Christina Wodtke
Author of Radical Focus, a guide to OKRs, and a Stanford University lecturer who teaches how to build high-performing teams.
Christina Wodtke did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsTying your fee to things you can’t control is the riskiest bet on the menu, and consultants can count.
- 5 weeks earlier
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Our reading
Even as AI collapses build time, testing an idea is still cheaper and faster than building it.
Their wordsBut if you need to actually make money from your idea, it is still cheaper and faster to test it than to build it and hope you guessed right. The harder part of product development wasn’t building cost or time. It was answering the question, “Will anyone pay for this?”
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsSpeed and scale get held up as goals, when they’re actually strategic choices. (I’ll address scale in a later post.) When AI lets everyone go fast, going fast isn’t an advantage — unless the way that you’re getting fast is getting smarter as a company faster than your competitors, or building a user base faster. Shipping code faster is a very temporary advantage.
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Their wordsYou know who actually needs you to scale? Your VC. If someone gave you money expecting 20x returns, of course they’re going to preach the gospel of growth. That’s their business model, not your destiny.
↗Scale Is a Tactic, Not a Virtueeleganthack.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsBut when companies get big, they get slow and stupid. Not always (maybe) but often (very.) I’ve spent years trying to bring OKRs into large enterprises and I’ll be honest: it doesn’t work most of the time. OKRs work when you have a small multidisciplinary team with a clear remit — basically a small company inside a big one. The moment you’re cross-matrixed, serving multiple stakeholders, depending on eight other teams to get anything done, OKRs become one more hassle in a job already full of hassles.
↗Scale Is a Tactic, Not a Virtueeleganthack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 7 weeks earlier
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Their wordsShowing someone a finished prototype and watching them shrug isn’t research. It’s a slow, expensive way to discover you guessed wrong. And when they shrug, you don’t learn what problem to solve instead. You just learn this guess was wrong.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsThe word “guess” makes people deeply uncomfortable. We’ve been trained to believe that business is about certainty, about knowing things. About data-driven decisions. But early in any endeavor—whether setting OKRs for a new initiative or estimating how long a feature will take to build—you don’t have data. You have hunches. You have analogies. You have experience with vaguely similar situations.
- 10 days earlier
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Their wordsTaste is not innate. Taste comes from experience—from interacting with hundreds of products critically, from years of observing what works and what fails and developing the pattern recognition to know the difference. When a founder has “product sense,” what they have is design training they picked up somewhere, consciously or not. They learned to see.
↗AI’s Missing Ingredienteleganthack.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsWhen everyone has access to the same AI tools generating the same average outputs, the companies that win will be the ones that can direct those tools toward something actually distinctive, something that connects with humans. Design matters more now, not less.
↗AI’s Missing Ingredienteleganthack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece