Head of Product Marketing at Quora, and PMA ambassador, JD Prater chats with us about all things OKRs, sharing his top tips on setting the right objectives and measuring their success, he discusses his progression from nonprofit and agency roles to head of a team of two PMMs at the world’s largest Q&A site, plus his top tips for getting that all-important seat at the table and tons more.

Full transcript:

Bryony Pearce - PMA  0:02

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Product Marketing Life podcast, which is brought to you by Product Marketing Alliance. My name’s Bryony Pearce and I’m the Content Manager here at PMA.

This week’s podcast is sponsored by Product Marketing Core...meta, we know. PMMC is our very own product marketing certification program, and it covers the A to Z of product marketing essentials. With 11 modules, 68 chapters, 87 exam questions, 10+ hours’ worth of learning and official PMA certification, it’s a course not to be missed. Head to https://pmmalliance.co/PMMC for more info.

As part of this series, we’re connecting with PMMs all over the world about various product marketing topics, and in this episode, we’ll be speaking to JD Prater, the Head of Product Marketing at Quora, about objectives and key results.

JD was at Quora from 2018 to 2020 and since recording this show with us, actually landed a job at Google as Fiber’s Marketing Manager. Before his stints at Quora and now Google, he spent time at AdStage, Hanapin Marketing, and Inflow, and he’s also one of your very own PMA Ambassadors. Anyway, enough from me, welcome to the show JD!

JD Prater  0:41

Thanks so much for having me.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  0:43

It's great to have you here today. I guess could we just kick off with a bit of an intro into you, your role at Quora, and then for anyone who's new to Quora just a little bit about Quora itself?

JD Prater  0:55

Yeah, so for me, I'll kind of give you the quick timeline of my progression into the product marketing world, but I started off working in nonprofits. And that's really where you get that strategic narrative down. I mean, nonprofits live and die by the story. And so being able to connect with audiences, being able to resonate to ultimately drive donations, that's really important. So really had great experiences starting off there, within my world, kind of transitioned into the agency side where I got to help a lot of different companies around messaging, launching products, and then also on that demand Gen side of things, too. So got to run like a lot of advertising for clients, and then moved internally, which was a lot of fun. So worked in and into the B2B SaaS and then moving into Quora. So now at Quora, it's the world's largest question and answer website, millions of questions and answers added every single week. You have probably landed on it from a Google search, right? That's probably how most people are familiar with Quora. But I'm on the monetization team and that's where I lead the product marketing, Quora has been around over 10 years now, and it's time to get some revenue. And we do that through advertising. So just like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, the other kind of platforms out there, we run ads, and so I'm on that team and kind of leading that go-to-market strategy.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  2:24

And then in terms of the Quora ads product marketing team specifically, what does that look like in terms of numbers and roles?

JD Prater  2:32

Yeah, so I was our first hire. So coming in to kind of lead this and then with my help, I have one other person that really helps me so there's really two of us that kind of lead that product marketing. She helps out on the content, the sales enablement piece, and really helps me with playbooks, one-pagers, FAQs, and that's where we kind of share and balance each other out.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  3:01

And then just out of curiosity, how is the rest of the product marketing function divvied up at Quora?

JD Prater  3:09

Yeah, so it's crazy whenever you hear this, we are the only ones. So this is what's so interesting. So I'm literally the first but it's also because as many of you guys have probably felt out there listening, you know, the PMs have owned it at Quora. And so it's good and bad, it puts a lot of pressure on them to deliver the PM side but also the other side of that, you know, that kind of go-to-market side, which is good and bad. Some are better than others, some like it more than others. But in my experience, it usually means it gets a little bit watered down when you don't have someone really focused on it and that really drives that execution part of it. And so, with the ad side of things, we do have me and another person that are really driving and focusing every single quarter with our OKRs, which we'll get into, really pushing that narrative, pushing that, you know, campaigns that adoption, the whole lifecycle of that Quora ads experience.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  4:13

And how did you find it coming into Quora as the first product marketer? I know it's a semi-universal kind of pain point coming in first sometimes you have to do a lot of explaining of what the role of product marketing actually is. Was that a big part of your role as you first entered?

