[27.08.25] Making OKRs Work: How Intruder Uses Data to Align Teams & Deliver Growth

Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar this afternoon. It's great to have you with us. I'm Molly Hughes. I'm the CEO of Count. We've got a really exciting discussion to have here about alignment of your team to your objectives and making sure that you're working together as a team, particularly about OKRs. Those of you just joining, just to run through a bit of the admin, like I must have air stewardess or steward. We're going to talk about, the q and a box. There's a q and a box that you can add your questions into at any point during the, the course of the discussion. We'll have a particular q and a time at the end. This sort of about sort of thirty, forty minutes in, so you can definitely have a chance to answer your questions there. We'll be recording this as well, so you have a replay. You can share with what your wider team at the end of this. If you don't catch it all, you want other people in your organization to get involved with it. And, yes, we're gonna be showing you canvases, and we're gonna be talking through some real examples of how, Intruder have used count to really level up their visibility of their core business metrics and align the team to their objectives. So I hope that makes sense. To set the scene, I wanna go straight into the content. We've asked you all as part of the ramp up to this webinar to tell us how you're doing OKRs right now. And I wanna just play back, the results of that survey. Thank you for those of you who filled it in. And I think it really just sets the scene so well to why we're talking here and why you're probably all tuning in to this this conversation. This is the these are the results of the survey. As you can see on the left here, on unsurprisingly, eighty two percent of respondents said that they are using OKRs in some way. So that's a a very, very common thing for us all to be using OKRs, objectives, key results, the structure, the change, and the deliver delivery as an organization and align ourselves to common goals. The shocking thing really is on the right. And I don't wanna put people off who are those, eighteen percent people who aren't doing OKRs yet, but if you look on the right hand side, no one is doing OKRs well. Half of the respondents said that they would rate themselves as one out of five in terms of performance, in terms of using OKRs well, and no one scored themselves above a three out of five. So no one is saying they are using OKRs well at all. So that is the the context it maybe brings you here. But as an industry, as we're thinking about how to be more effective, how to align ourselves to delivery, this is the context we're in. We're not doing it it well. And so I'm really, really grateful to the intruder team because they have agreed to talk through how they've used count to level up their visibility of their metrics and align their business into the OKR focus. So we've got here Adam, head of data Intruder. We've got Andy, who's the VP of product at Intruder, and we've got David, who's the head of marketing at Intruder. And just to clarify who Intruder are, Intruder are a cloud based vulnerability scanning platform. They're in the security space. They've been going, for a few years, have over three thousand businesses using their platform to secure themselves and be aware of any attack, and they're they're fast growing and moving well based out of London, out of the UK. So hi to all three of you. Thank you so much for joining me. It's wonderful to have all three of you here to have VP product and marketing, basically the company, all here working to make things better. I just wanna say hi to you all, and thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us, Ollie. So let's let's jump in. I guess one of the I wanted to go back to the slide which was part of the survey results, which was what is your main frustration with OKRs? And these are some of the things which we've heard, from people who are now here listening about why they're struggling with OKRs. They talk about being not very actionable, seeming random, people just throwing in their products they wanna do and try to crudely align them ourselves to to the key results. It's not a very structured process, in general. Seems to be the feedback that you can see here. Before we get into, like, what you're now using to drive OKRs, maybe we could just speak to that. Like, tell us, tell us more. Maybe, Andy, you could lead here. Like, what was it like doing OKRs in Intruder before you started doing it a new way? Like, have you had similar kind of challenges yourselves? Yeah. I think, there's a there's a few different things that have been that have cropped up in that in that response. One of which was the having metrics that when you achieve them all actually are reflected in in the needle being moved. It was definitely something that that we had a really big problem with, previously. We we we would set objectives. We would set key results. We'd see those key results complete. One of the things I can see in there is that, like, projects being completed initially used as a key result. But, what we we we we had that. We had a platform we were using for OKRs. It wasn't particularly great when it came to, like, being able to visualize, like, how all of these things flowed up to the top level objectives. So, yeah, in I suppose in the quote from Sin City, it was the bad days, the dark days, you know, the all or nothing days back in the day when we had when we had that process. And I think, yeah, we we've changed. We've we've noticed where all of those friction points have come from