just starts as like a very lightweight thing to do X and then eventually gets very sophisticated, uh, think about your goals program the same way and all kind of, uh, all kind of focus on those key outcomes. Uh, company-wide comms, another thing that people think a lot about as their company scales. Like, as we've scaled Grafana from 70 to 250 people in the last year and a bit, uh, this has had to scale a lot for us. So kind of our, uh, our Our key outcome was what's important. We want people to know what's important to them in terms of like what they need to do every day and what their role in the business is and to the business overall. Like if I work in finance, I probably don't have a lot of insight into what's important in engineering or vice versa. And we need to make sure that people, different people understand like what's important to the business overall and how that affects them. And then ideally done successfully, I create some alignment across the company. So the skateboard version of that is you have occasional all-hands meetings. They have ad hoc agendas. They're probably scheduled sort of randomly when it's like, hey, we have something we want to talk about and that we're thinking about. That was when I joined upon, we were pretty light on process. That's what we had. And that's okay. I think for an earlier stage company, that's fine. And then you scale it out. Monthly all-hands meetings, like let's put it on the calendar, let's commit to doing it every month. And then you have more set agendas. It's not a really rigid thing. You're not going over like an extensive KPI deck every time. Like that, that's okay too. Finally, like you might want to break out your all-hands meetings. So a common one that I've seen is you start getting like a people manager all-hands and you talk about things that might be more relevant to a group of people managers and leaders in the business, as well as kind of just broader all-hands meetings for all employees. And perhaps your next place is something where async team updates can happen. So that might be like email, newsletter type things to all staff or different Slack channels or something like that. But again, it's like the step in advanced communication where if you're a smaller team, it's probably over-engineering it. And if you're a lighter weight team or you're a larger team, now there's a lot more things that are happening. It's much more difficult. For any single individual to keep up with it. And then finally, and this could go into like airplanes and aircraft carriers of company-wide communications if you want to continue this kind of, this example here, but like maybe you get into team and department all-hands and quarterly kickoffs and things like that. Like there's so many things you can do around company communications, but you can imagine if like you're a 25-person team and someone like me comes in and it's like, well, We should really start with team and department all-hands, and then we should do a quarterly all-hands and a sales kickoff and all this other stuff. People are going to be like, holy crap, like, you have way too much stuff that you're trying to do and way too much stuff that, like, this is inappropriate for our size company. And it goes back again to these key outcomes and really accomplishing what you're setting out to accomplish as a business. So other examples with, in the left-hand column, kind of your your skateboard and your right-hand column, your heavy kind of car approaches. So let's talk about some of these. So budgeting is a super common, generally finance-driven process. And really, real estate companies will not have a mature finance function, and that's okay. Budgeting, like, think about it as rough plan of spending priorities, management of spend above a certain amount, probably some sort of lightweight process to approve headcount. Like, that's gonna be the main needle movers. Whereas if you are a mature company, you're going to do a monthly, like, budget versus actuals. You're going to do— you're going to have much better, much more robust tracking and spending across major categories. You're going to think about a process, a planning process that does both bottom-up planning as well as top-down and tries to reconcile that. There's a lot of space in between those, and if you skip from one or the other too drastically, it's going to cause issues. Metrics analytics is another really common one. I think it's a really good idea to go over a few key metrics each week, add some data to a BI system, start looking at it on a regular basis, just kind of operationalizing this idea of like, hey, we're looking at our metrics, we're trying to understand them. And then that gets into like full operational reviews, multiple levels of metrics and analysis, data analytics team. Like there's a lot you can do certainly in this area over time and as your company gets larger and We had a lot of that at Zendesk when we were like multi-thousand person company, but it was, it's a lot less relevant to us at Grafana. It's a 200-something person company. Same thing with product launches. Like your first version of your product launch is probably like a blog post or a tweet or something. And maybe an internal FAQ if you're like really on top of it. And then product launches at mature companies, like the furthest extreme is like, think of like Apple where they have these beautiful high-fidelity keynotes and press and all this other stuff like that, that's way beyond probably anyone in this audience is even thinking about. But maybe, maybe you do get to like product marketing decks and demo kits and webinars and press and all this other stuff. Like you want to increment these over time. And if you think of like each of these different processes effectively as a roadmap for how you're going to accomplish that as your company continues to scale and the company gets more complex, it will really help kind of make it a lot more attainable. A lot more actionable. The final kind of thought here is your teammates are customers too. Don't be afraid to use pilots. How can I reduce the scope of this is a great question. So maybe we'll start it with one team or one segment of the team, like the leadership team only. You want to iterate and learn. You want to ask for feedback. Like I always talk about these processes as we're going to learn from them. You're going to want to think about each initiative having maybe a Slack channel or similar kind of open forum for questions feedback, encourage that dialogue, send surveys, ask people like, hey, did the OKR process work for you this quarter? What could we do better? What would you like to see be done differently? And then like, start with a general tool that your team already uses before you graduate to a dedicated tool. Like, it really is sad to see the process that is probably well-designed, well-thought-of, and actually needed in the business like die because of a poor tool implementation or or die because people aren't used to it. So start with something that's much more general and kind of broadly applicable, critically that your team already uses. And then you can graduate to a dedicated planning tool or OKR tool or whatever the appropriate project is. So my top takeaways: your company's key processes are going to evolve over time. Don't be dogmatic about the process. It's all about the business outcome. And finally, treat your teammates like customers and ask for feedback. So if you, um, you're asking them, you'll hopefully hear, get some, get some honest feedback and really be able to take that to the next level. So, um, that's a little bit about kind of scaling your company as a, uh, as a product and thinking about it with a product mindset. Uh, I have some questions here for this group. And feel free to maybe unmute yourself and speak up. I think the group is small enough where we can do that if you feel like you have a particular story to share. Otherwise, we can move into more general Q&A as well. So I'll start with like, for companies that have goal processes, and if you don't, I'm curious to know maybe why, how have they evolved over time? So if anyone's particularly passionate about that, feel free to speak up. Or nobody has goal process and no one wants to talk about it. So possible. Martin, I saw you came on.