JD Prater  4:30

Yes, 100%. You know, I'm very lucky, my boss was a product marketer before so she got it and she understood it, obviously, that's why she was hiring for one. But in the company within the team, it took a lot of internal education, a lot of training, a lot of evangelizing what I do internally, so not even externally going to conferences telling other people like, "Hey, this is what we do. This is how we can help" and a lot of that just came down to... it's influencing without authority. And that's like a true product marketer, you know, because it's very cross-functional. And so it takes time, I'd say it took six months to really get there but ultimately really started to work and honed in on the PM team because I needed to get in quicker. You know, there was a lot of before I got there, "Hey, we're ready to launch this in two weeks. Can you guys write the blog post and really push it?" and we're like, "What two weeks?!" like I can do marketing in two weeks, I'm much better at doing marketing with two months, or three months, right? Give me some time to put together something and so really understanding what their goals were, you know, obviously they're launching something and they want it to be successful. And so that was a key value prop and then the other value prop being the voice of the customer, bringing in data that also got me a respectable stakeholder where I was able to come in and say, "Look, this is what they're asking for, hey, this is what the market is saying", and that got me a seat at the table as well. And I'll also throw out to anyone lunch is a good thing, you know, I know this is COVID time, but pre COVID time, sit down, get to know the person, that's also much easier to influence people too whenever you can have a friendly relationship.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  6:23

And then final kind of curiosity question before I dive in some OKR stuff, who is it that you kind of feed into, your product marketing function? Is it product, marketing, something else?

JD Prater  6:34

We feed into marketing, but we feed into a CRO. So our CRO is over marketing, sales, our CS team, and so we're the revenue team, we're all like fully aligned, which I'll get into at the OKRs. But ultimately, we roll up into marketing and I've listened to the podcast plenty of times, I'm a fan of rolling into marketing. I think it really helps on that, for us, that go-to-market side is really important as a new ads platform and trying to drive awareness. I think, right now, that's where that really aligns well.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  7:07

Yeah, sure. Okay. Cool so moving on to the OKR stuff, at Quora, who's involved in the OKR process when it actually comes to setting those objectives?

JD Prater  7:19

Yeah, so we do quarterly, if you've learned, if you do any OKRs, you've learned about OKRs, you know, quarterly that also fits really well within our product lifecycle. And that's how we really plan on a quarterly basis. So at the beginning of the year, you know, the exec team is putting out, "Hey, this is where we want to be" usually, you know, around three OKRs that they are aligning with, and those are like different parts of the full platform around Quora. And those are big, you know, those are the year long, you look at them and you're like, "I don't know, man, are we gonna do that? Okay. Cool. All right, let's do it", you know, and so, once you start like chunking them up, you're like, "Okay, this quarter, we can do this, then you break that down". And so starting at the company level, and then typically product goes first with their OKRs. And I say first because we're a very product-led organization and that's really where a lot of us will then feed from. So we kind of default to them mostly. We work with the product team, it's never really a surprise what the OKRs are. But I think understanding that they're really kind of setting the tone for us to then build off so they kind of start then our team, marketing team, will understand what their kind of product vision is, what their OKRs are, and then we'll kind of ladder up into those in a cross-functional way, but also we're going to help support that and we do that as a team. And so it's not really tops down, it really is kind of bottoms up, and we start to think through how can we do this and that's the full team,  it's a full team meeting and it's kind of fun because it takes us a good week to really solidify what those are. I think it's fun, I don't know, I mean planning, strategy, that's the fun part, I think, of all of our jobs. And from there, that then gets broken down to the individual level. So that's kind of how we think company and then team and then individual level of how I can help support that.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  9:40

So when you say the team do you mean kind of your product marketing team of three? Or is this the wider marketing team as well?

JD Prater  9:48

We do the wider marketing team. And so one of the marketing OKRs might be product marketing, you know, another one might be demand Gen, another one might be customer marketing. So it might be like the full lifecycle within that way of how the marketing team is going to support, again, depending on what the product is building, if they're launching a whole new product, a whole new feature, that's going to require more go-to-market, if they're lighter this month, and they're really focusing on improving the experience of maybe our ads manager. So it's what they kind of did in Q2, we launched a whole new redesign, and really focused on improving that functionality. So there's not really a lot for us to talk about to the market. It's mostly like, how do we have our customers understand that? How do we have our customers adopt that? So we kind of adjust like that.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  10:44

Yeah. Okay, cool got you. So next question, I guess this will kind of change from quarter to quarter as you review them but what sort of OKRs are you actually kind of measured against? Can you give us some examples?

