Turn business strategy into measurable goals

Our CTO Jonathan Morrice talked to Siftery about how Perdoo helps turn business strategy into measurable goals and focus on the work that delivers better results. The article was originally published on Siftery Creators Stories.

Siftery:

Hi Jonathan, so tell us about what you are working on?

Jonathan:

Perdoo is a goal management platform based on OKR (Objectives & Key Results), a framework used by companies like Intel and Google to manage, track, and achieve their goals. We help organizations to improve company-wide decision-making and connect strategy with execution. Perdoo is available as a web app and mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Perdoo OKR maps[/caption]

Siftery:

Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?

Jonathan:

Most of us have worked in jobs where we didn’t know what was expected of us or where the company was heading. We see this as a symptom of a big problem in today’s workplaces. Communicating company strategy in a way that everyone understands and that aligns everyone behind common goals is a huge challenge for business leaders. However, companies like Google, Intel, Twitter, and LinkedIn have all created winning teams that are focused, engaged, and effective by using OKR. With Perdoo, we make OKR easy to implement for everyone.

Siftery:

How is Perdoo different from what already exists in the market?

Jonathan:

We are focused on organizational goals, where most other solutions focus on employee performance. Our software helps translate strategy into measurable goals and focus employees, teams, and the entire organization on the work that delivers the greatest business impact. With Perdoo, everyone aligns their team and company OKRs toward the same Ultimate Objective — the reason the company exists — and can see how his or her work is contributing to the company’s success.

Siftery:

Who uses Perdoo? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

Jonathan:

Companies on all continents use Perdoo (except Antarctica, but we’re working on it). Many of them are startups or young tech companies with 25 employees or more, but there’s also a significant amount of established SMEs and large enterprises with thousands of employees that use Perdoo. Our customers include TradeDoubler, Sartorius AG, IconPeak, and Coliquio, to name a few. Looking at industries, IT, media, logistics, and manufacturing are among the most prevalent. The management team or operations and HR departments usually drive the implementation of OKR and Perdoo, but ultimately OKRs are relevant to everyone in the company.

Siftery:

How are your customers using Perdoo? Could you share a few different use cases?

Jonathan:

We’ve learned that OKR and Perdoo work best if you tie them to your weekly meetings, such as team stand-ups for example. Several customers told us that this was a game changer for them in their OKR programs since it kept their priorities in focus and helped them concentrate on what mattered that week. Besides that, most users engage with our tool at the start of a new cycle when reviewing old OKRs and creating new ones. We help companies get the insights and data from their OKRs that they need to start valuable discussions and make the right decisions.

Perdoo OKR page[/caption]

Siftery:

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Jonathan:

Our most successful growth hack was just talking to people. We collected ideas and feedback from both companies that mastered OKR and businesses that failed to implement the framework as well as management consultants and thought leaders. This valuable information helped us build a tool that offers exactly the right set of features needed to run a successful OKR program at any company. High-quality content is another important element of our growth strategy, providing our audience with education and support, and strengthening our relationship with them. On our blog, we regularly publish articles about goal setting, OKR, and company success. We also recently published an eBook on “How to write great OKRs” and received awesome feedback.

Siftery:

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Jonathan:

When we started, Google Ventures had only just published their video explaining OKRs, so it was still a relatively new topic for most people. The few companies that had already adopted OKRs were using spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides to manage them, but there was no other OKR software that we could analyze as a starting point. Also, very little written information about OKR was available, and there was no rulebook or best practice to follow, which meant we had to come up with most of it ourselves.

Starting with a blank canvas made it difficult to get the core structure right and figure out which views and data points would be useful to users as part of their OKRs. Luckily, there was huge interest in what we were building, so we designed the software together with our first customers right from the start. The very first company we worked with even had their design team come up with some ideas on how Perdoo could look and sent those over to us before they’d even started paying.

That's awesome!

Siftery:

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Jonathan:

Currently, our most popular integration is Slack. It automatically posts new OKRs and progress updates to a Slack channel. Close to 30% of our customers have set up a Perdoo-Slack integration. They’ve told us it’s a great way of staying in tune with other people’s work and progress. Slack channels also turned out to be the perfect place to celebrate achievements with the team. In the future, we want to integrate Perdoo with any business software stack you can imagine, covering popular tracking, analytics, and productivity tools.

Siftery:

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Jonathan:

• Heroku to deploy our web app
• GitHub for issue tracking
• Zendesk to provide an awesome customer service
• Perdoo for goal setting and OKR (yes, we eat our own dog food)
• HubSpot Marketing Platform to have all our marketing processes under one roof
• Slack for internal communication
• Asana to manage projects and task
• Chartmogul to keep track of our revenue metrics
• Mixpanel to understand how users use our software

Originally published in Siftery Creators Stories