Douglas, I usually just like to wing it. I don't really believe in goals.

I'm just kidding.

I'm willing to chat about our startup school process because we're doing this right now for FY21 planning. Some CEO of Draft, we're an FP&A platform and we do, you know, budgeting and forecasting. So we're helping people do all these revenue models, but now we've grown from like 10 to 30 people over the last year. And I can't just like be like, hey, do this, do this, do this. And we need to like communicate and everyone's working from home. So we've rolled up a lot of what you talk about with OKRs and then cascading that through and aligning and like rallying everyone around a theme. And then being able to then have that drive all the decision-making for what we do in product, what we do for hiring and people and process here. So a lot of what you're showing there is that, and we couldn't—

sorry, does that theme change quarterly or like, like, is, is the theme like reliability or scalability or something like that? Like, like how, how general or specific is the theme?

Like for example, you know, we just did our Series A, so now our investors expect us to scale. So we did like all the unscalable stuff before, like all the hacky stuff you have to do to get to that level. And then now it's like, all right, we actually have to like create stuff so that, you know, all of our leaders now went, you know, we went from 0 to 1 last year and all those functions. And now it's like, those people are going to play our coaches. And how do they scale themselves through tools, through process, through, you know, being able to delegate and go from there. So that's like our rallying theme on the year is all about, you know, time to value for everything that we do, you know, within the app, within the company, within each of the teams and speed for scale.

Nice. I like that. Well, thanks for sharing. Uh, Dane, you, you were going to chime in some thoughts on how you wing it. How about led to tremendous success?

Well, I don't know if I'm the best use case. I mean, I just find that as my teams have evolved, the goals become much less lone wolfy and more discussion-based. And I find the goals that have enough time to breathe— like, I think of a goal as like a tree. Like, the seed's planted, and then it's brought to the team as discussion. And if there's enough patient attention put on it, it can kind of grow into the tree and grow deeply into each person. And then it actually becomes a reality, like the goals of success before I ever start in that case, because so long story short, the goal becomes more of a discussion than a written down thing.

Does that, does that imply that the goal kind of stays true maybe for multiple quarters or months or planning periods versus like, hey, this is something we want to get done between January and March?

Well, I think the goal kind of stays the same, but the few voices transform it to like a SMART goal times 2, as opposed to if I did it alone.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I think a good kind of outcome of this, like I said, people are talking about it and you're getting bought into it versus just like this, hey, I'm sharing the goal for you as a company. And like, please, please follow this. Like, it becomes much more collaborative. Awesome.

It's a very different energy.

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, it's a very different like conversation and set of outcomes if people feel bought into it. Um, cool. Next one is like, do, do companies here have a planning cadence? Uh, maybe besides just goal setting, like a lot of companies just start with goal setting and that's that's totally fine, but curious if companies have embraced some sort of planning process beyond, beyond just OKRs or similar goal setting. A lot of times this will start with like a product roadmap and a planning process or product roadmap, and then you can see that like, okay, then we're going to do some like good old concept conference-driven development where we have a big event maybe once or twice a year that we're trying to align to. Uh, that was, that was how that started at Grafana largely, is what are, what are we going to build to hit our next kind of 6-month major kind of conference event. Uh, but curious if other companies have taken a similar or different approach.

I haven't got my video shared, but, um, uh, we actually are following— I don't know if you know, like, David Sachs has a cadence that he he pushed out.

