Unlock the full potential of your team with the insights from David Chase, CMO of Workboard, as he joins us to discuss the transformative power of AI in strategizing business goals. Get ready to align your company from the C-suite to the frontlines using the OKR framework, ensuring everyone's efforts contribute to the grand vision. David, with his wealth of experience, sheds light on how Workboard's platform has redefined strategy execution for industry giants like VMware, fostering enhanced collaboration and efficiency. He even adds a personal touch to the conversation, revealing the trials and triumphs of balancing a top-tier career with parenting in a remote work environment.
This episode is a treasure trove for those grappling with the challenges of steering large organizations towards a unified mission. Discover how to leverage what's at hand to set your company's strategic compass right, and learn why middle management's role is pivotal in this journey. The discussion ventures into the competitive landscape of strategy execution tools and unveils how Workboard's AI-infused platform is not just a game-changer but also a performance dialogue enricher. Get a sneak peek at the upcoming enhancements destined to empower managers and harness data analytics for a more streamlined path to achieving those ambitious business objectives. Join us for a session brimming with actionable strategies and a candid look into the future of business leadership.
Unlock the full potential of your team with the insights from David Chase, CMO of Workboard, as he joins us to discuss the transformative power of AI in strategizing business goals. Get ready to align your company from the C-suite to the frontlines using the OKR framework, ensuring everyone's efforts contribute to the grand vision. David, with his wealth of experience, sheds light on how Workboard's platform has redefined strategy execution for industry giants like VMware, fostering enhanced collaboration and efficiency. He even adds a personal touch to the conversation, revealing the trials and triumphs of balancing a top-tier career with parenting in a remote work environment.
This episode is a treasure trove for those grappling with the challenges of steering large organizations towards a unified mission. Discover how to leverage what's at hand to set your company's strategic compass right, and learn why middle management's role is pivotal in this journey. The discussion ventures into the competitive landscape of strategy execution tools and unveils how Workboard's AI-infused platform is not just a game-changer but also a performance dialogue enricher. Get a sneak peek at the upcoming enhancements destined to empower managers and harness data analytics for a more streamlined path to achieving those ambitious business objectives. Join us for a session brimming with actionable strategies and a candid look into the future of business leadership.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Speaker 1:
Hey everybody, really intriguing chat today around business strategy executed through AI, with an expert in the space from Workboard, david. How are you? I'm very well, evan. Good to be on the show, good to see you, good to see you. A really interesting and new topic for me. But let's dive right in. Maybe introduce yourself and your role at Workboard and your mission with the team.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so I'm David Chase. I've been at Workboard about three and a half years now. My background is really product marketing marketing currently the CMO at Workboard, having had a couple product marketing roles prior to that at the company. So, um, yeah, that's kind of my home. That's what I do, uh, based out of san francisco head office for workboarders in redwood city. So, um, right in the heart of silicon valley, which is an exciting place to be right now yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:
Um, yeah, please proceed, yeah yeah, in terms of you know workboard's mission um, we're a strategy execution okr platform. What does that mean? Well, we're really thinking about how do we help organizations and the people in them um effectively achieve the great results that they want to achieve? Um, whether that's executives that are setting the strategy, thinking about how they mobilize people, whether it's managers super important group translating that strategy, or the individuals who are actually working on those important outcomes and wanting to connect that work back up to the strategy at the senior leadership level.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, interesting space, not one I'm too familiar with. So excuse the pretty basic questions, but maybe describe some of the key features that the WorkBoard platform empowers and maybe as well the strategy execution tool space, something new to me. How would you describe this landscape and how do you fit in it?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so one of the things that's really. Excuse me just one second. George has been at home.
Speaker 1:
Yep, it's always fun having kids at home, so I appreciate the challenges of young kids. Apologies about that Home day. This is the new reality. That's it. How old are they, by the way?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we've got a two-and-a-half-year-old and a four-month-old.
Speaker 1:
Oh my goodness, Congratulations.
Speaker 2:
That's exciting, all new and, like I said, going to get home on a holiday weekend.
