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Testing your ideas against reality can be challenging. Not everything will go as planned. It’s about keeping an open mind, having a clear hypothesis and running multiple tests to see if you have enough directional evidence to keep going.
This is the How I Tested That Podcast, where David J Bland connects with entrepreneurs and innovators who had the courage to test their ideas with real people, in the market, with sometimes surprising results.
Join us as we explore the ups and downs of experimentation… together.
David J Bland (0:1.250)
Welcome to the podcast, Bruce and Melissa.
Bruce McCarthy (0:3.922)
Thanks, good to be here David.
Melissa Appel (0:5.894)
Thanks for having us.
David J Bland (0:7.374)
I'm so excited to have both of you on here. I've been fans of both of you for so long and I've had the pleasure of collaborating or being around you for a while and I love your approach to things. But all our listeners probably aren't as aware of you, although they should be. So maybe we can have just some background a little bit and then we could go into how you test things. So maybe Bruce, if you give us a little background on kind of your history and what you're excited about.
Bruce McCarthy (0:33.970)
Sure. I think of myself as a coach. A coach for product executives and product teams. My team and I, basically try to help product teams get better at the craft. And sometimes that means one-on-one coaching. Sometimes that means training or workshops to establish a process or skills for the first time. And sometimes it means help with hiring. it's...
sort of trying to solve the whole problem like a good product person would. And that whole approach is basically born from my experience. I've been a product person most of my career. Sometimes I've had to pivot and be in charge of engineering or UX or partnerships or whatever, but it's usually because I'm trying to get the result. That's what the whole test-driven philosophy is about is we're not just trying to do stuff, we're trying to get a result. So...
Now it's get a result for the client. It's my business.
David J Bland (1:35.778)
Thank you. And Melissa, could you give a little background on yourself as well for our listeners?
Melissa Appel (1:39.286)
Yeah, yeah. So I spent about 20 years in product management at companies of various sizes and stages. And a couple of years ago, I started coaching and advising with Bruce. And I also do one-on-one coaching and resume reviews and fractional CPO work.
David J Bland (2:3.352)
Thank you. Yeah, so I'm a huge fan. I'm sure my listeners are going to be a fan of both of you by the time this episode is over as well. And you all have a new book out called Aligned. And I'm a fan. I think the topic is well, well needed. It's very much something that needs to be explored and delved into a bit. And so can you just give us maybe a high level, Bruce, of what the book is about and sort of the driving force behind it?
Bruce McCarthy (2:34.162)
Sure, I mean, if you think about the skills of being a product manager, a lot of people point at what I call the hard skills. They point out, well, I need to be good at strategy. I need to be good at research and discovery. I need to be good at metrics. And I need to figure out how to develop a roadmap. And I wrote a book on product roadmaps a few years ago. But the next question people ask is, oh, how do I get
buy-in from my stakeholders on all that work that I've put in. And that turns out to be the hardest part of the job. If you listen to most product managers and you ask, what is the hardest part of your job? They might say roadmaps, but it's because it's hard to get people to buy in to it. And if they think for another second, they're like, well, actually managing stakeholders is the hardest part. So that's what this book is about.
is all of our hard-won lessons from various failures in why to and how to manage all of the people, not just on your squad, but around the organization that the success of your product depends on. And frankly, it is also the difference between a good workman-like individual contributor product manager and someone who
gets promoted is their ability to influence around the organization.
David J Bland (4:6.912)
definitely resonates with me. My co-author Alex is one. I do master classes on the testing business side is book and usually about like day three of the master class people like, how do I get by and how do I get back in? And that comes up as a trend every time of how do I get by in? Because sometimes you're I don't say like preaching to the choir, but these people are bought in, know, obviously they want to make an impact. But it's how you manage the people around the initiative, I think, can be challenging. Melissa?
I mean, what was your driving force to write a book with Bruce?
Melissa Appel (4:41.900)
Yeah, I actually initially had this concept of writing a book on saying no to stakeholders because I two people on my team who had trouble saying no. One actually had no trouble saying no, but she never gave kind of a reason and people were like, I'm confused. Why? Why not? And the other one always said yes to everybody, even though he knew he couldn't deliver and would definitely disappoint them later. But then I went and talked to Bruce Ben and he's like, I feel like there's more than just
how to say no. So that ended up being one of the chapters. But there's a lot more behind it to make a more comprehensive guide to stakeholder management.
