No matter what you do, you have customers
meF SOMEONE If you ask who your customers are, you will probably have an easy answer to that question. No matter what you do at work, you probably know who buys the products or services your company makes.
Now, if he were to ask you who spends what you do personally, the answer would not be easy. In many cases, the people who use what you create are not your company's end customers. It is most likely someone who works at the company. What will change if you start thinking? that person your customer?
This is a question most people never consider. To what extent does what I do make my colleagues successful? This can be especially challenging for those performing tasks outside of product development roles. If you work in finance, who uses the spreadsheets you create? What about your legal team? They make policy. How well do such policies support the work of those who must follow them? In other words, how well does your work “work”?
Leading your customers to success defines the value of your work. The simplest way to know if you’ve done so is to measure and see how their behavior changes after completing the task. Did the number of questions asked about the budget in your spreadsheet decrease or increase? Did the procurement policy you implemented decrease or increase supplier onboarding time?
This is the true measure of success and worth. The act of ‘making something’ is just the beginning of a conversation.
This is a radical concept. For decades we have been measured by whether we ‘got something done’ or whether we just completed a task. No one ever asks whether the “thing” we created or the task we completed actually made someone else more successful.
The behavioral change someone sees after using what we've created is called a result. not result It is a measurable change in human behavior that delivers business results. The result is the building blocks. Objectives and Key Results (OKR) — A revived, team-centric goal-setting framework used to redefine success from creating things (outputs) to meaningful changes in human behavior (outcomes).
Imagine you are a shoe designer. Your work will not be consumed by buyers of your company's shoes. Rather, it is consumed not only by shoemakers, but also by material buyers, sellers, marketing and advertising teams, and finance departments. Maybe even convey your design in 3D rendering format. This can be delivered as a video or as a simple PowerPoint presentation. Which delivery channel is best? How do I know?
Actually, that's not the case. And this is a disappointingly inefficient aspect that only considers output. You are guessing. I'm not sure exactly what the best way to convey this information is or what details I should include. The most effective way to know if you're creating value is to look at how people behave.
For shoe designers, key results that indicate they have delivered value include behaviors such as “number of clarifying questions asked after a shoe design is delivered” or “time from design to manufacturing.”
This is a measure of human behavior. They let you know when you've communicated something of value in a valuable way. They say you've succeeded with your internal customers.
Incorporating these key results into human-centric goals (how these people benefit from your work) allows you to set goals that will give you a much better understanding of the quality of your work and how you can improve it.
Footwear designers can construct objective, essential results statements such as:
purpose: It makes it incredibly easy for my colleagues, regardless of department, to work on my shoe designs.
Key results: Reduce the number of questions explicitly asked about each design by 90%.
Key results: Reduce the time from design delivery to manufacturing by 50%.
Describing goals in this way gives shoe designers the opportunity to try different ways to communicate their designs and evaluate which method works best. Thinking of your internal colleagues as your customers makes you a better shoe designer.
Use these tips to use OKRs to benefit your internal customers:
1. Think beyond what you are doing. How does what you do enable the next person to do theirs? Are you making it easier or harder for people through what you've created?
2. Talk to your colleagues. Understand how they work and what makes things easier and more difficult. Find out their obstacles. Perhaps there is a way to help them overcome their obstacles.
3. Work with them to determine successful actions. How do they define it?
Everyone has customers. He may not be who you thought he was. Ask yourself who uses what you create. How do their actions indicate that you have communicated value to them? Then write OKRs to redefine your team's goals and see how that changes the work they produce.
Jeff Godelf and Josh Seiden We have worked with hundreds of organizations as individual contributors, leaders, founders, and consultants. Software designers turned coaches, consultants, and speakers help organizations blend strategy, become customer-centric, and leverage evidence-based decision-making to become more agile (with a lowercase “a”), build better products, and achieve greater success. Achieve it. They previously wrote two books together. their new book Who does what and how much? A practical guide to customer-centric OKRs
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 1:04 PM
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