Sally Foote: Make Your Own Magic Goggles

Predicting the future is hard. but predicting the future is something managers of teams, products or businesses are asked to do every single day. When is going to happen? How long will it take? What will the effect be? What will customers think? How will your team react?

The good news is that while we might not be able to predict exactly how our team members will behave, we can absolutely work out, every day, whether our teams are going to succeed or fail. Once we know that, we can take action to help them when we need to.

Sally, explains how you can build yourself a pair of ‘magic’ goggles that will help you see into the future. She shares case studies from her own experiences and from companies you will have heard of, to help you understand whether your team will succeed or fail and how you can see your way to their success.

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Transcript

Okay, we’re definitely going to have to work on the walk on music. The volume this time was great. Don’t you think absolutely brilliant.

Thank you. Thanks everyone. Lovely to be here. I think everyone comes to these conferences and comes on stage and says, gosh, I’m so excited to be here. But I can tell you that I am genuinely very, very excited to be here. The last time Mark asked me to speak at Bos was March 2020, and we sort of all know how that played out. It was kind of, you know, is it going to happen? Isn’t it going to happen? And I remember, in the end, stacking suitcases on top of my spare bed the laptop balance to record the talk, and it all felt a bit novel at the time. But as you know, we all got very bored of that situation. And isn’t it wonderful to all be back in person?

So I’m Sally Foote and I am genuinely excited to be here today. So thank you very much for having me. Do you know that someone actually predicted the pandemic, and they didn’t do it in the pub to their mates? It was actually Bill Gates, and he did it in a TED talk in 2015 we should probably have been listening a bit better, shouldn’t we paying but more attention. And what he said was that if anything was going to kill 10 million people in the next few decades, it was highly likely to be an infectious virus.

Now, even if you set aside the quite extraordinary circumstances in which we found ourselves in the last three years, predicting the future is incredibly difficult, and yet, as managers of businesses, as managers of teams, as managers of products, it’s something that we are asked to do pretty much every single day. When’s that going to happen? What’s the outcome going to be? How are customers going to respond? What are your teams going to think?

Yeah, and Bill Gates is a man who gets things right a lot. Does he have a set of magic goggles that allow him to see into the future and predict what’s going to happen? Of course, he doesn’t. He uses data and he overlays that with precedence, and he uses his own experience, and he collaborates with other experts, and he uses all of that to work out what he thinks the most likely outcome is going to be. And of course, as managers of businesses, teams products, we need to do exactly the same thing. We need to take data, and we need to look for signs and signals, and we need to try and figure out what’s going to happen.

That all sounds really simple, doesn’t it tell us something we don’t already know, Sally? But it is simple until you figure out that what you’re trying to predict is human behavior. You’re trying to understand what your team are going to do and how they’re going to function and whether they’re going to achieve what you need them to do. And that, of course, isn’t as easy, because people aren’t as predictable as pandemics.

They’re Looking at the Same Horizon

Well, the good news is that you can actually see every single day whether your teams are going to succeed or not. And once we know that, of course, we can step in, and we can make adjustments, and we can we can help them, help them where they need it. So if you were going to have a pair of magic goggles that allowed you to see into the future, the first thing that you would want to see, the first lens that you would want on those goggles is the ability to see that you were looking at the same thing. You were looking at the same horizon. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean, do you have a vision, a picture of what success will look like when you get there? And do you share that vision with your team?

You are, no doubt, all familiar with a company called sky – big UK broadcaster. In 2012 they had a bit of a problem. Netflix was starting to make incredible inroads into the UK and were building this massive audience. And even although sky already had 12 million subscribers, they were worried because their price point looked extremely expensive alongside what was Netflix is £5.99 at the time. Sounds a bit historic, doesn’t it? And so they knew they needed to do something totally different. And initially, what they thought they would do is they thought they would go head to head with Netflix, and they would basically build a high quality, high extremely good content at a very low price point.

But then when they started to dig into the data, what they found was that pretty much everyone who was subscribing to Netflix was already a sky subscriber. So if they launched that product, they were effectively just going to be undermining their core subscription base and basically selling those customers a cheaper product. And so they had to go right back to the drawing board and work out what they were trying to do. And they land up launching NOW TV. And the vision for this product was very simple. It was called Pay-Lite. This was the phrase that they used internally. And what they meant by that was that they wanted their customers to be able to the customers for NOW TV, to be able to come and go whenever they wanted to sign up to cancel, and for that to be a very big part of what the proposition was. In other words, the total opposite to what sky was, which, at the time, still involved having a dish put on the on the outside of your house, and was all about long, long term commitment. And that was the clarity and consistency of that vision that played into absolutely everything they did. So they used it in their design, they used it in their product development, and they used it in proposition development as well. So what that meant was that a few years later, when they then launched broadband, they asked themselves, how should now TV launch broadband? How can broadband be pay-lite? And so, of course, they launched contractless broadband, which was a UK first. It was the clarity and consistency of that vision of pay-lite and contractlessness that really helped them to grow their user base and really helped them to kind of grow this product over the last few years.