Bruce McCarthy (5:22.662)
You, like me, you wrote the book that you wish you had had.
Melissa Appel (5:26.239)
Yeah, exactly. And that's what I hear from a lot of people. They're like, I wish I had this book 10 years ago. This would have made my life so much easier, which I take as a compliment, but also as just so like we found a great kind of product market fit, it were, finding a real problem that people have and trying to solve it.
Bruce McCarthy (5:46.086)
Yeah, we actually, you know, did our due diligence. were thinking, oh, there should be a book on this. Isn't there? And we went and looked and there just isn't, right? There's nothing like it for product people. So it's the book that I wish I'd had on my shelf all along.
Melissa Appel (6:5.653)
Yeah, there were a few books on stakeholder management for project managers, but they had a little bit of a different slant.
David J Bland (6:15.446)
It sounds like the book was born out of just a day-to-day problem you all were experiencing, you know? you went... We always use this model of like, do you have the problem? Are you aware of it? And you're actively seeking a solution. And this idea of, well, you actually had the problem and you're aware of it and you started seeking a solution and it's like, oh, there's no books out here on this topic. Yeah.
Melissa Appel (6:36.523)
Yeah, I actually looked for a book because I wanted to buy a book on this for the people on my team. And I'm like, there just there isn't anything I guess. I guess I got to write it.
Bruce McCarthy (6:46.098)
Let me give you a concrete example that appears in the book about how I learned through testing different possible solutions how to get help from finance. So I worked at a small software company that had been acquired by a much larger company with headquarters in another state. And during the first year,
We operated mostly independently, but I occasionally needed help from headquarters and I needed help on something. So I wrote to the person I understood to be in charge of this thing in finance. I sent them an email and I didn't hear anything. And I thought, well, maybe they're, you know, it got down below the fold or something like that. I'll ping them again. And I didn't hear anything. So I thought, well, okay, that didn't work. Let me try calling.
I'll try, I'll test a different medium, right? So I call them, I get their voicemail, I leave them a voicemail, nothing. And I'm double checking with my boss, is this really the right person to be talking to it? Yes, yes, it's the right person. You just need to get their attention. So I did, I called them one more time, voicemail again, silence. So, all right, I'm like, well, so far the things that I've tested to get the result I want are not working. I went to headquarters, I found an excuse to go.
and I showed up at their desk. And I showed up at their desk right before lunch. And I said, hi, I'm Bruce. And the guy had the decency to look kind of sheepish, because he knew he'd been ducking me. But I said, do you want to grab lunch? I timed it so that I could say something positive to sort of defuse the situation. He was like, sure. So we sat down face to face, had lunch, got to know each other a little bit.
And at some point he brought up the topic. I didn't deliberately. I just wanted to be friendly. He brought up the topic and he's like, so about your problem, I can totally help you. This is what we need to do. And that experiment taught me the value of face-to-face communication. Other methods had not worked. Informal communication. We didn't have a meeting on the calendar. And
Bruce McCarthy (9:7.738)
sitting down over a meal. All of those things just made the person much more willing to help me when they didn't really have to.
David J Bland (9:20.718)
I like that you were just like trial and error, okay, this doesn't work, this doesn't work. And you weren't negative about it, right? It was just more of, okay, let's try another method and being very deliberate about how you timed that conversation I think is very insightful. Melissa, do you have any other maybe war stories or situations to expand upon where, hey, I was trying to do this or trying to get.
alignment with my stakeholders and it just wasn't working out and how maybe you tested your way through that.
Melissa Appel (9:50.964)
Yeah, my story will sound very similar to Bruce's story, I think, in that the solution ended up being showing up in person. But I was working with somebody and, you know, we were having all these struggles, couldn't, it was a fellow product person. So our teams were kind of next to each other and we needed to work together on something. And this was pre-COVID, but he was in a different country. And so his background was
completely white wall. You never saw anything. You never even saw him take a drink of water. Like no clues about anything, didn't share anything personal. So I'm like, okay. And I made an excuse to go to the office in the country that he was in and say, hey, where's good to get dinner around here? He's like, let's go together. And found out a lot of kind of interesting things about him just having a dinner.
