Building Products that Drive Better Results with Shortcut

The full transcript

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting session of our LambdaTest XP Series. Through XP Series, we bring to you the latest innovations and best practices in the field of quality engineering and software development. In general, we connect you with industry leaders and business leaders in the ecosystem, and from them, we get to learn what's new coming out in the market.

I'm your host, Mudit Singh. I'm the Head of Growth and Marketing here at LambdaTest, and it's a pleasure to have you all with us today. Now joining me today as a guest on the show is Kurt Schrader. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Shortcut.

Now Kurt has been building up Shortcut or Clubhouse, which was known earlier for nearly nine and a half years. He drives the company's vision of making work more enjoyable for software teams around the world.

Prior to Shortcut, Kurt was the CTO at Intent Media and helped build engineering teams at software for several Fortune 500 companies. In today's webinar, we'll learn from Kurt about Shortcut's unique approach to product management. He will walk us through the philosophy of what the modern software development process should look like.

In short, he's going to talk about the Shortcut way how you can structure your team in such a way that everyone's voice is heard, striking a balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches.

As I highlighted, it's gonna do a sneak peek into what the Shortcut way is and, at the same time, what the Kurt team is building up in Shortcut right now. Right, so Kurt, we're pretty excited to know more about the Shortcut way.

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Awesome. Thank you for having me. And yeah, we have been working on this for nine years or so trying to build something that we think really helps software and product teams be more productive and more transparent and aligned with the companies that they're building in.

So excited to talk more. And really, the Shortcut way is really ultimately a way to build your teams and put together your company and your software teams based on trust, right?

How do you figure out how to build things in a way where your engineers can solve interesting problems, exciting problems? They're not just being told what to build this feature. They're saying, hey, we have these problems. Here's what the business problems look like.

Here's how we're translating them into OKRs or objectives, sort of what we want to move the needle on. How do we turn that into a roadmap? And then how do we take on the engineering side and product side, let people figure out the best solutions, figure out what they want to build, figure out how we're going to learn from it, and say, how does this ultimately move the needle or not move the needle?

So, it really comes down to learning and trusting. Well, at the same time, at the top level, having that visibility in so the rest of the organization can see what's going well, what's not going well, what's actually being built. And it kind of builds trust across the organization instead of keeping everyone in their own silos.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - Got it. It's a pretty interesting factor, like a point, in fact, OKR objective in key results. This has been something that was talked about by management consultants earlier, but now it has been creeping up into the, not just from, let's say, human resources side, but more towards the development and software development ecosystem as well.

Like team leaders, engineering leaders are now talking more about OKRs. So specifically for companies that are now digital-first, that are very heavily invested in the digital experience, building up their own software ecosystems.

So how does OKR kind of align in your experience, in the Shortcut experience, how the OKRs align, and organizations should align to drive product development forward, to take it to their, let's say, next digital transformation, which is another buzzword going on right now.

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Yeah, it's been interesting. We were originally building, and still are building, a project management tool that we thought software engineers and product managers would like.

And as we built up, we have thousands of companies using it at this point, ranging from 5-10 people, and our largest are close to 2,000 people, sort of everywhere in between. And one thing we found is a lot of companies said, hey, we still don't know what the engineering team is doing half the time.

And that, that manifested itself in they're going too slow or, you know, do we need to hire somebody new? I don't really know what's happening there. So we, we'd started to talk to a lot of people and try to learn as much about this. And when we got to OKRs, we interviewed a couple hundred of our customers and said, hey, do you use OKRs? And over 80% of them said they did use OKRs.

But the interesting thing that we found was when you asked them, when you kind of went a little bit below the surface there, a lot of people had OKRs. But the way they were using them was, hey, we'd look at them at the beginning of the quarter. We look at the end of the quarter.

Everyone's kind of forgotten about them in between, right? I don't know if it's they're being ignored, but just kind of out of sight, out of mind, right? So what we've tried to build up and what we're building up right now is putting everything in the same tool, right? You can plan in the tool.

So here's your roadmap; here's your stack of road things that are important that we're building this quarter. Here's how we're gonna communicate about that, right? This is not just a progress bar, but we tried to make it easy to say you know, here's a quantitative, sorry, a qualitative update where it says, this is on track, this is off track.

So visibility to it at that level. And then the next level up is, here are our objectives. Here are the key results that we care about. Here are the things we're building that we think are actually gonna move the needle on those key results. So you can pull in, you know if we're building something and we think it's going to, you know, increase conversion rate, right?