JD Prater  10:56

Yeah, so it definitely changes every quarter, mostly in the key results. The objectives, I would say kind of like rotate, right? You know, so when you think about it, the objective, like, I want our advertisers to be successful, right? And it's vague enough, but it's also like, big enough, you know? And so how do you do that? How do you have successful advertisers? And so that would be an example and then we start working through some key results of what that could look like. Success is such a dubious, nebulous term, like what is success? It's like, this guy is successful, but she's not successful, you know what I mean? So, we really tried to hone in on what that looks like for us and what we can control. I think another thing that we think through for an OKR is brand awareness. I mean, we are new, you know, we've been around for just three years. You've got the Googles and the Facebook's of the world just sucking up all ad spend, all data, it's incredible how much money they really make. But when we started looking at other competitors, you know, maybe like LinkedIn, maybe like Reddit, we're actually able to compete within that. And so really understanding brand awareness. So maybe a key result is I'm going to be on five podcasts this quarter, as an example, talking about Quora. Or looking at a campaign that we launched around a product that's coming out so we've got lead gen forms coming out, yes, we stole that from LinkedIn, it's the exact same term. Thankfully, in advertising, you can completely steal other company’s names and be okay with that. They actually appreciate it. So, thank you LinkedIn, we really hats off to you, this is our hat tip. And so understanding what does that brand awareness look like for that campaign, and then ultimately, probably moving into Q3 it's going to be probably adoption, probably even into Q4 it's going to probably take three to six months to get the adoption we want and so measuring those key results.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  13:04

So am I technically helping you achieve one-fifth of your OKRs?

JD Prater  13:11

Yes, we can cross off that 20% right there.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  13:24

Okay, you're welcome Quora. And then how many typically, I know you mentioned at an organization level there's typically three objectives for the year. How many do you typically try and have on the go at once? Because I know you've read our OKR e-book, we have a section in there, and I think it's Div Manickam mentions that two to three OKRs should be the cap to maintain focus, where do you sit on that kind of range?

JD Prater  13:53

I agree, I would love to have that focus, what ends up happening, especially whenever you're a smaller team, and you're still building out this core function, I end up with way too many. And so this is where I need help from like my boss to say like, "Okay, let's get some of those right and let's really focus here" or working with a product team cross-functionally to understand. But what I think we all end up doing, I think you'll end up having one for like, go-to-market, you'll have one for sales enablement, you'll have one for lead gen, you'll have one for product adoption. And so you'll end up because those are all core things that we do as PMMs, but it stretches you really quick because then you'll have three to five key results under each one. And the next thing you know, you're at like 25 key results, but you've only got three months to do it. And so what we do is, I then just think what can we cut? What can we move around? What's the most important thing for us to work on? And so I usually try to get around three. It's a long answer for that one but I know there are probably people out there that do this, that probably end up with like five and they got five key results and then they're just tired every quarter.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  15:10

Well, I bet as well for some product marketers if you're managing kind of 2,3,4,5 or even more products, and then you've got all those key columns within those like it can just get crazy very quick I imagine in product marketing.

JD Prater  15:22

Yes, and I think that also helps justify maybe for headcount. Right? So I think that's why I like to go bigger every quarter and just to show all the things we can do, I put in air quotes "can do" and want to do, but resource constraints, this is what we have to focus on. I think it's also valuable for other teams to see as well. I know, that's like the draft mode, but I do think it's important whenever you're getting that cross-functional and that like transparency for them to see that, you know, "Sorry, I can't work on that".

Bryony Pearce - PMA  15:57

Yeah. And then in between those kinds of quarterly reviews of your OKRs like, how often and how are you going and kind of checking in and making sure you're on track and tweaking, is that like a daily thing weekly or?

JD Prater  16:11

Yeah, so we have weekly one-on-ones and we typically... so we have a couple of things we have a team meeting, that's every Monday, we definitely review what we're working on, how that ladders up to those OKRs so we look at it as a team every week. And then we have our individual one-on-ones where we check in on them because we just covered them but probably like bi-weekly there we really you know, hone in. I try to... I always put mine in Asana. We use Asana for a lot of our task management. A key result is not a task, I understand that but I try to break it up into tasks that help me get to that point. So if I know if I need to be on five podcasts, the example, it's like okay, who can I reach out to? Or you know, which ones do I need to get on to? And that helps me stay focused, but also like set deadlines, and you know, it's all in Asana, anyone can go and see it. And then I like Asana's emails and their notifications right into Slack. And so you're always up to date.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  17:20

Yeah, for sure. And then how do you... so obviously, product marketing is a very collaborative role and I guess with a lot of the OKRs it won't just be you or your product marketing counterparts that kind of drive them forward and are responsible for hitting that OKR. So how do you ensure responsibility? Is it a shared OKR with marketing or product, for example, or do you take full ownership or how does that work at Quora?