Now, checking in with your team to make sure that they share the same vision as you can require a level of persistence. I was part of the team at The Times and Sunday Times who helped to launch the paywall there. So we took that newspaper from being free online journalism that anyone could read to a subscription product. And James Murdoch was leading the company at the time, and his vision for this product was readers will pay for our editorial content. And of course, we as the team heard that, and we were like, OK, great. How are we going to get around this? And we must have presented six or seven different versions of this proposition that included a free paragraph, a free page, a free trial. And in every instance, James Murdoch just stuck to his vision and stuck to the bounds of that vision, which was readers will pay for our editorial content. And so we launched that product with a very, very, very hard paywall. They’ve moved away from that a little bit now, but that kind of clarity vision really helped to frame the success of that project and its initial launch. So you have to start with the vision, and then you have to know that your team have got a way to get there, and you need to be able to see that they’ve got a plan to get there. But perhaps the most important thing about that plan is that they have made it to themselves.

Accountability vs Responsibility

Very early on in my career, I had a conversation with my boss. I was getting incredibly frustrated by a particular project that we were working on. I had a very clear view about how we should be approaching it, and the senior management had a very different view, and they were basically telling us what to do. And my boss got sick of all of my moaning, and eventually said to me, Sally, what you need to understand is that if you are trying to, if you are deciding how to do something, you’re responsible. You are accountable. You’re accountable for the plan and you’re accountable for the outcome, and if someone else is telling you how to do it, you’re just responsible for executing what they’ve told you to do. And that conversation has stayed with me for years, and I often think about it when I’m managing teams, because I think about how I felt with that reduced sense of accountability, or that reduced accountability in that project, I stopped caring about what the impact was of what we were doing, and the thing that I cared about was just executing it to the best of my ability. So the key thing here is that teams who have accountability own the outcome, whereas teams who just have responsibility own the execution.

Objectives and Key Results

But how do you find that balance between giving your teams true accountability and yet at the same time making sure that they are executing what you need them to do?

I found OKRs to be a really useful tool for this. I’m sure many of you are familiar with OKRs. There is tons that you can read on, and I’m not going to spend any time on it today. There’s much better experts than me to talk about to talk about OKRs, but if you have read about them, you’ll know that it’s quite easy to use them really badly, and that actually you can land up having the total opposite effect of what you were trying to do in the first place. When it comes to leading product teams and engineering teams, the key thing is that the teams need to set the key results themselves.

Yeah, my current company Car Wow. We are an online marketplace, so for buying and selling cars. And what we do is, as the leadership team’s executive leadership team, we do not set any OKRs across the whole company. What we do is we set the financial plan, and we provide guidance to our teams about what we need to achieve for the year, and then we use a quarterly business review process. In fact, it’s tomorrow for the end of this quarter, the beginning of the next where all of the teams present each of their OKRs. And our job there is to push them hard on whether they have set the levels at the right place. Look for gaps between those OKRs, to make sure that they ladder up to our overall business plan. And, of course, to look for dependencies, so where someone has got a goal that isn’t being matched by a dependency in another team. That’s our role. Our role is not to set these objectives for the teams. They need to be able to do that themselves. They need to say what they can achieve themselves.

And then the second part of our job, which is really important when it comes to objectives is to make sure that those objectives are real objectives, and that they’re powerful objectives. So what do I mean by that? Well, I mean a really bad objective is one that doesn’t have a business or customer outcome, something like launch social login or complete feature x, y or z. That kind of objective basically means that the team lines up focusing on delivering a thing, rather than focusing on the impact or the outcome of what they’re trying to achieve. A much better objective would be something like increased social logins on mobile for mobile customers, and the key result might be something like by 50% by the end of the quarter. That kind of objective frees the team up to work on the best way to solve the problem, rather than dictating a solution.

So we’ve got a vision, and we’ve got a team who can see how to get there. And once we’ve got those measurable objectives, the next thing we need to see through our magic goggles is that they are really focusing on how they’re performing against those objectives, and that starts with living and breathing their OKRs and another of my previous companies, the CEO, started doing this thing that we called the elevator test. Every time he got in the lift, he would ask whoever he was in there with what their OKR was, how they were doing against it, and how confident they were they were going to hit it. It was an incredibly effective way of getting people to take the stairs, but it was also, it was also just a brilliant reminder of how important objectives were to the organization, and that that importance started right from from the CEO and embedding OKRs in your day to day.