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - You know, here are the three things that the team is actually doing. These two are actually done. What metrics are we tying that back to? What are we learning from it? Did this work? Did it not work? Right. And then you can have that conversation. It didn't work.

Is there a version two of it that should we just choose the next thing on the list? And you try to figure out, you know, what's actually happening. And I think we've found and rolled out in beta. We're using it internally; the level of trust among those teams and sort of crossing those boundaries from your sales team to your other teams that you're working with really starts to ratchet up.

People sort of can understand and, and see what, what everyone's doing there and how it all fits together. So I think that's been going, going really well so far. And it's really about driving that alignment and getting everyone together in the organization.

All the stakeholders are kind of on the same page about everything, right? It's in one tool. You're not just looking at the end of the quarter when you set it up at the beginning to say this worked, this didn't work. You kind of have regular updates around everything to drive that trusted alignment through everything.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - Got it. Alignment is a very interesting topic in it all together. So usually, there are two approaches. There's a bottom-down, bottom-up approach and there's a top-down approach. And when we most of the organization kind of struggle to keep a balance in between, right, to do a, let's say, alignment in all of those things.

So what should be the best practices? What do you think is the right way? How that organization can approach a balance between those two approaches?

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Yeah, totally. I think that there's generally at the top level, sort of your high level goals get set, right? Your objectives, you know, you have a conversation with the company around, you know, these are the things that are important this quarter, right?

And we generally work on a quarterly cadence. We see most of the companies we work with work on a quarterly cadence, where we say, hey, these are the things that are important to us. These are the objectives we have for this quarter.

And then the alignment comes, at least from what we've seen and sort of what the organization we're working with, you know, across the organization, people say, okay, I think I can affect this objective. Here's a key result that would move the needle on this thing, right?

And you know, conversion, right? As an easy example for most of the companies that we work with, you know, you want to convert more people to pay. So how do you if each team on their own says, hey, this is what I think I could do towards that, then you roll those up, and you can say, this is the objective, here are the OKRs, they've been rolled up from different teams.

But the bottom-up approach of objectives and the KRs coming up from the bottom seems to be what we've seen working best. The people who are coming up with those key results are closest to the customer and have the most information. You know, you really can do the best job, right?

The failure mode that we see a lot is somebody in the CEO seat or the team around the CEO seat saying, here are your objectives; here are the key results. This is what we're going to move. And the team goes, I don't know how to do any of that stuff.

Like that's not even, wouldn't even be the highest impact thing. And they just go do another thing. And that's where you get that, you know, really out-of-alignment piece there. You've got all this stuff in one tool over here. The other team's working over here. And it just, you know, never really hooks together in any way.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - So again, that also creates an interesting point. So specifically an organization where the steps are very high, like there is a very big organizational chain.

Now we mentioned that the people who are on the ground, who are customer facing their OKR, should be something that the company should drive forward. But what that means is what we are talking about is that the voice of the people who are down on the ground, working on the ground, should be heard as well.

So that is something that usually does not happen specifically at larger companies, right? So what the organizations, big organizations specifically should work upon to ensure that voice is being heard, that every team's voice is something that should matter, right? How does that work out?

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, the thing that we've seen, and part of the reason we're building this is in a lot of organizations, your trust breaks down because somebody shows up, somebody on the sales side goes to an engineering leader and says, hey, you know, what's going on with this thing? I want to sell it. Right.

And you end up, I think, in a place or generally speaking, what we've seen a lot of is, you know, some deflection or, I don't know, like go talk to somebody else, you know, you send someone somewhere else because the, uh, you know, the, the transparency, I think, and alignment's not there.

And you do need that person, right? Like you don't want, um, I think, uh, you know, your, your VP of sales going to your to an individual engineer and saying, hey, build this for me, right? That's where things start to get out of whack.

But if you just have that visibility to say, hey, the thing you want, we said is less important than this other thing, maybe not to you, but as an organization, this is the stack of things that we wanted to do there. And I think it's building that trust.

And if after a couple of quarters, they can actually see, hey, I can actually understand what's going on, I understand what's being built, I understand why things are going faster or slower than I think they should be going.

Then it gives you that space, that mental space actually to trust your team and roll it up. Because I think, ultimately, it comes back to trust. And especially in large organizations, like this stuff's going to roll down, right? But you have to have that process in place where the goals get set from the top, and then the innovation comes from the bottom.