And it made it, it kind of made it easier to work together moving forward in a virtual way. And, you know, the testing was like, would, I would throw out like, hey, you know, I, you know, my kids blah, blah, blah, and like just nothing, like no response, like trying to get anything like, what'd you do this weekend? Yeah, you know, hung out. It's like, okay, but like, I want to try to get to know you. But, you know, again, with the being in person, especially
Now that people are in different places, making an excuse to see somebody in person once can make the whole rest of the relationship run smoother.
Bruce McCarthy (11:30.906)
become human beings if you've met them in person, not just...
Melissa Appel (11:32.587)
Mm-hmm.
with legs and everything.
Bruce McCarthy (11:36.570)
Right. Not just an obligation and a sort of simulated reality on the screen.
David J Bland (11:44.654)
Yeah, I experienced that a bit in my own work. If I show up in person, do a workshop or do some coaching and people are like, oh, we really like your style. And now that we've actually seen you and we know you, now let's do some more things together. And so that's been happening a lot even this year for me. So you have this amazing book on a much needed problem that needs to be solved and you've gotten really great feedback on it so far. So.
Bruce McCarthy (11:56.892)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Melissa Appel (11:57.451)
Mm-hmm.
David J Bland (12:9.678)
besides testing something like the ideas of, I actually experienced this problem firsthand and I tested my way through it. What are some of the ways you try to figure out, hey, what form should this book be in or how should we test the book? Because the book can feel like a very waterfall-like process, traditional, hey, we go through these phases and it's there in the world and it's really hard to change once it's out there. So what maybe...
Share some insights with us about how you maybe tested your way through that or tried to figure out, hey, how should the book be formed? What's the flow? Any, any insights there that you can share?
Melissa Appel (12:47.704)
Yeah, we tested individual ideas and concepts just through conversations we were having and say, hey, does this resonate with you? Is this a problem that you have? then we, Bruce can talk a little bit more about this, but we created an early readers club. The idea gotten from some fellow authors who suggested the idea. And it was great because we had a monthly meeting with
some folks who were interested in helping out with the book. And each month we had maybe a different topic or we shared a chapter and asked for feedback. It ended up being a little bit like a stakeholder management anonymous club, which was sort of fun. But we tested ideas. said, listen, we're thinking about talking about the idea of trust. Like what does trust mean to you? And thinking about time. And there were definitely things that we had intended to put in the book that we didn't because they didn't really resonate with people. But I think the biggest
uh, test that we did, um, was we wrote the entire book and we put it out and we got feedback and the feedback was great. And we ended up starting from scratch. Like we did a major, not like we didn't change the topic, but we did a pretty big pivot in that we rejiggered what exactly the topics were that we were going to talk about. We cut a whole bunch of stuff and we, um, created this concept of the
Melissa Appel (14:13.879)
through line narrative that we have in the book. So the book is kind of half in a continuous story and half explanatory information about individual topics. in the initial version of the book, we put little examples, but people were sort of confused and they're like, I don't understand. And what we realized was, okay, well, the reason that's happening is because when you talk about stakeholders, you really have to get to know people. Like that's the whole thing.
So if we have continuous characters, get to know them over time and you see actually the main character experimenting with what works and what doesn't work with different people for different reasons.
Bruce McCarthy (14:56.750)
I found the feedback loop that we had with that group extremely helpful, not only in that sort of aggregate view that caused us to go back and rewrite things, but also just step by step as we went. We got some feedback that we were advocating empathy as a key aspect of the skill of stakeholder management where
you spend time trying to understand the other person's point of view so that you can figure out where you can come to alignment. And yet we weren't always displaying that level of empathy in the text. We were sometimes coming off as a little bit judgmental, like, those salespeople. And we had to step back and really look at ourselves and say, you know what? That's right. It might be funny to make fun of people in other roles that
we traditionally make jokes about as product people. But that's not living our values and that's not actually helping someone in this role get better at it. So we really changed course in quite a few ways. I want to go back though to how the Early Readers Club started.