Speaker 1:
I was asking you know, maybe describe the landscape for strategy execution tools. Is this a new category or something that's been around for quite a while?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so you know Workboard itself has been around for about 12 years, so, you know, not a new company by any stretch. You know the founder and co-founder really started the organization, having been at IBM, a previous company that was acquired by IBM and really just struggled with alignment in the biggest and most complex organizations. How do you get big teams focused on the same few priorities that you want to execute? How do you go away from the hundreds of pages of monthly business reviews and status reporting into a way that everybody across the team or across the organization can actually see what they should be working on, actually see how they're progressing towards what they're working on and see how that work contributes In terms of the space. It's super exciting, super dynamic. There's a couple of different elements to it, if you like. There's sort of the core OKR part. Okrs have been popularized for many, many years and, you know, started at Intel, famous by Google. There's been a bunch of books written.
Speaker 1:
Objectives and key results, as many of us who've worked in big enterprises know more than well.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, exactly, and you know, while that's a framework that is particularly effective, one of the things that's interesting is about it. One of the things that's interesting is about it's just. It's about alignment and making sure that organizations can get people focused in the right direction. Managers have the tool set. The OKR framework, objectives and keywords framework gives them a common not all of our customers. It's the framework that we use in-house. It is really not about the acronym. It's about what it empowers teams and organizations to do.
Speaker 1:
Wow, really compelling. So talk about how it's used, maybe in a typical case study, customer example, success story. Yeah, I mean, you must have lost lots of examples of that. Could you pick a favorite or two?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, for sure, and we think about it really in three stages, three stages of ROI as we start to engage with organizations. So the first stage is getting transparency. So the first stage is getting transparency. So, whatever the goals that you have as an organization, whatever the major things that you want to go and achieve, get them into the platform. This is really where organizations I'm going to use a case study joined each of these three stages.
Speaker 2:
This is where VMware, as an example, they used Workboard enterprise-wide, 30-odd thousand users. That's where they found that they had many hundreds of teams doing the duplicative work. What did that mean? Well, that meant that they could effectively take those resources and they could realign them. To optimize the resources across the organization Doesn't mean remove them. It means focus them on areas that they can have a greater impact and they can make sure that those work, those teams that are doing similar work, are actually working together. They're not working in silos. So companies have an alignment problem. They have that issue, but without having transparency into what people are working on, it just goes unnoticed and ultimately you get a bunch of wasted resources across the organization.
Speaker 2:
The second stage that we think about is improving alignment. So once you have those goals, however basic, however rudimentary or however great they are, in the platform where everybody can see we move on to. How do we improve alignment? How do we make sure that it's not just functional alignment but also cross-functional? You know, most organizations today, particularly the most successful ones, really really lean into dynamic teams and cross-functional teams, pods and squads to get key initiatives done.
Speaker 2:
When you think about improving alignment, you're intentional about the tie-offs. That translates into many, many more people understanding the strategy and how their work contributes towards it. So another example is Juniper. Before we started working with Juniper, again enterprise wide, they're 10,000 users Survey scores which is common with many organizations in the 50s of how well do I know the strategy and how does my work contribute? After leveraging Workboard platform for just a couple of quarters that went up to the 90s into the 90s so effectively.
Speaker 2:
You're talking about a 30 40 percent increase in effectively capacity people working on the right things rather than working on things that are either not the right things or actually working against where the organization wants to go. And then the final step is really about increasing the velocity. So how do you get more focused? How do you increase the cadence that you actually review and you learn and you iterate on those objectives and that's really where we see organizations. Again, I can lean on VMware, one of their strategy pillars. They managed to execute six months earlier than they had planned. Another organization, someone like Albemarle, who again was really focused on one part of their organization they managed to increase their revenue by 3x without increasing headcount, partly down to having the alignment, better alignment and better accountability in the Workbook platform.