Functioning is really important, at my previous company Go compare we used squad reviews, which many are product reviews, which many of you will be familiar with. They were a fortnightly meeting where the product teams presented everything that they had done in the last two weeks, and every single one of those meetings started with a review of the OKRs. How are we doing? How is the work we’re doing? Laddering up to these objectives. They were obviously also a really important place for stakeholders to come and input on what the team were doing and to help guide them when they’d gone off track, or to help them to solve solve problems. And now at Car Wow, I mentioned our QBR process, which is how we set our OKRs, and then we actually review them at an even higher frequency. So in my weekly trading meetings, we review all of our commercial OKRs on a weekly basis. So we’ll look at things like acquisition targets, but also around specific work that’s going on in our commercial teams to close sales and deals.

The Team Owns the Outcome

The key thing here is that good teams with strong OKRs own the outcome of what they are doing, and they use the OKRs to measure and track against outcome, rather than against something or thing that they’re delivering. Teams who succeed also don’t just look at the output as a measure of success. They also look at how they perform as a team.

At Photobox, we had two brilliant agile coaches who worked with our product squads. What they would do is they would sit down with the teams and they would help them to work on their teaminess. So they’d ask the teams to describe how they wanted to work together and where they felt they weren’t working together well, and they would create a matrix for them to measure themselves so things like communication, how well are we communicating? How well are we collaborating? How good is our documentation? And the teams would rate themselves on this, and they would prioritize what they wanted to focus on. And then in those squad reviews and in monthly kind of playbacks and retros, they would analyze how much they’d improved in terms of how they were working together as a team. And again, this is a really, really important measure of how well the team is functioning is that they are doing this, that they are measuring how well they are operating together.

The Team Can Adapt to New Information

So you’re looking at the same vision, and you can see the next steps to get there. We’ve got visibility of progress. The next thing you want to see through your magic goggles is that your team can adapt. And for this, we’re going to go way back in time to the era just after the dinosaurs. So pre Uber. To talk about this company, Zimride, which you may not have heard of. It was founded quite a while ago, near 2007 at Cornell University, by these two gentlemen, and they had come together because they were passionate about reducing cars in cities. They wanted cities to be designed around the people that lived in them, rather than the cars that parked in them. And so they developed this piece of software called Zimride. And originally it was used by universities, and it was used by students at those universities to match make against each other, to find people who were traveling between the same two cities at the weekend, and wanted to share a ride. And it went really well. So they closed several rounds, including in 2011 a 6.6 million Series A, and they were very happy the business was going exceptionally well.

And yet, in 2011 they stopped entirely, and they checked in with their vision, and they asked themselves, how are we doing? How are we doing against what we set out to achieve? And they also asked themselves, if we were to restart this business today, what would we do differently? And this was a really, really important question in 2011 because between 2007 and 2011 the smartphone had launched, and so they were operating in an entirely different world. And so they went back to the drawing board, and with that same vision of reducing car ownership, they developed an app, which I’m sure you probably will have heard of, called Lyft, and that allowed you to call a car from anywhere, and that car would turn up being driven by its own owner, and you would be able to take that car to wherever you wanted to go, not unlike what Uber did little while later. Lyft IPO-ed for 22.2 billion.

Last year at Car Wow, we did a very similar thing. And I’m sure many of you have been going through this process as well. We looked at when our next investment cycle is we’re VC backed, and we looked at what our story needed to be for that next investment round. And with the changing market and the changing thinking around investment, we decided that we wanted to go into that with a much stronger profitability story than we had at the time. And so we reset our business around a path to profitability over the next sort of 12 to 18 months. And what that meant was we needed to take some very difficult decisions. For example, we’ve had to pause the rollout of our sell my car business in Germany that allows customers to list a vehicle and then dealers buy it or buy it off them, and that was really hard, because we’d spent six months building that product, and we had just launched. It was only about two or three months old, and it was, it was just starting to tick up, but we knew that we would have to make significant marketing investments to really be able to scale that product in that market, and that just didn’t fit with the timings around a part of profitability.

Data Drives their Decisions

Those are quite big moments. Your teams don’t face those types of pivots every single day, but they do face the need to make changes and to adapt to data on a day to day basis. And you can see that teams are doing this because of the way that they answer your questions and the way that they answer your questions will tell you that they are using data to drive their decisions. So you can see this adaptability on a day to day basis. Teams that use data to drive their decision making don’t answer your questions with I think, or I feel, they answer your questions with facts, or they answer your questions by telling you about the hypothesis that they are busy testing and gathering data against.