and part of that transition away from, I suppose, less visibility. We we've moved more towards count and more towards a a central data repository to allow us to track all of those metrics, more consistently and start to solve some of the problems we were seeing. Yeah. So tell us so let's go back to, like, what you were doing. So you mentioned lots of problems there. One is just the idea of having all the key results being met, but, actually, objective hasn't really been met. Can you tell us a bit more about that? That's kind of a very what would sound, quite a strange thing, but I completely understand what you mean. I've had that ask yeah. In other companies I've been in as well where you sort of have that situation of we're we're definitely doing stuff, but I'm not seeing it delivery. There's a there's a disconnect. Yeah. There is. And I think it it comes from probably a symptom of how OKRs, run within different organizations. If you if you are racing every quarter to define new key results to, like, meet these top level objectives, then you don't necessarily have the time to sit down, think through, and see what the impact is over time. We certainly we certainly had that for a bit. Part of that was that the project deliveries was one. Right? Like, how many things can we ship? Like, what are the what are the number of leads perhaps the the marketing are gonna bring in? But you'd see all of those start to go green. But if our to say, for example, our our top level objective is to try and improve our retention rate for a specific cohort within our user base, you'd see all of these projects go live, and we'd track success metrics for those projects as well. But you'd see the success metrics should be ticked off. It would be okay, and then you'd see the key result go green. Then you wouldn't actually see the retention rate move in any meaningful way. So that objective stays stays red or stays orange, and you see a minor minor up, tick upwards. Yeah. And it was again, I I think that was part of the visibility. Some of the tools we were using previously, do you want me to mention the name? Should we keep it broad? Be honest rather than opaque. Yeah. Yeah. So so we were using Lattice previously, and Lattice has been it did us don't get me wrong. It did us well for for a while, but being able to see visibly how all of our key results tied up to a single top level objective was really hard to do. A lot of it was UX based and and functionally, we we really struggled to roll it out to a large like, to to more and more people within the organization. But, yeah, like I say, that that that approach caused us some some headaches, and and we needed really if if you think about it, often you have these dashboarding tools that are like, here's a dashboard, and you have to, like, scroll down infinitely to get to, like, the the section where there's maybe two graphs or, like, maybe a little flow diagram or something. But that's not how people's brains work necessarily. Right? Like, at Intruder, when I think about things, I'm I'm usually thinking in terms of, like, spatially, how do I how do I see that this part of the tree is going in the right direction? How do I see that all of those key results are going green up the tree rather than, yeah, rather than perhaps a specific graph on a very constrained dashboard? Yeah. Thank you. I think that's, what you're pointing out to there is you've got, like, kind of tool bloat in some respects. You've got a you have a OKR specific tool over here, but, actually, the metrics who are actually tracking the business in in the in those dashboards are separate. So, Adam, maybe you can ask you, like, what was it so you've got you had a dashboard tool as well as Latticeye for that. Sounds like you had you had a kind of data stack and another OKR specialist tool, and that's part of the disconnect, it sounds like. For sure. Yeah. Because, like, when you're manually entering these results, into Lattice, then there is, there's a burden, right, on on those people to update those things, which already makes it out of date. And then there's not necessarily, like, the kind of questioning of, like, what that metric means, like, if how it's being measured. That, really comes into play when you have to build something off of the data. So, yeah, I think disconnect is is the word all the way through that problem. Yeah. I think, we were using well, we still are. We have, like, obviously, the product metrics. We capture everything within the portal, and we see how users are flowing through, their trial window, like or once they've turned up to pay being an existing customer, how they're using the platform. But, yeah, to your point and to Adams, those two metrics were totally siloed. Right? Like, we couldn't join up the we've set this objective. Here's the the actual results of what we're seeing reflected in our in our product flow into those key results in any meaningful way. It was all manual manual process for team leads or individuals to do data entry, which is just a whole load of overhead that we didn't need. Yeah. That makes sense. You're trying to align comp your team in one tool and manually pasting it over here, and you're trying to track what's actually going on in in and just seeing numbers and seeing the business in another tool. And, actually, there's no space for you to think or work for the problem that is the most important thing, which is, like, what's gonna make our business grow? How are we doing on that? And it's kind of in between the gaps of those two different tools effectively. Yeah. And it it caused real headaches because, obviously, if if each of the heads of each team