Book review: Who Does What By How Much?

Who Does What By How Much?, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seldon’s new book about objectives and key results (OKRs), now claims the most accessible and practical OKR book spot. I like its scope, perspective, and clarity.

Another OKR book

I recommend Radical Focus to product managers who want to understand classic OKRs, and Succeeding with OKRs in Agile to engineering managers who’ll identify with the agile software development perspective.

Who does what by how much? approaches OKRs from a different angle, explained in the introduction:

some of those books […] are missing something that we think is important: the idea that everyone—yes, everyone—has a customer.

Breadth

This book delivers on this promise, and makes OKRs more accessible to a broad audience. Unlike the two books mentioned above, it doesn’t depend on understanding a particular context - Silly Valley start-ups, or the agile software development community. Instead, it delivers clear explanations throughout.

That breadth makes this a good candidate for a first book to read as a product manager, because it doesn’t assume prior knowledge, and much of its advice overlaps with product management basics. By extension, that breadth makes this a great book to give a copy of to every employee, as soon as your company decides to adopt OKRs, because it will land well with more people.

Structure and frameworks

Who does what by how much? gives everyone a different topic to focus on. It has four parts, corresponding to OKR adoption phases:

1. What are OKRs?
2. Writing OKRs
3. Using OKRs
4. Making OKRs successful in your organisation

I found this book’s organisation and structure exceptionally satisfying. Several chapters break a topic down into a process, checklist or other framework, and use it to structure the chapter. For example, the book’s title comes from a template for writing a key result:

[who] + [does what] + [by how much]

Chapter 5 - Who does what? - then breaks this down into a series of questions that help you write key results, and goes into more detail on how to answer them:

1. What does your team have control over?
2. Which customers will you target first?
3. What behaviours from this audience drive business results?

As a result, the subheadings and chapter-end key takeaways usefully summarise of the whole book. While I read it cover-to-cover, this makes it easy to return to later, or browse if you don’t want to read it linearly.

Book design

The book design lets down the content, somewhat. The layout includes a lot of padding: a significant proportion of blank pages, and frequent extra-wide margins. The typography makes it worse, with awkwardly loose body text character spacing.

This design bloats the book exactly as the publisher intended, of course, but looks bad compared to slimmer volumes with better production values, such as Escaping the Build Trap. I hope a later edition corrects this.

Conclusion

Who Does What By How Much? delivers on its promise: its practical style complements its customer-centric approach. Make this your default first book on OKRs, and get as many people as possible to read it in any company that decides to adopt OKRs.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Recommended.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of the book from the author.