Now, the other thing that’s important about data in decision making is that you also see your teams testing that data and questioning that data. In my previous company at go compare, we relaunched our home insurance quote journey. Now, for those of you don’t know, go compare, it’s a price comparison website, so you put in lots of information, and then you get comparative prices on your home on your home insurance. And for anyone who has ever got home insurance, you will know that it is a very long and tedious process, and at the end of this redesign of this process, we saw a 25% increase in the number of people who were getting to the last page of this journey. Wow. Everyone was very happy with that, obviously. But for those of you who’ve done that journey, you’ll know that it’s full of loads of loads of legal questions and there is a lot of information that you do actually have to provide in order to get to an accurate quote. So from a redesign point of view, it’s actually very difficult to fundamentally change that journey. A large part of what we’ve done was just make it look a little bit better, improve the branding, tidy up some of the validation, that sort of thing. So 25% improvement, exactly. The team were immediately suspicious and started digging until they found the tagging error, because it is always a tagging error, isn’t it. And it’s our role as the team managers to ensure that our teams have got access to the data they need, whether that is commercial performance or user tracking, or customer research or market research, and then to make sure that they are using that data. And I don’t mean telling them to use that data. I mean asking them in a way that means that they have to use that data. So asking them things like, Why do you think that? How has that number changed? What do you expect the impact to be on this particular part of the funnel, that type of thing, which means you’re enforcing that use of data, but you’re not dictating it.

They’re Tackling the Difficult Stuff

Now, sometimes there are enormous and complex problems that stand between us and reaching our vision. You might be trying to change your market or build an entirely new business model, or you might be have a really complicated market fit. And in this case, what you want to be able to see through your goggles is that your team are tackling these difficult problems, that they’re not avoiding them, that these difficult problems are their most important work.

And here’s an example from another business that you might have heard of: Five Guys. Five Guys was founded in Arlington, Virginia, by Jamie and Janie Murrell, and their five sons, and in many ways, it was the true definition of a lean startup. They had very, very little money. And all of their efforts were focused on getting their product right, choosing exactly the right ingredients, creating this wonderful burger. Arlington’s a pretty big place, but they didn’t have quite a lot of money, so there was quite a few options in terms of where they could place their first outlet. And they thought really hard about this, and what they eventually decided to do was to choose somewhere that was off the main area, so you couldn’t just kind of wander there down a high street and wander into the burger joint. And the reason that they did that was very specific. They wanted people to come there purposefully, because they knew that if they could succeed somewhere out the way, they would have really nailed it. They could succeed anywhere and without any marketing or email campaigns or PR, they launched, and within a day they had, they had a queue around the block. And of course, you know where the story goes, because there’s now 3005 guys outlets around the world.

Create a Science Lab Space

They designed the test to fail, and they solved the hardest thing first. To make that possible within your own company, you need to create what I call a science lab space, because in a science lab space you fully expect you create experiments, and you fully expect some of those to fail. Learning from a failure is as important as getting the right outcome from a test. And also, of course, you get to wear goggles, which are fully on brand.

For this talk, I want to come back to Zimride again for a moment to tell you about the best indicator that your team are going to succeed. When they first launched, they were a whole new type of thing. There was no legislative framework that allowed you to hire out your car as a private individual to another individual. And as you know, America is quite a complex legislative environment. And so they started looking at how to tackle this problem. How could they make it legal for you to be able to hire your car out? And they realized that it was going to be an enormous problem, it was going to be very, very difficult. And so instead of sort of stopping or changing their business model, what they decided to do was to make it voluntary, and that allowed them to launch the product. They took a step forward, and they were able to operate in that way for a number of years, while they worked literally tirelessly with national and regional government to get to to get the legislation changed, to what to walk towards their vision.

I call that finding a way forward, and it’s my number one success criteria for understanding whether a team is functioning well and whether they’re going to achieve what they need to achieve. If you ask anyone who’s worked for me, they’ll tell you that it’s my mantra. Teams that succeed find ways to move forward. They take a step. They learn something new.

They Have You

Finally, the secret, the real secret, the true magic to the magic goggles, is that if you want your team to deliver to really work. The thing you need to look at to understand whether your team is going to succeed or fail is you. And to illustrate this, I want to tell you one last story, a story about how poor leadership wasted a ton of money and created a crazy little nerd.