within Intruder had a different tool that they were digging into for their statistics and their data, and and what that ended up doing is, like, when we came to have our senior leadership meetings, we'd sit down, and we'd have the discussion. It's like, well, I've got this number. This number doesn't look great. What are we gonna do to to resolve it? And then, actually, somebody else from another team turns around and says, well, actually, my numbers say we're we're fine on with that metric. You know? We don't actually need to do anything on it. So, yeah, those those were the old days, and, I'm I'm glad that we've, we've progressed from there for sure. Well, let let's move on to that moment. Let's let's talk about, like, the impetus for change. And, Adam, I think in some ways, you you you were kind of the the leader here. You I think you found count first and started digging in and realizing potentially as a new way of doing this and bringing everything together in one place. Tell us about that journey, like, what how you started and how you got the rest of the Intruder to really buy into, like, consolidating the OKR process in one place alongside the metrics? Yeah. For sure. So I joined Intruder just over two years ago with the arena of setting up the data function, essentially. So, you know, the warehouse from scratch and kind of getting those foundational models in place. So count, we actually brought on fairly early on. I was aware of you guys from, actually, like, very early on when you, you were doing the data hackathons way back in the day. And then, yeah, it was passed on a recommendation from a from a previous, manager. And so the account yeah. Account came on very, very early on, and, the the kind of the journey to, fit it into a lot of the in house we're doing was was, yeah, super promising. There's a lot of update because it's, it's easy to use, right, in terms of like, once people get in, it's very visual. It works a lot like Figma, so it works great for the product team. And so, actually, you know, when, it came around to the discussion around OKRs and not quite working with where we were in Lattice, it was a a nice moment that the kind of more than us suggesting it, the leadership team came to us and said, surely, we can do this in count because it kind of demonstrate that, you know, count had become integrated in the business and, like, and data especially as well. You know, it's not just like a data, a data tool. It's something that the the the wider business sees as, like, integral to to how we work. So, yeah, that was a nice moment. Give a little bit of color on that as well. I think, the senior leadership team, yeah, we we came to Adam when we were like, Adam, man, we need help. Like, this, like, this needs to change. And, actually, the the thing that sparked us from moving away from those other tooling and going more towards this, like, data driven approach to OKRs using count was, with two people in the business who are who are really, really, metric driven when it comes to performance and, like, they like to know that everything they're doing is having a real meaningful impact on the business. And previously, it was kind of hard for them to see that. So, Naomi, who's our head of support, and, Keith, who's our head of design, they sat down and they were they they had this discussion, and they came to the senior leadership team. And they were like, look. This this isn't working for us when we're not seeing the, you know, the everything tied together and how we're having that impact. And because of them, we had that discussion in the senior leadership team just saying this you know, if if the team isn't bought in, if they're not on board, then how how are we possibly gonna try and move all of these numbers in the right direction? And, yeah, that was what triggered us to to speak to Adam in the data team, and Adam's done a pretty bang up job so far. And, yeah, looking forward to diving into what it looks like now. Yeah. You know what? I think I should just share it because I think it's really hard to pull in the abstract. And, actually, it'd be just great to have it up on the page so we can all see it, and you can walk us through how it looks. So just to be clarified, this is not actually Intruder's OKRs. You've given us this is actually your this is a structure you've built, but we've anonymized it and changed the colors of it. So none of these action metrics are actually yours just to make sure people who are competitors of yours are looking at this and not getting too excited or not. But let's just walk through this, and then maybe you could just walk through how it's structured. And then also, like, what was the Penny drop moment? Like, what and what is it like to work with now as well? So, Andy, maybe you can just walk us through it. I'm happy to zoom around and make sure we can really see it. Obviously, it starts at the top with a north star. Yeah. If we zoom in there, I think, there's a little bit of a question mark around, like, what that North Star should be. Like, if you if you read, you know, into modern day products and that sort of thing, should revenue really be a North Star metric? But, you know, this is company wide. This is business wide for us where we are a revenue driven business. Annual recurring revenue is the most important thing for us to continue operating as a business. Drew is bootstrapped as well. Right? Like, we we haven't got, you know, a hundred million dollars in investment. And so, yeah, we've we've done everything bootstrapped. So revenue is important because it's a very key and, like, key for us to to grow. So revenue was that North Star number. We