So I think organizationally there is some work to make that call and say, Hey, this is what we're going to do and push people in that direction. It's not going to happen organically in most places. You have to have to, somebody has to drive it.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - I see that was one of the biggest challenges that come in this way, like adopting this way. So a lot of pre-built notions, a lot of pre-built processes, they have to be broken down. A lot of new from-scratch thinking has to be done specifically in larger organizations as well, as we highlighted.

So what if I, as a company, start to implement the Shortcut way? Usually, what are the strategic challenges that come into play that we have to overcome kind of make sure that this approach is successful?

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big ones that we see is in a lot of organizations, you'll have a product team who thinks it's their job to figure out all the details, figure out everything that needs to be built, push down an exact spec for things, and then the teams just implement that, right?

And I don't think historically this has come from everything from the legend of Steve Jobs, who people think designed every detail of the iPhone. People who worked with him, obviously that wasn't true.

But you get this piece of product and a lot of organizations can have so much control and so much their arms around things deflecting results, the engineering team didn't get it finished, even though I'd done everything.

It becomes sort of this, I don't know if toxic is the right word, but it's not a healthy relationship between engineering and product in a lot of places. And you have to figure out, you have to get comfortable with, the team will build this. It may not have been the way that I built it, right?

But it solves the problem. We can see from the results it's, uh, more people are using the product, you know, revenues, ramping up all those things. Uh, so I think there's, there's a, there's a level of, of comfort and, and sort of taking your hands off these things and, and trusting those people including a lot of organizations I've worked in, and it's hard to get people over that hump and say, you have to, you have to kind of let go of the wheel a little bit and trust that your team is, is going to make it happen. So, I think that's a big one that we go through with a lot of companies as they're moving over.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - Yeah, so kind of cut down on the micromanaging part of things, cut down in making this mandate that, yeah, your way is the only way or the right way, right? So that's what, in fact, the transparency part of the thing is. So kind of ensure that you are trusting your team as well.

And at the same time, trusting the team in this regard that, yeah, they are ultimately going to meet the objective that you have set up from the top down, that, yeah, we want to solve this problem of the big customer case. And

The way we solve it is up to you guys. It's how the best engineering that you can do to kind of get to the solution, right? So that's pretty interesting. And I think one of the challenges in all of this transparency and trust factor is the tooling that is involved. And I think that is what Shortcut is all about.

So I wanted to have a sneak peek into how you guys are re-imagining this OKR piece in the software development ecosystem and what the roadmap is that you see in this regard.

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Yeah, I think from our point of view, what we're building currently, and we're rolling out to, right now, it's, I think, about a hundred customers, along with us internally, some other people, is putting your objectives, your key results, your roadmap, and then all of your work in the same tool.

So you can really zoom all the way from the top level of, you know, here's what's important to the company all the way into, you know, this is what the team is working on, this is what I'm working on day to day, and it's all in the same place.

So to that point, the objectives are forgotten, or they're out of sight, like we want to make sure they're there. So you can start your week by saying, hey, you know, let's recenter, let's realign, say this is what we care about.

This is what the key results we're trying to move are this quarter. This is the work that's being done. This is how it's going. All right, let's get to work, right? And having those teams, everything there from your top level all the way down to your actual engineering and product work really helps keep that alignment there and keep everybody on the same page.

So we're building that. And the other thing here is, you know, when you think about, you know, how all these pieces are going to fit together, you know, what can we learn from them?

How can we summarize progress, right? Having everything in one place starts to make it easier when you think about some really, to me, I think useful uses of AI and different things like that. You can say, all right, there's a team, what's it doing? How is it contributing to the stack?

Like there's all this information all over the place. Once you start to pull it all together, you start to get some really useful, hey, I've been on vacation for two weeks. Like what happened, right? Like how have we moved the needle on these things?

And everything starts to come together, especially when you're pulling in your metrics from your amplitudes, other tools to say, hey, this is actually what's being built. This is how the needles or the metrics are actually moving. The key results are starting to move in the right direction. You can just have everything there.

And it takes out that piece of, we've forgotten about it. And it just gives you that transparency and alignment piece that teams don't really have. I think a lot of teams still think about, you know, you say, oh, the engineering team, I thought we were going to be done with something.

And the metrics and the mental model that we've gotten to over the last couple of decades is, well, they finished 30 tickets this week and 20 last week. And so they're moving faster or slower when ultimately you care about, are we shipping the things that we said we're going to ship?

Are they moving the needle? Like, I think we got to get back to that place where we're just building things to move the business forward. And the micromanagement can be taken out of the picture on some level.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - All right, so we're talking about metrics right now. And I'll say that there are, specifically in the software as a service ecosystem, SaaS ecosystem, there are hundreds of metrics people track but let's talk about the Shortcut way in this.