This is the christening coin of Princess Charlotte, so she is the middle child of William and Kate, and this coin was never supposed to exist. Now, just a bit of context for those of you not necessarily UK based, is whenever there’s a big event like a coronation or a royal christening or anything like that, the Royal Mint produces commemorative coins, and they do this explicitly to make money. They are trying to make money from these coins. And this one, as I said, was for Princess Charlotte, and it was never supposed to exist, and the whole reason that it does is because of bad leadership. So what happened?

Well, back in 2015 there was something massive going on at the Royal Mint. They were changing that portrait of the Queen, perhaps not so massive to those of us, not in the Royal Mint, but this was an exciting thing for them, because it had only happened four times in the history of the Royal Mint. And so there was a lot of internal excitement, as you can well imagine. And so the product team got to work, to work out what they should do about it, and they spoke to loads of users, and they understood, and they did lots of market research, and they basically came up with a product range that was sort of relatively limited, a small collection of coins and some relatively small and sensible production volumes. And the leader of this team looked at this proposal and said, I really think you’re all massively underestimating the level of interest that there is going to be in this change of the portrait of the Queen. And they overrode every suggestion that this product team had put together, and they massively increased the range and massively increased the production volumes, and you can see exactly where this is going right. Three weeks after launch, they had almost no sales, and it was very, very clear that the sales weren’t going to go anywhere near the level that this leader of this team had predicted. And so as a result, they were going to have to smelt a huge volume of these coins, and there was this multi million pound hole left in the budget. So what to do? What to do? Well, the leader of this team decided that the best thing that they could do was to launch another coin to try and fill that that hole in the budget. And hence we have the perfectly timed christening coin for Princess Charlotte, who should never have had one.

And what I want to really encourage you to do is next time you pick up a coin and you look at that portrait of the Queen or the king or whoever is on the back of that coin that head, I want you to take a moment and to remember this silly, nerdy little fact and the story behind it. And I want you to ask yourself, How am I leading my team today? Because the number one reason, whether your team will succeed or fail depends on you. If your team can see the vision. They know how to get there. They’re measuring their success. They’re finding ways around problems, and you are still telling them what to do, then magic goggles are not going to help you, my friend, you need magic ears, and that is a totally different talk. Thank you so much. I think we’ve got plenty of time for questions. Great.

Q&A

Audience member: Sally over here, so coming to your last point here, if it’s me that’s the problem. I mean, well, you know it’s hard for us to be that introspective. Does that start with, I need to go off for some training to figure out how to be a little more supportive and useful, or I need to replace myself?

Sally Foote: Well, interesting question. I mean, I think, you know, it’s interesting. I think that the higher up you get, and the more people you manage, the more time you spend trying to cut your teams out of that individual contributor role into leadership roles. And I suppose, you know, you think, you think you’ve made that transition, don’t you like, I remember, sort of my first role where I was moving out of individual contributor and I thought, Oh, I’ve nailed this. Now, I know I’m just going to teach people how to do this now and then you find yourself doing it again, you know, all the time last just, just before Christmas last year, I did a piece of work, and I got to end of and thought I should not have done that piece of work. Why did I do that piece of work? My team should have done that piece of work. And I think actually, this is a constant reminder for all of us. And I think the reason why I wanted to stick on that coin anecdote is, I think, no, we don’t often have currency in our hand, hand very often, but I think when you pick it up, it’s just this constant reminder, and it’s something that we have to work at our whole careers. Is giving that accountability back into your teams, and I see it constantly in these OKR meetings we’ve got, I mentioned we’ve got our QBR tomorrow, and I intend to start that meeting with my whole executive leadership team and the CEO and everyone, and basically say, right now, remember what our job as leaders in this room is, is to basically make sure that people have put down tough enough objectives that they’re challenging themselves, that those objectives connect together.

But we cannot override priorities in this room. That is not our job. The team have done the work to understand where to focus, and our job is to challenge their thinking, but it is not to do their thinking for them, and that, really, as a leader, is the only way that you can scale and and I do think, you know, rich your point, should you go and get training? Probably, you know, if you need a reminder. But primarily, and certainly, this is my own experience, it’s about constantly reminding yourself about how to lead, and it couldn’t be more true for product teams, where you usually see people saying, we need this feature. This is the answer to this, and it’s remembering the teams should be empowered to do the work to get to that answer. Right.

Audience member: Hi, I’ve been buying cars all my life, but six months ago, I bought my first car online. And I have to say, the experience was so good. Unfortunately, it wasn’t with Car Wow, but the experience was so good I would never go back to dealing with a dealer. And how’s it going at Car Wow?