had a lot of discussion around whether it should be and and the result was off the back of it. Yes. We should. So we have that target. What's really nice is the target's there, and you can see, like, Adam did a really great job of not just splitting out what the total target that we're looking for at the end of this year is, but, you know, what do we what do we need by the end of this month? And then, what does the end of year target look like? So yeah. It's And we should clarify just and just for Adam. Yeah. This obviously looks like it's obviously a card. It's got a description. It's got some text. But, actually, these are live metrics. This is actually a visual chart effectively within within count. You can see that we've actually got this this the visual you can change here. This is actually running and I guess it's true for you, Adam. Right? Is it running off your database directly? It updates live as things change. Correct. Yeah. And I think the the leadership team have the reporting session specifically, which they run off of this every two weeks. And then kind of recent updates as well, we've automated the targets as well, so that, the color of those metrics will actually change dynamically based on the attainment of our end of month, which is is really nice. It could completely low touch for them and, yeah, just gives that really clear instant indication of you know, thumbs up, thumbs down. Love it. Thank you. Just to clarify how this is wired up, this is actually a live interactive canvas like a Figma Ward as you mentioned, but then you've got those live datasets. You've got those definitions and metrics attached. Sorry. Andy, back to your structure. I just wanna make sure we understood how it will actually what they're actually seeing. Yeah. No problem. So so that's the the the top level. And then underneath that, we have the objectives that we're we're hoping to achieve. Now we we used to set these quarterly, and I think this was part of the problem potentially when it came to I saw in that feedback that, somebody says every quarter, it's a rush. But we've set these objectives, we've actually set them annually, and they stay annual unless there is some specific change in direction that needs to happen. And we have that kind of like like Adam mentioned, we have a discussion as a senior leadership team every two weeks. And then once a quarter or so, we'll decide whether we need to shift or whether we're comfortable continuing with that objective. So, each of these four that we have, like, we try not to go much further than four. If you have more, it becomes unwieldy and really quite difficult to to manage. But, we've got four that sit across the entire business. And now different teams will contribute in different ways to these top level objectives. Increased market share, for example, sits pretty heavily kind of with David and potentially our GTM team, but also how the product team goes around building, you know, new components or new features to expand into new markets, for within vulnerability management and cybersecurity. Again, those have, cards that are particularly well defined. They they give us kind of the top level of what we're trying to drive towards. And then on the next level down, this is where the key results start to come in. So we start to talk about KPIs. So, yeah, the again, the live data, being able to see where we are right now and what we're trying to achieve is is really the thing that differentiates this from from a whole bunch of of things that we've done in the past. So we can see really clearly on all of the cards. It doesn't matter who you are within the leadership team or in the wider business. If you've got access to this dashboard, you can immediately see from the very top North Star down through the objectives into the KPIs, and you can see quite clearly, like, where we are now when and and where we're going. And then breaking that down and then you basically break that down even further. So you go, okay. Well, this is this is the total, net net new business ARR, but you're breaking it down by channel, by outbound, and inbound so you can give ownership and accountability down the down the structure. Yeah. I'm I'm happy to dig more into that. I think Adam or David is probably this one in particular might be quite if if you've got anything you wanna say on specifically on the new business ARR and new and, outbound and inbound split, which has been a pretty big shift for us at Intruder. For sure. I think the great thing about this is, like, we've really broken out all the components of revenue. I think, obviously, Northstar being, like, net revenue growth, which is great, but we all know that there's a lot that goes into it and different teams are responsible for different aspects of that revenue generation. So, being able to understand, you know, our churn performance, our new business performance on an inbound and outbound perspective, you know, things like expansion. Right? All these different revenue drivers that have different owners within the business. Like like that's been tremendously helpful, in understanding both like from a team perspective understanding what we're what we're responsible for and what we're trying to move and and showing the impact of that. But then also equally making sure that we're not just getting distracted by new business and that we're actually on a regular basis going and looking at churn performance looking at expansion performance because you know on a customer base of three thousand customers these things do have a material impact, right? So I think it's been really good for keeping those you know, maybe less sexy, you