So what are the core metrics that you guys track and in your approach that are most important to have to get them and end up feeling that this, based on this metric indicators the strategic planning that we have done is a success or not? Like, what are the core metrics that you track in that regard?

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Yeah, definitely. So I think there's, there's metrics at a few different, few different levels, right? At the, at the highest level, uh, that we have, we have our key results. We track, um, uh, you know, if, if we're saying, Hey, we, we converted this many people last quarter and we want to convert this many people this quarter, you know, that, that sort of thing where you track sort of your business metrics.

And then underneath that, at an engineering and product level, we look at a couple of things. We have a roadmap, which is not a time-based roadmap. It's a stack of the most important things for each team. The metrics in there, you know, both show you stories completed.

So you can say, hey, you know, this is gonna take 50 stories, we're 30 stories through. You can also see, you know, has that expanded or collapsed, right? So, you know, it's when we started, it was 30, now it's 50, now it's 40. We're in a good place to finish this.

There's also a, and this is built into Shortcut, but I think just in general, something people can get better at is not just the quantitative piece, but the qualitative piece, right? Like, is this on track? Is this not on track? Why? And what does that, every week, say? Oh, we're behind because somebody's out of the office for an emergency, that sort of thing, right?

You can go back to this alignment of trust and transparency. Uh, like that's a big piece of like saying, you know, not just things are ahead, they're going to ship on time, or they're not, you know, why and what's happening behind it.

The next level down from that, generally speaking, is within a team, excuse me, then an engineering team, what's being shipped, how often they're being shipped, your cycle time, and things like that.

I think is the most important thing that we look at. We want teams to be shipping all the time. And where are those places? You can look at a cumulative flow diagram, things like that, to say, OK, we're stuck in.

Things get stuck too long in QA. Things get stuck too long in testing, or it takes too long to deploy. All those metrics are where you're collapsing your ability to ship fast and use tooling around testing, things like that to make your life better and make things easier on that side, I think really goes a long way.

We do less, and we've seen, I think, less among our customer base of saying, hey, we've shipped 30 points this week, 30 points that week, so it means we're gonna ship 30 points next week. Within teams, I think that's important. Those metrics, I think need to stay more internally facing so that the teams can calibrate around things.

But it becomes a problem when that bubbles up, and someone says, oh, well, this team shipped 50 points; this team shipped 20 points. Those teams may be totally different. They may estimate all those different pieces in there. So we try to stay away from that, at least externally. We make it easy internally within a team to look at it.

But at a higher level, it's, are you shipping value? Are you shipping, number one? What value is that driving number two and then, and then go from there? Uh, that's how you drive the company and the organization forward.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - Hmm-Mmm! So kind of like an OKR observability, right? This is the newest favorite word of mine, observability. So OKR observability stack, kind of like that is what we are building up, right?

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - I like that. I'm going to take that. OKR observability. There we go.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - So, coming back, one very interesting point we were discussing in the previous question is the use of AI, like another big word, the buzzword of 2023. And we were talking about how we can leverage AI specifically, I'll say the cognitive aspects of AI, looking at past data and kind of doing some efforts.

But where do you see, like, what would be the role of AI or AI-augmented tooling in all of this ecosystem in the, I'll say, the again Shortcut way where the AI lies in the Shortcut way?

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we've seen a lot of tools we work with, and I think a lot of people have seen a lot of tools kind of just throw stuff over the wall and call it AI. And I don't see it get used a lot or it's not super impressive in a lot of ways.

So I think right now, where we're zeroing in is a couple of different things. And I think, you know, for now, for the foreseeable future from where I sit, the more AI is a, uh, you know, Copilot or assistant or whatever you want to call it to say this is going to help me to move faster to make my life easier.

And when you frame it and look at it through that lens, I think you end up a lot with, You know, for us, especially on the project management product management side of things. It's, You know if we're writing specs or writing out sort of what we're building, How can you look at how we've done that in the past, you know?

Like, let's get started, right? Let's do the busy work, the 80% of getting started and saying, oh, most of the specs in this company are written in this way. Like, we can fill in, you know, 20, you know, 80% of that to get started.

And then you go through, and you're more of an editor than a writer, or you focus on the important pieces. I think that's an interesting area that we're exploring. I know some other people are exploring as well. That, you know, we'll see what happens there.

