Warning, this transcript is mostly unedited. Please hear the podcast for a far better experience.
{{< okr-podcast-episode "43-why-is-okr-so-hard-in-digital-production-space-with-bart-den-haak" >}}
Before we start, please introduce yourself. Ah, who are you? What are you? What are you doing, and what motivates you in your daily work?
Thank you, André. I try to keep it as small as possible. My name is Bart, I'm from the Netherlands.
Who are you? what are you doing and what motivates you.
You can probably hear from my accent. Most Dutch speak German, but you know I'm one of those Dutch that can't, so I'm sorry, and I had it in high school for 1 year, and then I found it too difficult. So, I still understand a little bit (of the German language), some of my friends are German. So, we always make jokes about that. I'm a software engineer for more than 22 years now, and I still think that if I think you never lose that.
Part so I still do some active software development these days, but I've worked for various companies in my career for ESA, the European Space Agency until large big corporates like NG bank and everything in between from startup, scale-ups and various positions in engineering roles but also in management roles CDO roles.
Um and throughout my career, I think it was like ten years ago, I got a lot little bit frustrated. Um, because I saw all these engineering teams product teams and they found it so hard to describe the value that they're producing and then maybe if you worked in a digital environment then ah every product owner or product manager says oh we need to deliver product value customer value and everybody asked like what is that? My obsession started actually with metrics. How can I actually quantify the value?
Perhaps.
There are so many fake terms, so I started into you know, quantifying results and I got basically obsessed about it and at that time ten years ago so the company that I worked for also introduced OKRs, and it was a big disaster by the way. Um, but I saw the potential of the this this this very powerful tool to actually motivate teams to empower teams um to to Grow. So I start Blogg about it and eventually ended up writing a book about it. Um, and the past few years I've been consulting and helping a lot of customers implementing OKRs. Um until I also figured out that it is quite hard to actually do it right? So I would pause here and.
This is a little bit my background.
Okay, let's recap you are a software engineer and you love software engineering until or till today you have learned about ok us in your journey to um.