JD Prater  17:48

Yeah, so this is why it's also tough too if you only have three, and you're gonna have one that's probably shared with your counterparts on the PM side, and so that's why you have, for me, it's like keeping our advertisers, you know, having successful advertisers, right? It's big enough of an objective, but then those key results, I could, you know, filter in the PM, we're going to launch this, or we're gonna drive adoption of this. And so there might be that kind of counterpoint of responsibility on the PM side. So if I'm saying driving adoption, you know, help me understand who would be a good fit for this? Or is my messaging good? And so we both kind of own this responsibility. And so I think that's really helpful. But yes, we do have some that are shared, typically one of the three and then the other two, it's not shared with sales, but like, sales enablement, how's your deal velocity? How's your confidence? We did three trainings this month. Do you guys feel good about this go to market? And so, it's not shared, but it's also at the same time, it's helping them.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  19:06

And then you mentioned earlier an example of one of the OKRs was brand awareness. So, like looking at the finer details, how do you measure brand awareness? Or like, what will you actually compare against what metrics?

JD Prater  19:22

Yeah, it's a really tough one. I mean, you know, all the brand marketers out there they have way more sophisticated tools than we do. But some things that we look at are a couple of things. We like to look at social listening. So we like to see are people talking about us more? That's, you know, yeah, we'll see. Some things that I really like is people repeating our messaging back to us, you know, and so that's a good thing that I think is a little bit more measurable. Our sales team will say, "Hey, they were talking about this and this", that worked, or understanding where leads might be coming from, so, "Hey, I heard you on this podcast", "Hey, I was at this conference", and I think those kinds of things help. It's not a perfect science by any stretch of the imagination. But I think at this point, we know that brand awareness is more long term measurement. And so it's not necessarily this week, next week, it really is six months to a year you know, for something to really resonate to really stick and to really get that traction that we want in the market. And so that's really how we kind of look at it and measure it, that one's probably a year OKR if we're realistic. And then I think one thing I wanted to layer in was within a certain product, like lead gen forms, we would look at adoption, because you wouldn't really know about it unless you got hit with a campaign outside of like, we'd kind of break it up into existing users and then new users that came in just for this specific ad unit.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  21:07

And then with those lead gen forms, is it a case of just kind of going and seeing where people are dropping out? And then will you be continually refining those forms for obviously higher completion rates and that kind of thing?

JD Prater  21:18

So with lead gen forms, it's an advertising unit, right? And so that allows them to capture leads in Quora, so the user never has to leave Quora. It's great. And then how we kind of look at it is, all of our existing users, like this is a much easier brand awareness play for them. That's just like almost cross-sell, you know, emailing, looking at our campaigns and kind of understanding in-product notifications. There's a couple of different touchpoints that we have working with our CSMs. But new acquisition is something that we would look at and say like, you came in, you were never spending before or maybe you reactivated, maybe it was a resurrection campaign because of that, and so that would be something that we can attribute to that brand awareness that those campaigns that we were driving.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  22:08

And then out of curiosity, so your background kind of before Quora, you said you worked at nonprofits, agencies, and typically more kind of marketing specific roles, how have your OKRs now in a product marketing role, in Quora, in-house, how have they differed from these kind of previous roles you've had?