Speaker 1:
Really powerful and I'm looking at a number of really exciting things in your website, like Teams integration and I imagine you integrate with other tools. And also AI. Maybe describe how AI is being infused into the mix Gen AI and how you're leveraging it?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so we're really fast movers with the sort of Gen AI shift. Last year we came to market in September with our first AI Gen AI product, but we have been using AI and ML across the platform for many, many years. What this sort of you know, recent wave of AI has allowed us to do is really break down those last few big friction points in getting everybody aligned and getting everyone really to understand how the OKR objectives with Key Results framework can actually be used across the organization, how to scale it. So what do I mean by that? Well, one of the first things that we launched is a co-author to help teams actually craft their OKRs. So not just going into ChatGPT and putting create some marketing OKRs, but actually using the up-level objectives and key results that are in the platform prior quarters objectives and key results that are in the platform and actually giving intelligent suggestions about what the team should now be focused on as they head into the new quarter or the new year. We've had a really good uptick in that and what it's allowed us to do is actually help organizations just scale the methodology much faster than prior.
Speaker 2:
You know, historically it was hand to hand combat. You had to get a bunch of coaches trained up. You had to then go through the cycles of learning and get people educated on the framework before they could really get some return or have some impact with it. We've been able to reduce that massively from weeks into just just days.
Speaker 2:
The second big thing that we've launched over the new year was summarizing executive briefs and impact summaries. So if you think about the status reports that organizations and teams have done for years and years, on a Friday they write their list of things they've achieved, they roll it up to their manager, to their manager, to the manager. Now, again, leveraging Gen AI, we've basically eliminated that entirely. We can schedule executive briefs or pre-reads to meetings that will actually use the results data in the platform and then give that out to the manager or the senior leadership team. So you know, you could take a slice of the organization and say give me all of the results for the last week or last month, the actual work that's being done for a certain transformation initiative or a certain project, and then summarize that and actually just distribute it straight out via email or via Microsoft Teams or Slack or something else in the platform. So there have been a couple of examples where we've really been able to lower that barrier to getting quick value from Workboard.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, sounds intriguing. What a great example there. So when you talk to customers, you know there must be common challenges that most organizations face executing strategy. Organizations face executing strategy. I imagine some have really no tools. How do you get started with clients and you know how do you suggest, you know the sort of best practices around, not just using your platform but having a common, you know, mission.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and the three stages that I just went through has come from, you know, years of um conversations and many, many um companies. You know trialing and providing feedback and us coaching um big, big organizations to actually roll out a common language and a common framework. The challenge, the big challenge that people have is the alignment challenge. How do they make sure that in a, particularly in the world we live in today, that their scarce set of resources are actually contributing towards the company's mission? That's the big, big challenge and it's really hard the bigger the organizations are and the and the more complex, especially as you start to weave in. You know, different parts of the world or um. You've got different levels of um, return to office or hybrid work. It just adds complexity to the whole um, to the whole equation. So the biggest bit of advice, really, and the thing that we tell clients is, is get started. You know, one month, one quarter's worth of data in the platform where you can actually see where the misalignment is, is way, way, way, way better than spending time crafting the perfect O or the perfect key results or having the absolute perfect rollout plan or, you know, getting every single person to be, you know, 100% bought into this shift.
Speaker 2:
If you know, people having personal goals meant that the organization or meant everyone was working in the same direction in the organization. We'd have known that already. We'd known that years and years ago. That hasn't worked.
Speaker 2:
What does work is actually having those sort of personal goals the things that people are working on from an individual level, really tightly connected to the team goals and the strategy that the company wants to execute on and actually empowering the VP, the senior director community, that middle management level, those ambitious managers with a common framework and a common set of tools and language, to actually be able to translate the strategy consistently. And that's really where we've seen people have. Success is when they lean into that. You go from an organization where you're really misaligned you've got a bunch of VPs and senior directors who are really stuck in between trying to translate the strategy but no real way to do it to an organization that has really strong engagement scores, really strong leaders who understand how to be effective and understand how to contribute, and team members that are really engaged in getting the work done and feel like they have growth at an organization.