Sally Foote: Yeah, very, very good point. I mean, I think the whole genesis of Car Wow was founded on exactly that principle, right? I think people find buying cars a massively expensive purchase, and it’s one you don’t do very regularly, and you know, it’s really fraught. There’s a lack of trust on either side. And so our business was founded on the premise that actually, by aggregating that market, we could give consumers price confidence, and we could connect them to the vehicle that they wanted at the right price in the in the right area. Obviously, the last few years have been a very challenging market for for cars, the challenges in covid initially, and then the chip shortage, particularly in the new car market. But we’ve actually, we’ve had a really, really good start to the earth, and we’ve been worried about consumer confidence and whether people were still going to be buying cars. But actually we’re seeing, we’re not seeing that flow through into big, into big purchases.

At the moment, for us, our big focus at the moment is actually tackling the other part of that transaction. So usually when you’re buying a car, you’re also selling one. And so we have what I call, what we call our sell my car business, and that allows you to list a vehicle and dealers competitively bid to buy that vehicle. And we are seeing huge growth in that area, primarily because it’s like walking into a dealership and getting a part exchange price, but it’s like doing that across 10 different businesses, so you get a really good price for your car, but you’re not trying to, you’re not trying to negotiate with another member of the public, and it’s all kind of done very neatly for you. And to your point, that interface, and you see that, you’ve seen this in many other marketplaces where you provide an interface between consumers and some of the retail or wholesale market, and it worked very well for consumers, because you can control and align around the consumer experience. Great.

Mark Littlewood: We had a really interesting lightning talk a few years ago from an architect who designed car dealerships, and every car dealership is the same in so much as you walk in and there’s massive, high ceilings and stuff, it’s all very grand. And then when you’re shuffled into the hey, let’s just talk about the thing. You’re in a tiny room. It’s very low, there’d be no windows, no it’s sort of all artificial light. And that’s designed because when you’re in that big space, you have grand visions. And you know, that’s why people behave by German casts overpaid for them and whatever. But they have these sort of delusions of adequacy and grandeur and whatever. But they can’t make a decision. And then they’re put into the little room, because in that little room, you make a decision. Do you have insights into that sort of behavior online?

Sally Foote: I’ve been test driving a lot of cars because I’m exploring, very heavily, exploring the EV space at the moment to understand, and I think specifically to understand consumer decision making when they’re trying to decide whether to switch to an electric vehicle and then how to choose the right one, because it’s a lot more complicated than previously was choosing petrol or DZ villa, because it’s suddenly all of these new brands that people don’t necessarily know and they don’t necessarily trust the brand that they’ve bought from for years to have built them a brilliant electric vehicle. And I think what we’ve seen with online that has potentially changed that situation is that a lot more of the decision making about what you want to buy happens online. So we have a massive YouTube channel. In fact, it’s the biggest automotive channel in the world, with Matt Watson, who does a lot of fun stuff racing cars, but also does these really, really down to earth reviews of cars and looks at things like the boot space and what the indicator sounds like, and all of those things are actually really, really important to consumers in their decision making. So we see a lot more of that top of funnel decision making happening online. And so by the time someone walks into a dealership, they’ve usually compared the car that they want to buy across three or four different dealerships, and they’re coming in to make the transaction happen. But then we’ve also seen, obviously, partly accelerated by covid, the way that dealerships work with consumers change totally. So you can now do video calls. You can do 360s of the car from home. And in fact, even if you’re not buying from someone like kazoo, quite often, you can get their car just delivered and purchase the purchase done at home. You don’t ever have to go into one of those glass showrooms. And as a result, we’re also seeing dealers having to totally transform how they sell, and that’s a tricky thing for them to do. They’ve been used to the conversation of someone walking in and being relatively open to different mix models. And now we seeing some of that decision making move online, but we’re also seeing people who are in an online mindset trying to work with these physical retailers. And so a lot of the coaching that Car Wow does is we use AI to analyze huge amounts of conversations between dealers and customers, and we give our dealer partners like intelligence on like these are the types of things that can move a conversation forward. These are indicators that someone knows what they want. These are indicators that people don’t know how they want. This is how you reply to someone who’s on their phone, not with a 700 word essay, you know, and then how to tier information in an online world. And so there’s still a lot. There’s so much changing in the car industry. It’s fascinating, but some of that is just literally in how that transaction is happening and where that sale is genuinely being made.

Audience member: So to get sort of kind of gritty you were talking about OKRs, and how you found those useful about specifically with teams owning outcomes. And I’m really interested in how you find it as you get a bit further down towards execution, because it’s all very well to say that if you are implementing, say, social login, then you know the ultimate outcome you’re looking for is to drive usage or stickiness or whatever. But as you move sort of down the organization towards the ICS, sooner or later, you reach a team whose only, whose only possible influence on the outcome is is, as you say, making a thing. And how do you articulate the join between people whose only outcome is making a thing and people whose outcome is moving the moving needle on the business, because that’s always been a difficult one for us.