JD Prater  22:29

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think a lot of it is... it's just different within the messaging, I think, is a bigger one, you know, the positioning is a bigger one, or, you know, there might be a strategic narrative piece, right? It's more of, I would say, more storytelling, I think is part of it. I think whenever you think, you know, demand Gen heavy, it's like, leads, what is my conversion? Whatever it is, right? It's these metrics that you have that are really kind of easier to measure, I would say. Whereas we don't have a place that we store all of our like sales enablement to track all of our uses of sales enablement, there are tools that do that, right? And so we're kind of hacking that. But I think, as we get into more measurable and more refined and get more robust within this PMM role, I think these metrics and these OKRs look a little bit different as far as like, we start thinking through... let's see here, like asset utilization,  really thinking through like feature adoption, that's a very product marketing thing. And so that one was different than whenever you're in the agency side, because you may not have those back end metrics. You might be all front end. Or when you're in the nonprofit side, you really like donations. Did we get donations, yes or no? Or you're looking at your email open rates or your click-through rates, really trying to understand how your donors are coming in, and re-upping this next month or, you know, net new donors. So it's similar, but also very different, I think.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  24:16

Yeah, for sure. And then not even OKR related, but just out of curiosity, how did your transition from those more marketing generalist roles happen into product marketing? Was it kind of a very active choice or a natural progression?

JD Prater  24:29

Yeah, I mean, I think it was a very natural progression for me. For those in the US listening, I'm from Middle America, Oklahoma, where product marketing wasn't really a thing. And then we moved to DC, ultimately moved to Denver, and now I'm in the Bay Area. And so the Bay Area has had this concept of product marketing, but everywhere else, not so much. And so that wasn't really an option or something I even thought about, but growing up in the nonprofit world, that is product marketing, you know, it's maybe more brand marketing, but that is product marketing, if a product marketer is the CMO of this product, you know, it's just there's one product, and it's what we're doing. So the storytelling, the narrative, the messaging, nonprofits excel at that, and then agency side, you know, this is the go-to-market. This is your launch strategy. This is demand Gen, you know, this is messaging in 140 characters on Twitter, and I know it's now more but you know we didn't have a product marketer giving us messaging. It was us coming up with the messaging. It was us coming up with the testing and everything like that. And now moving into kind of internal roles, you quickly understand, "Oh, I've been doing parts of product marketing my entire time". And this was a pretty natural fit for me because I was also doing a lot of like evangelism, you know, so conference speaking events, webinars, and that's another thing to measure. But I think it was a pretty natural fit. It was a pretty, I would say, an easy fit for me. And it just kind of worked out. Whenever Quora reached out, like, "Hey, you want to come do this?" Yeah, let's do it, it makes complete sense.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  26:29

That seems to be so often the case as well, I ask in the other series we've got, Product Marketing Insider podcast, I ask a lot of people how they got into product marketing and everyone's like, 'I just kind of fell into it and then realized I was doing product marketing under various different titles for years beforehand'. So yeah, I think that's definitely a trend for most people.

JD Prater  26:49

I think product marketing has almost got to an extent, it's like a land grab role, where you're just like, "Yeah, I'll take that, I'll take that". So we're like just taking on more responsibility which is great to an extent but at sometimes you're gonna feel stretched, you need to hire more, but like in previous roles, like feature adoption, retention, that was owned more like lifecycle marketing or customer marketing and working with our CSMs, or working with the CS team, with PMMs owning it you're like, "Oh, that's interesting. Okay, that's cool", or the demand Gen side they may have worked with the PMM beforehand, but it was mostly like, "Hey, we're launching this, go figure it out, here's our persona docs". And you know, there was no like collaboration really of that who owns what and where's the handoff? It was mostly just demand Gen running. Maybe that wasn't a good practice. But yeah, I see PMMs becoming a lot more of a strategic role and really taking on more responsibility, which is good and bad.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  27:55

Well, it's one of those isn't it, the more prevalent it becomes and people kind of understand and appreciate the value, it's kind of a double-edged sword because on the one hand, like yay people understand it, but on the other, the more people understand that the more they want from you, then the more stretched you get, which is a good and bad thing as you say.

JD Prater  28:12

It's probably also why we see PMM look different across every org, you know, I mean, it's amazing when you look at job descriptions for PMMs or listen to the podcast, you're like, "Oh, wow, you do that too?" or, "Wow, like, that's all you do, that would be amazing if that's all I could focus on," and so I think I get a little bit jealous on both sides.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  28:35

Okay, cool. And then I guess one thing that is key for everyone in terms of hitting these OKRs is the relationships that you have with those internal teams in that, I guess, the kind of closer you are, the more other teams understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, how it applies to them, the more likely they are to adopt it and support you and help you roll out. So how would you describe the other teams that you work with at Quora, are you all quite close-knit? Do they all get it, all super supportive of the product marketing kind of role?