It functioned very much as a kind of a beta test. And there's a few things that you're looking for from a beta test. You're looking for people, obviously, to uncover bugs. And we've just described some things that weren't quite right about the book that we went and fixed, if you will. But you're also looking for adoption. You're looking for, people even sign up for my beta program? Are they even interested? Will they dedicate some time or energy? Will they pay for access to the beta?
And we were able to check all those boxes. We put out on our website and advertised through our newsletter, hey, we're doing this early readers club and it's 20 bucks a month. And here's a discount code if you want to share it with your friends. So we had 140 people, something like that, most of them paying something, either the full price or the discounted price, to be there. So that was early validation that the topic.
Bruce McCarthy (17:20.370)
was of interest to people. And then we started having these monthly Zoom meetings for the club. And not 140 people showed up, a small subset. But a small subset kept showing up month after month to talk about the book and, as Melissa said, to kind of have a therapy session on their own struggles with stakeholder management. So that was another.
bit of validation that kept us going on the book, that people were engaged and interested. And even though it took us twice as long to write this book as I had originally hoped, they kept coming and kept paying through this entire process to be part of it. So those things were super validating on a sort of a business scale, but also encouraging emotionally, because writing a book is hard.
And it's a lot of work. And rewriting is even harder than writing in the first place.
David J Bland (18:28.908)
Yeah, I'm not probably a good person to ask. I mean, I most of my book in keynote, which is pretty insane when think about it. But it's such a landscape style book. Keynote just seemed like the medium to write it in. So I wanted to sort of frame this in a way that we talk about it with testing. So in testing, we often talk about desirable, viable, feasible, which we're pulling from like design thinking and all that. this early access group of readers feels like you were testing desirability.
Bruce McCarthy (18:38.734)
It works. Yeah, it totally works.
David J Bland (18:58.690)
would people even like with this value prop resonate at all with anyone you're kind of target reader and then a little bit of viability because they are paying some you know it's it's hard to get people to pay for things right and so you weren't necessarily validating the backstage what's this all going to cost part of viability but as far as willingness to pay I mean you had recurring revenue already for for an upcoming book that wasn't even
out there yet. And so I do think it almost reminds me of crowdfunding like Indiegogo Kickstarter in a bit where you're testing desire, but you can also test a little bit of viability, not all of it, but a little bit for your early adopters. And it feels like, you know, you that's what you were looking for evidence to know, hey, are we on the right track with with our writing?
Bruce McCarthy (19:34.929)
Yeah.
Bruce McCarthy (19:49.810)
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Originally, I had thought of it as the finding the bugs part and the building an audience part for a launch of beta testing. So I guess I went in kind of with a little bit of unexamined hubris about, oh, of course, the topic will resonate with people. so maybe we just got lucky on that. Or maybe we've been in this business long enough that we knew.
that people would be interested. An even earlier test was could we get our publisher, O'Reilly, interested by writing them a proposal and giving them a bit of our early research with customers. And that was another validation point because they were enthusiastic.
Melissa Appel (20:39.829)
Yeah, and we also did some speaking before the book came out on the topic of stakeholder management and just the fact that people are like, yes, this is the topic that I want a book to be written about was helpful, right? Just kind of everyday conversation and continuous learning.
Bruce McCarthy (20:56.902)
Yeah, actually for me, one of the inspirations for the book was literally teaching a workshop on road mapping and having one of the students say, but how am I supposed to get buy-in on this, um, on this method of road mapping? And after I started to give a few tips on how to get buy-in, they were like, Oh, this is the workshop we need to have. Uh, these, these are the skills that are.
hard to get and nobody teaches. So that also was, you you're constantly looking for feedback on and signal from the world on what's resonating.
David J Bland (21:39.918)
So Melissa, what other tests did you run around the book, or maybe even since the book has been published, that you feel as if some are working, some are not? Not everything works out from an experiment point of view. It's not an experiment if it can't fail, right? So what other things are you doing around the book to test some assumptions that you have?