Sally Foote: Yes, I get that. I think it always depends on how your a lot of this can get into how your product teams are set up, and how you know where those OKRs are being set in the organization. So it might help if I get I’m trying to think of a great example. I’ll talk about one that we’ve got on now, which is a commercial example. I think there’s lots of people who work slightly more on the commercial slightly more on the commercial side of the business in this example. And so one of the things, one of our objectives, is to reduce the distance between a price that someone is seeing, or a car that someone can see on our site and their home. So we measure that like currently, like the max is 45 and we want to get that down to 23 kilometers, right? So that would be the objective, and the key result is to reduce the offer that you’re getting from 45 to 23 now that will be owned by a team. That objective is owned by a team of about 15 people, and that is where they’ve set that they think they can reduce that from that to that, and that ladders up into a much bigger thing, which is effectively drive as conversion or click out from our website, right? That isn’t the objective. That is a business metric. It’s a KPI. The objective is to improve the distance between the offer someone’s getting.

I think now that team will have set that objective, and then they will identify a set of initiatives that help to drive that objective. So they will say, for example, great, our biggest problem is with VWs in the northwest. We’re going to go and target three dealerships in that area, and we’re going to get them on board and get their cars listed or improve the cars that are listing onto. So they would have identified sort of three or four initiatives against that objective that they’re trying to, trying to figure out, which is pretty, pretty much the same as launch social login or something like that. And what you want to see is that they’re trying to make progress against those initiatives, and that those initiatives are impacting that number. So as they bring them in, they can articulate that that was the right thing to do, and if it isn’t the right thing to do, you want them to be able to change the initiative. Now with product teams, that’s a lot more complicated, because usually you have to do quite a lot of work to identify what the thing is that’s going to move the objective. And I think the key thing is, with product and engineering teams, is that they’re involved in choosing what those initiatives are to move that objective. So they’ve decided that social login is the right thing to do to drive engagement on mobile, for example.

Audience member: So do you have the OKR sort of process go down so, like goes down past that boundary. So that is actually somebody whose objective and key result is making the thing. It’s just that you don’t want that to bubble up too far in the organization where you someone has to think about making the thing, you just think about the outcomes.

Sally Foote: So the team will have, so let’s say, take a product team. They will have that objective and key result, but they will have identified a set of initiatives, which are the bets that they’re playing this quarter to move that number.

Audience member: And the people who are executing those initiatives, they’re not really operating under the OKR system. They’re working on something different?

Sally Foote: They are. So they have that objective. So they would have the objective of increased social of increased engagement, for example, increase I can’t even remember what my example was. Now, sorry, they would have that whole team would have that objective, but they would have a piece of work that they were doing to try and move that objective. And then if that piece of work didn’t, didn’t, start to move the objective. So that whole team, they would present this is our objective every month, and then they’d say the things we’ve done this week or this month to try and move that are x, y and z. This one worked. This one didn’t. But they keep that North Star of the objective, which means that they can change how they’re trying to achieve it. And that would be at the very lowest level of the product team. I mean, I think OKRs are tricky when it comes to things like customer service teams, who are where there’s a lot higher proportion of Bau and so one of the things that, sorry, business as usual, so like a customer service.

Sorry, is that fine? For that is like answering calls, you know, 90% of the time, but you might still be trying to change the length of call in those times, or the response rate, for example, might be some of the objectives. And one of the things that we do in our QBR is we identify in any given team how much of their time is absorbed by business as usual work. So those are things, just processes that need to run all the time, like for our commercial teams that might be setting up accounts or onboarding new partners, for example, and then we carve out a chunk of time which is objective based, which is a number that they are trying to move. And so for product teams, that’s much higher weighting on the objective and a much higher importance that the objective has. And then and commercial teams as well. But then some other teams, like customer service or our strategy team, for example, have a smaller proportion of their time focused on OKRs.

Mark Littlewood: We had a message from you yesterday saying you were stuck in an airport and wanted to know if BoS was going to be streamed and you’d miss your first BoS. So I’m glad you didn’t miss your first boss, and I’m glad you’re here. We don’t stream our in person conferences. We put the videos online, but I think hybrid events are just the worst of both worlds. Welcome.