JD Prater  29:06

I would say now we are I think it's great, you know, I think for me too, something that I should have mentioned earlier was we also have executive buy-in, our CRO really likes product marketing, he sees the value in it, and especially like training the sales team. And so we have a revenue meeting bi-weekly with the full revenue team, and I present in this meeting,  I'm giving the product updates, what's coming, here's the messaging, you know, letting them know, we're going to have this launch this date, we're going to do this training here. And so, I think it elevates the role amongst the team, which is great. So whenever I do come knocking on their door for feedback or something, I think there is this impetus to say "Okay, yeah, I will help JD". But at the same time, you still got rogue salespeople running their own messaging, you're not really going to fix that, but I think having that buy-in is key, especially when you're trying to influence others in the org.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  30:17

And then drilling into that because I know a lot of people will probably be listening and be very jealous of that kind of CRO relationship. Is that a byproduct of this work that you did when you first joined? You said you kind of spent six months on the education piece, or were they just kind of maybe more bought into the product marketing role anyway, or maybe a combination of the two? Like, how did you go about getting to the position where you're invited to these meetings?

JD Prater  30:41

Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, I think a lot of it, I think you just keep showing up right? Providing as much value as you can. That's a really good question. I think my boss did a lot for me, I want to give as much credit to other people, but I think if you're out there listening, it's like, I think show up, provide value, be the voice of the customer. If you can show up with data, like Quora is data-heavy, you don't have data, you don't really have a seat at the table. And so I show up with data, we use Tableau, so I'm in Tableau constantly pulling these reports, adoption reports and understanding who our market is. I was lucky enough to be a former advertiser, so I understand the market really well. And so being able to come in and say, "I don't think that's... No, not like that, these look like this", you know, where's the data and you're like, "Well, actually, customer X, Y, and Z said this, this and that", so I think that was earned but at the same time, having that executive buy-in was key. And I think the next piece of that is, when we think about our messaging and positioning and market and that differentiation, that was key for the sales team to deal velocity and that was a turning point as well, because once that started sticking and resonating, now they were more willing to listen, they were like, "Oh, actually, you know what, those three value props are spot on. I got a lot of head nods and the deal closed much quicker. They started advertising quicker". So it takes time. It takes time.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  32:18

Yeah, for sure. Okay, cool. Final question from me. So in this year's State of Product Marketing survey that we went out with, we kind of asked a question around OKRs, asking people what they were measured against, and it actually turned out that just over one in four of the product marketers we spoke to don't have any OKRs in place at all, I guess I just wanted to get your thoughts on that - what are your thoughts on not having OKRs and the dangers of that?

JD Prater  32:48

I mean, it's definitely tricky. I think there's a couple of things I'll say. I don't think OKRs are for every org. I do think you need to have like, and I say that meaning like if you're a Series A startup with like 12 people, probably OKRs - not that relevant for you because you're probably really close and you understand what's happening. I think as you get bigger, I don't know if there's like a certain number there, maybe 50 people, but I think once you start getting teams, and you're starting to see people running in other directions, I think it's time to bring the ship, bring it together, and like work on that. So, I think that this one in four don't have OKRs I think that is... I think if we could maybe discount 15% of them, but I think the other 10% will start to see this get more adoption. I think it's really valuable, I think especially as a PMM, I would push for it because it's going to allow a lot more transparency, which is fantastic for building trust, but it's also going to allow for more of that like cross-functional relationships and collaborations to happen and everyone working together. Again, we were lucky at Quora that it was already in place in that we had a great CRO that was able to align all the teams around certain metrics and around like, how we're gonna do things. And so I think leadership was really key, I can say, back at AdStage, I was the one that implemented OKRs for the full company. So if you're listening, and you don't have them, start with just company OKRs, I don't think you necessarily need company, team, individual, it leads to a lot of confusion, just work on that adoption of company OKRs, "Let's align around these three things that we're gonna do. Maybe the next quarter, your team could do it. Maybe the next quarter, you know, individuals could do it", so I think a slow rollout is also really important.

Bryony Pearce - PMA  34:46

Okay, awesome. Well, that is all my questions today. Thank you so much for taking the time out for us, JD it's been really lovely speaking to you and I'm sure everyone's got lots of use out of this one today.

JD Prater  34:56

Oh, no, it was a lot of fun. So I thank you for allowing me to come on and talk about some OKRs, if you guys have questions after listening, like I'm sure I do as well, like feel free to reach out - happy to help where I can.