Speaker 1:
Oh, that's really great, and without calling out your competitors by name, maybe you can talk about some of those competitors, how you differentiate from them, or I imagine your homegrown solutions must be pretty popular as well. Just something that the internal team uses off the shelf?
Speaker 2:
Yeah for sure. Like most SaaS platforms, some of the most common competitors that you've come across are just, you know, powerpoint and Excel People just doing stuff manually or on a spreadsheet somewhere, on a bit of paper somewhere. We see that all the time and, you know, while it's a good step forward to have a well-documented strategy, you know, even organizations will have documented objectives and key results. You know, even organizations will have documented objectives and key results. We also see some technology platforms that have really great ways of kind of documenting those objectives and key results. Where we really differentiate is again through the embedded Gen AI across the platform to really help scale that across an organization of, you know, tens of thousands of employees. That's a real big differentiator.
Speaker 2:
And the second one is actually focusing on the driving of the strategy, the actual execution of it and empowering the people to be better managers.
Speaker 2:
That's the really big difference. So if you want people to get to drive results, you want people to achieve their results. It really starts with managing the people and coaching them to be better, and that has to come back to making sure that you're having real conversations about the work that people are doing and the impact that they're having, which is connecting those team objectives. So you know, from a competitive, you know standpoint, a bunch of platforms out there that you know do a really good job actually of just you know, from a competitive, you know standpoint, a bunch of platforms out there that you know do a really good job actually of just, you know, documenting those objectives or a nice way to be able to connect things together. Where we differentiate is really those that second, third and fourth level of where you see the real impact of actually having people be able to drive, use those objectives and key results in their team conversations. Get that data back up to help improve performance conversations and coaching conversations.
Speaker 1:
And that's really where we see many of our large organizations get real value from Webhub. Oh, well said, really interesting. Maybe give us a peek into your future plans, roadmap or direction. There's so much value you're delivering today, but you must have a lot on your plate in terms of uh future work and uh future initiatives. Can you give us a bit of a peek?
Speaker 2:
yeah, we're um, yeah, we're really excited to continue to invest in in gen AI and AI across the platform. You know, we we see real. We see real important additional strides to take there as an organization, particularly as we think about the performance conversations and people conversations. So what do I really really mean by that? I really mean being able to help managers be the manager that they've always wanted to be, making sure that they can actually have performance conversations and impact conversations and feedback conversations that are actually going to help their team members be better and actually focused on the data that's in the platform and the data that is actually contributing to the strategy achievement. So how do we take that data, summarize it, provide suggestions and be really thoughtful about elevating the manager's performance in the organization? That's one area, particularly from a product perspective.
Speaker 2:
Another couple of exciting things from a go-to-market perspective. We've've really exciting bunch of uh resellers who are have been partners with workboard for a long time, and a couple of new ones. It's a really important um step for us in terms of providing the workbook platform across. You know, additional uh categories, additional segments. And then we're also really excited that our flagship event, accelerate, will be back this fall in La Jolla, california, which is the biggest strategy execution OKR in-person event. We had a great event last year in Phoenix. We had speakers from CarMax and Bain and Juniper and VMware and this year we have Twilio and Boeing and a bunch of others already confirmed. So really, really excited to bring the community together and have another great event in the fall.
Speaker 1:
Well, la Jolla, you couldn't beat that locale for a get together in September. Hopefully my invitation's in the mail for a get-together in September, hopefully my invitation's in the mail, but it looks like a fantastic event and yeah. Thanks so much for sharing just a bit of the mission and vision. What are you up to personally, besides enjoying the long holiday break? Any trips or travel, or just heads down getting work done?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we're in a bit of a work mode at the moment. We've got a couple of trips coming up over the summer and hopefully we'll be spending some time back in the UK as we head towards the end of the year. So a couple of things coming up, but, yeah, focused on work and focused on the new family and hopefully it's hopefully looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:
Congratulations on all that Very exciting time and thanks so much for joining, taking this Friday before the holiday to share some really great insights. Great Thanks, david. Thanks Evan, thanks everyone for watching Reach out to Workboard. They put out some fascinating content. Thanks everyone, take care.