Melissa Appel (21:59.766)
Yeah, I've recently been doing a few, I if you call them podcasts, but webinars or virtual events with some UX friends to see if the book will resonate with the UX crowd. And I've gotten some initial feedback that it's helpful, but thinking about, who else can use this book? Because it's really about the whole product team. It takes
Like the story is from the perspective of a product manager, but other people have to interact with stakeholders as well. And so one of the things I'm testing now is, hey, are there other audiences that we might want to promote this book with?
Bruce McCarthy (22:45.778)
Following up on that, we've been running a webinar series during most of 2024. Once a month, one of me or Melissa or our teammate Phil would talk on a topic related to being a chief product officer. It's a free webinar and then we have Q &A. And we thought that might be a good lead generator for our coaching business.
And I think we did get a few leads out of it, it was onesie twosies. And it really didn't seem like we were seeing the strong signal that we got, for example, around the book. And over time, the number of people, while we got quite a crowd for the first few of these webinars, it dwindled over time. And so naturally our enthusiasm for doing it dwindled over time.
And so we'd recently stopped doing it. So there's an experiment, a set of experiments, where even though we tried over time to tweak the format and we tried over time to figure out which topics were going to resonate the most, nonetheless, the trend was obvious. So we learned from that and stopped doing it. On the other hand, when the book actually came out, Melissa and I
did kind of a book tour. And I think between us over six weeks, we did like a dozen different meetups and conferences where we either spoke or did a workshop or both. And that really generated a lot of interest. Anecdotally, unscientifically, the number of people in the room nodding their heads and afterwards coming up and saying, thank you so much. This is the hardest part of my job.
Nobody ever talks about this and can you sign my copy? And scientifically, we captured something like 600 emails from those events by putting up a QR code and being able to track exactly who and how many were coming from which event. So that seemed to work much better than webinars.
David J Bland (25:7.842)
I like the approach because I feel as if when I talk to people who think about writing a book, they think about most of the hard work is the writing of the book. And while that is hard, a lot of it happens after the book is published, right? I think Wiley, when I was speaking to them about publishing a book, my editor said, you most business books don't sell.
any more than 10,000 copies, right? And which which you wouldn't think because if you look at how successful books appear to be online, you say, oh, this book must be selling a bunch. But you look at the book scan numbers, usually less than 10,000. And so, you know, I personally experienced this when because we launched the book right before COVID hit. And obviously, my book tour didn't happen because everything was locked down. So I had to do my book tour remotely through meetups. think I had one book tour episode in San Francisco with the folks at Mural. And it was very, very
beautiful. And it was fun, but that was the only in person book tour. And so I had to kind test my way through. Okay, wow, I didn't plan for a global pandemic here. So how do I, you know, navigate that and keep promoting the book? And I'm just from your point of view, I'm one I'm interested, know, Bruce, if you agree with a lot of the work begins after the book is published. And two, like, what else are you trying to test out as part of this? Okay, now the books out there.
Bruce McCarthy (26:13.010)
Mm.
Bruce McCarthy (26:24.103)
Totally.
David J Bland (26:30.274)
what else can we do around the book and through trial and error, find what resonates with folks.
Bruce McCarthy (26:37.360)
Well, I would agree with that entirely. Somebody asked me on LinkedIn just this week, they said, I'm writing a book and I wonder if you have any advice. And I said, OK, first, writing a book is hard, editing a book is harder, and marketing a book is harder still. I completely agree that a lot of the work is done afterward and that the difference between a really
Assuming you've written a good book on a good resonant topic, the difference between a book on your shelf and a book people talk about and does its job to make a dent in the universe and create a position for you as a thought leader is that after the book is written, promotion work.
It plays a role in our business and that role is not directly to generate a lot of money and royalties. That role is to get the message out there that there is a problem and there is a solution and then to position us as the experts. So we go and we speak at conferences about the topics in the book or we go to meetups or we do podcasts and that
gets the word out. But the book has to exist first, but there's tons of extra work afterward. So what are we working on now to try to test things further? Well, we are testing to those 600 emails that we created, that we collected. We are testing messages to see what gets opened. And
we collected information about what services people might be interested in as part of the email capture. And so we're testing, segmenting the audience based on their LinkedIn profile and the things that they checked that are interest to them and testing different calls to action. So far we've only actually emailed that list once and we got a couple of...