Audience member: Thank you. So I’d be interested in the line between providing a vision and overriding priorities, especially when they’re in the actual depths of work, and you like were me feel like they might be losing sight of that vision. And then where’s that? Where’s the line? What’s the difference between being the guy who says all people will buy this coin, and being James murder, staying steady, saying people will pay for our editorials, like in the very day to day business.

Sally Foote: It’s a great question, because I think it’s a very blurry line, right? I think the point of a vision is that it’s it’s quite far out, and you’re never quite sure how you’re going to get exactly there and what the shape of it is, as you say back like that. I’m like, Oh, actually, maybe James Murdoch wasn’t doing things. Did he? Exactly the right way. Quite different kind of organization, the time, Sunny times and the Murdoch organization. But I think one of the things that we’ve done to try and help that is we, again, recently at Car Wow we built a vision for one bit of our business, and then working with the key leaders across the team, we’ve articulated the detail of that vision against our value proposition.

So we’ve said, This is what it needs to look like for our partners. This is what it needs to look like for our customers in the future. And we’ve articulated that sort of five or six bullet points against each element of the value prop. And then we’ve basically built a board that says, okay, the things that we would need to do to develop from a capability point of view are these things. We’ve kind of laded them out. And then what we when the teams are working out what they’re going to do each quarter, they pull forward elements of those, some of those might be learning things that they pull forward, which might mean we change the path that we’re going to use to get there. But I think again, in all of that, what we’ve been trying to do is have the teams be as wedded into the definition of the vision as they can be, and then using that as a kind of a sounding board on what we’re doing on a day to day basis. But, yeah, I think it’s a gray line. It’s not it’s not always sort of super clear cut. I think the important thing is to have that vision and then to engage the teams in detailing, detailing what that looks like.

Audience member: Okay, so basically, if I get you right, you’re saying it’s a blurry line you can never really eliminate, and you’re just investing in everybody fully understanding the vision?

Sally Foote: Exactly and contributing towards contributing towards the definition of it. So yeah, beyond that, like sort of readers will pay for our editorial you would want to create a view of, what does that mean for our customers, what does that mean for our editorial team? What does that mean? How will our editorial team be working in the future? How will our future? How will our advertisers be putting advertising on our site that sort of next level down of that vision? And that’s the bit you really, really want the teams to be involved in, like because that’s what lifts their mindset into into that vision space. And it’s also where you flush out the discrepancies in terms of what it looks like in your head versus what it looks like in their head.

Audience member: Hi. My name is Liz. Thank you very much for your talk. Sally, where I work, OKRs have been introduced recently, and not especially effectively, because it’s very top down. So from the middle point of view, where I am, where I know how OKRs should work, and they’re clearly not working that way. What can you do to nudge upwards for a better, more effective use of OKRs, to be more like as you described?

Sally Foote: Yeah. So one thing I actually did once was I bought John Dawes book. I bought several copies, and distributed them around the relevant people of the organization, which is a bit passive aggressive. If I’m honest, I won’t necessarily post it notes. Yeah, I like the key. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that as a result. I mean, I think work out kind of where your own control is and trying to grab hold of things that you can say, Look, this is what objective is. I mean, what? I didn’t talk about this in this version of the talk, but I’ve previously spoken about the fact that OKRs are actually amazing mechanic for and so is a vision for managing your stakeholders and keeping them like great example, you’re presenting your priorities in a particular meeting, and the CEO or CEO is there going like but what about this and what about that? And you can use them as a really strong mechanic for refocusing on what the objective is. And there’s either lack of clarity between the feature that they’re suggesting and that objective, in which case there’s more work to be done to understand whether that’s the right Initiative, or it’s a totally different thing they’re asking you to focus on. And so our teams really use them as a control through the course the quarter to keep us out of their out of their work. And like, No, this is my objective. This is what I’m doing. And we can agree whether that’s going to come in. But yeah, I think, I think it’s an art, and it does depend on the kind of organization that you’re working with. I think you can also work with some very interesting companies, like, is it called what three things who are a consultancy and will come in, they have a tool that helps you to do this properly, and will come in and help educate your organization. And, yeah, so you don’t have to passively aggressively give people books.

Sure, I think it’s I also think they’re hard to get right right. That’s why there’s been a lot of material written about them. So the other thing I just do is encourage you to persist, because when you’ve got it right, they are a really powerful mechanic.

Mark Littlewood: Sally, thank you. Thank you.

Sally Foote

Managing Director, carwow

Sally has been part of the team behind digital product launches at the Guardian, Times, Sunday Times paywall, BT Sport, Photobox, GoCompare and carwow.

She has a product background and now leads commercial operations at carwow. She loves working at the strategic execution level – creating business visions and goals and translating these into executable products that deliver tangible value for organisations and their customers.

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