know, forms of of revenue growth, top of mind. And this is awesome, right, as well because if you're using other other than other tooling, they've they can be really rigid and opinionated in the way that they go about forcing you down the the OKR route. Like, we we would have had potentially just one line item here, which would be, like, drive growth, reduce churn, that top level number. But being able to get visibility into the split between inbound new revenue, so people who have just found Intruder through PPC or otherwise signed up for a free trial and become a paying customer. And then the new function, new go to market approach that we're starting to invest in, which is that outbound approach. Like, we're able to split that down. We're able to see that really clearly. Like, it doesn't matter when that happens. We can add a new card here. And the data under the hood, Adam, has done a huge amount of work to, I suppose, separate and identify when something specifically is inbound, when there's outbound, when there's sales touch, and it all flows automatically with with next to no, input from, I suppose, anybody now. It just flows into this dashboard and the leadership team and the business can see exactly how each side is performing. I've just noticed down here, there's a host one when I've got my project in the negative. Actually, definitely positive now. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. We're flipping outside now. This is obviously not live data, but just on this example is a unhelpful arrow. This is great. Thank you so much for walking through it into much detail. And you can see that you've then broken down these objectives even more. You have no limitation of how much visibility you wanna have to really know that you're actually working on the right things and seeing results cascade up. Yeah. And it it's incredibly it's incredibly thoughtful, well laid out diagram. It's obviously a quality of information, but then, ultimately, this is what it takes to run a business. Right? You can't it's as simple as you can make it in one way. I one could just ask, like, maybe, Adam, you have one who sort of really got this built up. What was the from your mind, the pay drop moment when you saw, like, when it actually really crystallized that the leadership team needed this, and they were loving it, and they were working with it, and you could you knew that it was the right tool. What was the kind of on the way of building it up, did you go, yes. We got it. We're gonna make this is gonna be the way we're gonna go. For sure. Yeah. I think it was, like, the the conversations that that led to this, like, say what went into the back end logic, that that exercise of, you know, mapping the strategy document to, like, where the actual metric's gonna be, how we actually gonna measure these things. Because it's very easy, right, to to write down, you know, what you should be aiming for by the end of the year. But until you actually, you know, go through that exercise and saying, well, this is where the data is gonna come from, and these are the caveats on that, and, you know, and turn it into a query essentially. You know, you could do that externally, of course. You could build a model which has all these, but then, you know, why would you unless you're building something like this? It's that that added layer of scrutiny. And, I think everyone getting, like, involved in those discussions, being excited by the fact that we were actually getting somewhere, right, with something which was gonna be measurable and gonna be live and and people are gonna be accountable to it. Yeah. That felt like it was, you know, really transitioning from something which is quite passive to something which is, you know, actionable and and meaningful, which is, you know, what you're always driving for as a as a base team. Yeah. Thank you. And then, you mentioned before that this is used every fortnight, I think, by the leadership team. Maybe David, David, Andy, can you talk us through, like, actually how you're using it? Like, what's that meeting look like? What's coming out of that meeting? Is it how is the document used in between those meetings? I mean, not to give the the full, you know, powerhouse to the digital intruder and all the secrets, but just tell us a sense of, like, how is it a living document? For sure. I can take a first stop, and and, Andy, feel free to chime in. I think the way that our leadership sessions run, you know, when we're reviewing NeoCares is we really sort of start at the top. Right? And then we sort of work our way, through the metrics. We have as a leadership team, we're all sort of, like, we're the owners of of various metrics with within this board. So we'll speak to it, speak to the the results that we see on the page, and then we'll also sort of provide that color commentary. And it's essentially became this canvas in in essence has become our agenda for that meeting. Right? So we're going through we're talking through things. If if we're missing target, we're talking about why or what we're doing to sort of course correct on that front. So, yeah, this this just like we put this up on the on the screen, and and that's you know, we're we're talking about it for an hour or two hours, however long it takes. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I think, I was just gonna say expanding on that. I think it helps because because you're constantly viewing this objectives board and the key results, like, on a continuous basis within the leadership team, it helps us at the like, at the very top stay aligned for, you know, what is it we're hoping to achieve, why are we achieving it, and it helps solve potentially a a a the usual kind of friction you get within a SaaS product. Right? Like the sales team being like, when's x and y gonna come out? Or, like, the marketing team, you know, asking, like, you know, when's the new cool thing that we're gonna release that, you know, we can shout about coming out? Like, you're constantly going through this process and everything is is is constantly being discussed and it opens communication in a way that I think previously it's hard to explain. It felt almost blinkered, right? Like previously when you're using other tools to do this, it was it was kind of clunky and difficult just stifled conversation and stifled communication. Whereas being able to see it open over the, like, the grand scheme of everything that we're trying to do and how that flows up to a top level revenue target, has been really good to to facilitate conversation and communication within the SLT. I love it. That's that's really great. If there if there's anything I'm gonna die on here, it's gonna be like, BI tool should give you more clarity, and that's what he basically described there. You just put words out of my mouth, which is always a a wonderful thing. Thank you for picking that up. This has been I mean, you've talked us through it. I guess my hope is that there's been a reduction in terms of the dashboards now as well, right, where the dashboards you described were giving you no context. And you then you had an a context full environment over here where you had no live data. Now you got both. My hope is that, actually, that means you are using dashboards less. And in fact, to prove that, you've actually kindly also shown us the level of detail below this, which is the department level metric tree. So that and maybe you could explain, Andy, how this works. I'll show you the product one first. So you could explain how this fits because this is a product only department view. It's a metric tree, but I guess this this couples with ultimately the the OKRs. Right? So this isn't a separate thing, a different agenda. It's aligned. Yeah. Absolutely. I think, like I mentioned, there there's there's a whole bunch of product metrics that we track, and those product metrics do contribute to our top level revenue number, in in kind of different ways. So, there was we can talk about revenue quite a lot, but in the product design, like, engineering team, we're we're we're focusing pretty heavily on kind of product driven metrics that help us understand how we're solving the problems that our customers have. And like at Intruder, like you mentioned, we're external vulnerability management and attack surface management solutions. So part of what we're trying to do, the core thing we're trying to do is help people find risk that exists in their internet facing systems and then fix that risk. Because if we're not helping them find it and then fix it, like, what are we really trying? So that was our North Star, right? Anything that's a high or critical occurrence, that stuff's that gonna lead to a breach. We wanna know for sure that we're trending in the right direction. So, that's that's what we wanna see move. We wanna see that, like, moving to the top, like, continue upwards, ideally exponentially. That would be wonderful. But, yeah, that's our North Star. So so we It is it is in your shot. Right? That's what you're telling me. This is just Yes. Exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And then there's a bunch of different ways you can get to solving, like, finding and fixing critical and high, vulnerabilities within, within an external attack surface. And and the drivers that go into that, again, I sat down with Keith, who's our head of product design, and we tried to work out, like, what are the key drivers that we have? And I think if we go over to the left hand side one, which I think is probably the kind of the first one is, like, if we're finding critical vulnerabilities, one of the drivers for that is making sure that the vulnerabilities we're detecting aren't garbage. Like, they need to be legitimate vulnerabilities that we're finding. So we have a driver for that, and then we drill down into the kinds of things that we can control that contribute to whether, we're finding the right number of vulnerabilities. So like the number of checks we have across our platform, we can start to see if we have more checks for more vulnerabilities, we're going to find more true vulnerabilities, and then we're going to help people be able to fix them. So you start to see this relationship flow all the way to the top of the graph. And we can set, like, objectives if we want to in the in this, scenario, but actually, I tend not to, like, have objectives here. This really for me is trying to understand at a top level and across the the product whether all of the levers and all of the components as we flow are moving in the right direction. So if if I see something start to drop and go in the wrong direction, then there's something that we can discuss in the product and then design team to to move that forward. So this is almost becomes a diagnostic tool when you're looking I love what you've got. You've got, like, a nuance metric, which is obviously a a metric which is relevant and and to be aware of, but, actually, isn't something you can control necessarily. It's more the reaction side of things, which I'm still so you've got here. So this gives you, like, top level diagnostic ability to see what's going on in the top in the core product. And you've got a cut a metric cut in various different ways to have the diagnosis be really quick. And then how does it so how does this