Bruce McCarthy (28:55.394)
a couple of things back. My intuition that I want to test is that it will take multiple touches over time. So we were just having a meeting today about, what sort of an ongoing campaign do we want to do? And how will we measure success? Is it dollars? Is it click-throughs? Is it conversion to something? I don't think we figured that all out yet.
David J Bland (29:22.766)
Yeah, it sounds like you have a captive audience though. Listen, go ahead and expand upon that.
Melissa Appel (29:23.019)
Yeah, and.
Yeah, I mentioned before that I'm sort of testing different audiences for the book because I think we've established that it resonates with product folks. Does it also resonate with UX folks? Does it also resonate with CEOs? Right? And I remember one of the book events we did in San Francisco, a woman came up to us afterwards and she's like, I'm in sales and I love this concept because
I had no idea why the product managers didn't want to do my stuff. And now I understand that I need to figure out how to speak their language and relate it back to the goals of the company. And so thinking about, well, all the stakeholders themselves, is this helpful? Especially since we took out the us versus them parts of the book. Can other types of stakeholders kind of find,
the way to understand how to work with product teams from this book. So thinking about the audience and who does it resonate with, and then thinking about, okay, well, if we find a place, maybe we try some directed kind of marketing or promotional efforts with those groups too.
David J Bland (30:41.838)
That's fascinating.
Bruce McCarthy (30:42.915)
There's promoting the book itself. And then there are a few ideas that we have for follow-ups that might be interesting that we'd like to test. Maybe a test can be whether anybody pings you afterward and says, oh, I want that. One test is we could do an online course. We did one for the product roadmaps book. And it's an obvious next step to be able to
get the material in a different way and to have exercises to do. Because interactivity is my favorite way to do a course. Or maybe there's even a live workshop component to it. I did a really fun all day live workshop at Product at Heart with a room full of 40 something product people where we made them play characters from the book and made them try to
pretend to be an executive team trying to make a decision that we teed up for them. We gave them all personalities to play and some hidden agendas to see if they could.
Melissa Appel (31:50.914)
Characters from the book, by the way. And I did the same workshop in an hour and a half version, right? So testing out, it work in an all day thing? Does it work in an hour and a half? You know, trying to figure out what's gonna work for people.
Bruce McCarthy (32:1.404)
Yeah.
Bruce McCarthy (32:7.588)
And we also thought possibly that workshop could be, since you're playing characters and we're putting you through a bunch of exercises, maybe we could make that into a card game that people could play on their own.
David J Bland (32:21.925)
Oh, yeah, I love that. I love just trying to find. So if you find a problem.
and a customer being willing to try different solutions, know, not falling in love with, the book, this is the ultimate end goal of what we did. And it's our big, thick business card. there are no other things we need to test. know, it sounds like you're applying what you are hired to do to go in and help people learn and apply to your own work. And I think backing up maybe a little bit, Melissa, something you said that just kind of sparked interest in me was
Melissa Appel (32:40.118)
Yeah.
David J Bland (32:58.510)
You wrote a book about aligning stakeholders, but that also might be a value prop to the end stakeholders themselves. And I think that's fascinating to me. Even when I was writing my own book, asked like, oh, who else do you think this book would be good for? And people responded in ways that I was like, oh, I didn't even think this book would be for these different roles.
Melissa Appel (33:9.559)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
David J Bland (33:22.126)
So I do think being open to the fact that so much of scientific method and learning is these aha moments, these new insights. And seems like you're finding maybe the leading indicators there that even though you wrote it for product people and it's for aligning stakeholders that the stakeholders themselves might be a target customer for you.
Melissa Appel (33:40.642)
Yeah, and I think we're doing what we learn as product managers, which is like, what is the problem we're trying to solve? What are the goals? Right? And the goal was not writing a book. Writing a book was an outcome, right? Or an output, rather. The goal is to get people better at alignment, to improve the discipline of product management, to make product teams more successful. And so we have all this content from the book.