Um, so we mentioned that a couple, maybe a month or two ago.

Yeah, so we do exactly that cadence, um, with a bit of modification obviously, and a bit more fleshed out than what he has.

Yeah, I guess maybe probably not everyone here is familiar with it. Do you mind just explaining it a little bit?

Yeah, so there's sort of like two calendars that kind of snap together, and the, the first is— and there's sort of two key events. The first one is a sales kickoff event, and at that event is sort of talking about what are the product roadmap features that are coming out later on in the half of the quarter, aligning all the sales folks about, hey, what are the new products coming out, how are we going to price them. Any of the customer success folks join that first call, and then We typically bring in like a guest speaker or someone to make it fun. Then we brought in a rapper called Harry Mack in the first time we ran it. That was really cool. And then what we then do is the next piece of it is the product launch event, which is, yeah, I think of an Apple event, but a million times less exciting.

Yeah. Because of the budget.

And so that sort of goes on mid-quarter and then we invite our customers to that event. And then everything else kind of revolves around it.

And you're doing that every quarter, so 4 times a year?

Yeah, so we've done it, we've tested it out for the first time in Q4 this year and then went pretty well, and we're doing that all next year.

Yeah, that's great. And then I think, is your, how large is your company just in terms of—

We're about 70 people.

Cool, yeah, my imagination is you all get— it's great that you can do that on like a quarterly basis too, that you're that agile. Um, I imagine it's when it gets a little bigger, it'll be more like a semi-annual or annual basis. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Uh, other Q&A about, uh, kind of goals or company planning or scaling? I'm gonna take the slides off here that way I can, I can see folks better. But any other kind of questions that you want to ask?

I have a question for you, Douglas. Do you, do you find, um, that the planning process was— is like boring, or like, um, I guess, I guess that'd be my initial question is, did you, did you ever find it boring and did it become more fun as you got more used to it, or?

Yeah, I think as the person facilitating it, I, I try to be honest that this is like OKR planning and things like that. It's not like probably most people's idea of a good time. You can do things to try and make it a little bit more fun and exciting. Like at Zendesk, I would give our kind of monthly OKR updates with like a very gift-filled presentation and try and make it fun and accessible for the employee audience. But like with my peers on the leadership team, I'm like, yeah, this is tough and a little tedious, but it's super important. And like, it's a, it's a good use of our time. It's a good investment of our time. Time. So my strategy is to try and just be honest about that, and I think people, people get it. Hopefully it's not like I want to like stab my eyes out at the end of it. I don't think it's that bad, but I'm sure people would rather watch something on Netflix than participate in the planning process.

Cool.

I guess I'll wait and see if anybody else has any other questions. I tend to jump in too fast, and I want to give other people a chance.

Sure. Any other questions from the group?

I've got one more. You mentioned about, you know, these different levels of detail you could go on. Have you found any great OKR software or platforms that just, you know, scale? Like, I know there's a bunch of them out there, but, you know, one that you're just like, you know, for a hybrid company that works really well?

Yeah, we—

I've used a bunch. We did a trial of BetterWorks at Zendesk. It was pretty good. We used Workday Goals for a while. We're at Grafana, we're using a tool called 15Five, which does more like all the goal tools are kind of broader than just goal setting. They want to do performance reviews and check-ins and things like that. Lattice is another one. I think they're all like They're all pretty good. They're all fine. Uh, they're— I don't think any of them like unlock some magical like goal process engagement. Uh, that would be nice if it did, but I think they're really like, it's helpful to have a place to organize it. But if starting with like Google Docs or Google Sheets works for your company, like I wouldn't argue against that either. So the shortlist, I would say like depending probably in ascending order for company size would be like 15Five, Lattice, BetterWorks. Like, I think any of those three could be pretty good, um, and are probably worth evaluating if you're looking for a goal/holistic performance management tool. Any other questions? Okay, great. If anyone has any follow-up questions, you can find me on Twitter. It's just my full name, Douglas Hannah. Or if you want to email me, it's just doug@grafana.com. I'll post that in the chat here. So feel free to reach out.

I have one question, Douglas.

Yeah, go for it.

When would you say that planning is actually an interference with productivity?

A great, a great question. Usually that I hear from planning, planning cynics, but I think if you, if you feel like you're spending more time planning the business than operating the business, and/or if planning the business is getting in the way of operating the business, your ratio is probably off. Another thing I think about too is like the effectiveness of your planning. So if you're planning for A, B, and C to happen, and then like 3 months later X, Y, and Z happens, you're probably not at like a company-wide level of maturity to be able to like really go through a robust planning process. So for example, like, I don't know, a company like Apple could probably do a 5-year plan and it would be credible and they generally would follow it.