Kate Syuma

To maintain company-wide visibility and ensure alignment, several rituals should be consistently maintained: — Monthly company-wide meeting to share OKRs, product wins, strategic updates, reinforcing the vision and mission. If this meeting is facilitated by the CEO of the company personally, it can help to reach better engagement and trust on a bigger scale. — Weekly stream-level traction: creating visibility of each team's progress, uncovering overlaps, and resolving them immediately — Team-level plannings and refinements: making sure that each person in the team understands roles and responsibilities — 1:1s: creating a safe space to tackle more difficult and unique concerns with team members in person

Word-of-mouth can work as a strategy for B2B SaaS products if several criteria are taken into account: — The product is delivering high-quality value on promise — User wants to contribute to the product value — User is creating user-generated content (Frameworks, Templates, Videos, etc.) — Product is creating a surface/marketplace to distribute this UGC — Users are motivated to share it with others, knowing that their contributions (effort) will reach visibility and they will get some ROI of that (credibility or monetization) Some good examples of WOM used as a strategy for UGC: Notion, Coda, Miro, Figma community.

The ideal customer for potential referrals is also known as a "high-expectation customer" or biggest supporter. These customers can be identified while you're trying to achieve the product-market fit and they identify themselves as highly engaged in your product idea. While the product is scaling, this segment of customers can be leveraged for partnerships or strategies like Community-led Growth. This category can become active contributors and creators of UGC (user-generated content) that they will be sharing naturally with their network and create more organic word-of-mouth.

I found it helpful to combine several components in a Growth Framework while auditing products and uncovering growth opportunities: — User Journey steps: start with decomposing each step in the product flow. — Problems connected to each step: this should be data-informed using qualitative and quantitative data — Hypotheses on how to improve it: We believe (problem), because (data/feedback) — Solution / Prediction: if we (change), it can improve (impact) — Behavioral principles: e.g. improving discoverability by using "Hick's law" — WSLL: what success looks like, Leading + Primary metrics As a result, it should give a list of hypotheses to prioritize for the growth roadmap.

In my experience, defining OKRs should be done on 3 different levels: — Company OKRs: reflect the company's painted picture (vision, mission towards ≈3 years) and be holistic enough to use them as an overarching umbrella — Stream / Group level OKRs: Group leaders decide on which OKRs from the company level they want to support and decompose deeper — Team-level OKRs: each team takes a metric and creates a set of initiatives to drive it. It's important to avoid duplications and overlaps at scale, this is why transparency is the key (e.g. Company-wide spreadsheet with OKRs divided by each level) To summarize: define OKRs on 3 levels and prioritize a limited number of KR metrics (4-6) to keep it simple.