Can we deliver that in additional ways that helps people gain better alignment? Like a workshop, like a course, like a card game, like a talk, like a whatever.
Bruce McCarthy (34:20.690)
And the reason we might consider different modes of delivery is that different people, we talk about this in the book, they absorb information in different ways. They think and make decisions in different ways. And you have to approach them where they are and in the way that's going to allow your message to land. And if that means a more experiential thing like a workshop, instead of sit down and read this book, then
that's going to better accomplish the goal. I'll give you another example. I spent two years with an executive team for a software company on OKRs. They wanted to adopt OKRs throughout the organization. And we did that over two years. But the biggest obstacle actually to a successful OKR implementation for them was alignment on the executive team.
It was them coming to agree on one thing they were going to focus on at any given time. So when we started this program, they wanted to have seven OKRs for the company as a whole at the company level. We told them that was too many. They had almost one per executive in the room. And they were kind of departmental. And I said, that's not the magic here. The magic here is if we have something cross-functional that we all care about.
And it needs to be a smaller number of things that you can really pull off. Well, it took them really two years to get from there, we're each going to have our own, to we're all going to rally around one. And they had to get there by trial and error, because me telling them that you need to do it this way was not working. So I needed to let them fail in their first experiment with OKRs. had to.
23 % achievement on average across all seven of the OKRs in the first quarter. And they gradually reduced the number and they gradually made them more cross-functional and they gradually improved their completion percentage by the end of the quarter. And eventually they got to one, one OKR to rule them all for the whole company. And they managed to make that actually work for them.
Bruce McCarthy (36:48.452)
So that's a completely different mode for getting to the same goal that Melissa described of...
David J Bland (36:54.530)
Yeah, I appreciate that.
the willingness to work with you over a course of time and you trying different methods to get them to move the needle. And I experienced that too. Sometimes I give advice and people are like, nope, we're gonna do it our way. And then their way doesn't work. I don't necessarily, aha, I told you so. That's not my job. It's tempting, but it's more of a, hey, okay, let's try something else. Or maybe we can shift back to what we were talking about before. And I try to be very thoughtful about that approach. It sounds like you both are as well.
Bruce McCarthy (37:14.566)
Really tempting.
David J Bland (37:26.800)
And I just want to thank you so much. We covered so many different topics about how you wrote the book to the things around the book and making sure the book was an output, not necessarily an outcome and your outcome focused as the product people you are. Melissa, if people have listened this and they want to reach out to you, what is the best way for them to find you?
Melissa Appel (37:50.720)
People can find me on LinkedIn.
David J Bland (37:56.248)
All right, so what we'll do is we'll put the LinkedIn profile for you in the detail page so people can reach out to you.
Melissa Appel (37:56.702)
Um, yeah.
Melissa Appel (38:1.729)
Yeah, and if they want to know more about the book, we have a book website, alignethebook.com, which has some downloadable extras from the book and has a way to contact us about it too.
David J Bland (38:17.567)
Great, we will also include that in the detail page. Bruce, if people want to reach out to you, how should they find you?
Bruce McCarthy (38:23.824)
Yeah, LinkedIn is good or in addition to the book website, we have a website for product culture at product culture.com and you can learn about our services and you can sign up for our weekly nano letter. The idea of a nano letter is it's so short, it's faster to read it than to put it in your folder of things you'll never read. It really is that short, like you shouldn't even have to scroll on your phone.
It's just one bite size insight about product culture each week.
David J Bland (38:57.742)
Thank you. I love that approach. So we're going to include that in the link detail page as well in the product detail page for the podcast. I just want to thank you so much for sitting down and sharing sort of like your insights into how you go through your testing process on your own stuff and going through the book and around the book. I'm just so excited to see the book succeed and help people with real problems, especially with aligning stakeholders, which I hear all the time. So it was a very much needed book and thank you both for writing it and coming on the podcast today.
Bruce McCarthy (39:25.778)
Thank you for having us and helping us get the word out and for having a fun nerdy conversation. You're the best kind.
Melissa Appel (39:28.619)
Yeah, thank you.