And then, yeah, like, if you can put your information and sort it in a way where you can say, what's this team doing, what's this team doing, fill me in, right? I think a lot of us have a problem where you're looking at a bunch of stories or tickets that got done over the last couple of weeks.

You're looking at Slack channels that sort of or Microsoft Teams channels that are, you know, data is all over the place and some things are, you know, talking about some features here, and teams are talking about things here.

If you can pull that together and really give you that level of abstraction and the same way we're building the tooling to say, you know, hey, here's here are the five things that teams are building. You don't need to worry about the details of the 400 tickets underneath that are built out. It's just like art.

Do we agree on these five things, right? The same thing It's like, hey, what's the team been doing? Can you abstract that away and say, you know, it's over the last week This is what happened.

These are the important discussions that happen, and you can dig deeper in if you need to and things but kind of give you that level of distraction and that ability to see progress and understand the progress in an abstracted way, right, and you know, I think it is still, there's still work to be done there.

We're still figuring out sort of what that right level of abstraction looks like and how you don't miss, miss too much. But, uh, yeah, I think that that's kind of the interesting place to, to dig into that we're seeing.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - So basically, what I understand is to get data from different aspects, like what the conversations are happening on the communication channels like Slack and Teams and what kind of tickets are open.

So, let's say the, in fact, in our case, let's say what tests have been run, what development has happened, what commits have happened. Cut that together, sync that together, kind of highlight how we are aligning with the OKRs we have defined earlier, right? Is that actually moving the needle, or is it just noise?

So kind of bring all that data together into one a coherent ecosystem, a coherent way to kind of see if, and also cut down a lot of manual effort on those regards, because right now a leader has to kind of check everything, manually look at each conversation, take it manually, and then highlight to their higher-ups that yeah, we are doing a good job.

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Thank you. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, the more we can take that out of things. And, you know, like you said, right, like, what tests are run? You know, it's so easy to say, hey, we, you know, we did the wrong thing or, you know, a big chunk of this wasn't covered by tests, and nobody saw like all those things that like a computer can do well to say, and then bring it together and say, you know, we didn't, we didn't write these tests because we were working on something else. This was the trade-off.

And then you can go have a conversation with that person instead of trying to parse together all these different sources to understand sort of what happened. So the more AI can be sort of a super sort of aggregator and summarizer of that data, I think the more useful it will be.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - Awesome, awesome. So we are hitting the time, but one last question from my side in this, like where do you see the Shortcut to evolving? We talked about the tooling you have built, in fact, the uses of AI and all of this, but the landscape right now is pretty deceptive in nature. It's like evolving at a very fast pace, specifically, the innovations that even you guys are doing. So what do you see in the next chapter that is being written in this saga?

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? Like, everybody, you know, even over the last couple of years, I think a lot of things have changed. Everybody has to do more with less than they did even a couple of years ago.

And, you know, as we're seeing, you know, more of the organization, you know, be able to see what's being built, how it's all tied together. I think we're seeing more and more of our the companies that use Shortcut and are following a Shortcut way start to pull in their marketing teams and other things like that.

I think driving all that alignment, once you start to see alignment across a big chunk of the organization, then naturally, the rest of the organization starts to roll in, and you end up finding more and more people in one tool instead of five or six or 10 different tools, spreadsheets and everything like that.

So I think we're gonna see, uh, you know, this alignment piece, uh, kind of build on itself and like a snowball rolling down a hill, uh, you're going to see more and more organizations, uh, once they've seen how the alignment helps them, uh, move faster and, and move the needle faster on, on growing.

I think we're going to see more and more companies sort of move into that space and sort of figure out how we can pull more data into one place instead of being all over.

So I think that's where it's gonna go. I think teams are gonna figure out, you know, how to make sure they're aligned more and more and pull everything together. So you have one cohesive flow of everything through the org.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - So we are really looking forward to that feature, right? And again, as we hit time, thanks for your insights and thanks for sharing with us your philosophy and approach to the Shortcut. We're really interesting, really insightful and thanks for being part of the show.

Kurt Schrader (CEO & Co-Founder, Shortcut) - Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Mudit Singh (Head of Growth & Marketing, LambdaTest) - Yeah, so everybody who has tuned us in so far, I really appreciate you guys as well. Thanks for watching our show. Do subscribe to our channel and we'll share the links to Shortcut and Kurt's profile down below.

Do check out the Shortcut platform; they are building really cool stuff. And yeah, do Subscribe to LambdaTest YouTube Channel for the next XP Series webinar. Bye-bye, have a great day.