play back with OKRs? This obviously gives you operational clarity of your department, but, obviously, then this helps you understand what's going on enough to go back to the OKRs and say, here's what's we're not we you know, we'll work out how it relates to what needs to move for the business, I guess. Yeah. I think, I I suppose I'll take just one very quick step back on that. You mentioned not having too many dashboards. I think when it comes to count, I, I I probably have I I open a canvas to, like, dig into. If I have a problem that I'm trying to solve, I would dive head first into something like like, count is my go to. I've probably got forty tabs open for count right now and probably yeah. It's like I if I have a problem that comes down to data, I can try and solve that problem or at least understand what that problem looks like using count and using our products metrics and using the the data that we have available to us. So if I I know, for example so I think if we zoom in to example, the Nuance metric that you have in the middle down the bottom, I think it's the cloud integrations. Right? So And it's kind of like a little mini dashboard in itself. Right? It's just contextualizing the wider tree. Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. And, like, we've done some digging using count to understand, like, what does our what does our conversion rate look like if somebody adds a cloud integration during their trial window? And we know that they convert three times more frequently if they add a cloud integration during our trial window. And then the same for kind of, as as a retention, if they add a, if they add a cloud integration, they stay with us significantly longer because there's a whole bunch of value in having that cloud integration. Now what that means is when it comes to setting those key results, if we're trying to improve our conversion rate as, you know, as a KPI, we're trying to improve our retention metric, then we already know based on what we've seen in our product dashboard, which metrics that we're gonna want to have to have to shift. So, when it comes to building new projects, like planning new projects, prioritizing what we're looking for in within the product space, we start to understand, well, we're gonna focus on something that helps increase retention because we wanna improve our NRR. Cloud integrations are one of the best ways that we can do that at the moment. How do we present people, get people down that funnel? So it's really nice to be able to see actual live product metrics over time moving in one direction or the other and then be able to tie that. Literally, I could copy and paste this. Right? I can copy and paste this cell and put that under the the KPI section in the, in the business. Yeah. And so so I say you're actually literally like a lot this is the metric you care about. We're gonna align that to OKRs lift and shift. And it's all got it's back to it's all governed by a single semantic layer, so, actually, metrics always define the same way. I think, at least, that's certainly the movement you're going in. Yeah. Adam's doing a lot of work on the semantic layer for sure. Yeah. I mean, actually, I was wondering if I was gonna ask you. I want by the way, we wanna have time for questions about five minutes. If you have any questions, go to the q and a section. Start dumping them in there. Thank you, Tien, for adding in if you're ready. I wanna I wanna go back to David and also to Adam and just understand a bit more about, your world. So maybe while I transition, Adam, you maybe you could speak to the cow using count metrics to help you govern all this because it ultimately, count is a BI tool. It does let you do dashboards. It does let you do self-service and let you define metrics and explore them. So maybe you could talk a bit about how you're doing that data modeling under the hood to make it really easy for the team to work. Yeah. So we're at that tipping point now, I think, with the where we are in terms of warehouse maturity in terms of having the foundational models that are able to answer a lot of questions across a lot of the business. And and now, you know, increasingly, the focus for me and my very talented team is to, you know, move that across to make it more accessible and, you know, make what we love about the the metrics layer is that it's it's drag and drop, and people can drill down and answer those questions ad hoc in in their own time and without the lead SQL. Obviously, it's great to have, you know, the best of both in terms of, you know, we have, Andy and his and his his product guys are very, you know, SQL literate and can go and build amazing things like this. But, you know, there's a, another side of that coin, I guess, which is, you know, being being able to put data into, you know, the rest of the business plan. Yeah. Obviously, you're fixing that gap. And I think that's actually a good story because, David, you've you actually read it you joined Intruder, a few months ago, four or five months ago. So you've been getting you've been coming to this world, coming to count for the first time and trying to get your head around the business very quickly. Maybe, and I know that you've been relying on the count metrics to sort of let you build out the visibility. And, actually, this is, an example of, like, what you first built when you first arrived, which just shows you guys how literate you are straight for the numbers, get you handle it. Maybe you could talk us through what experience being like coming in, starting to use count for your own work, and then also starting to use the, the or seeing this OKR setup they've got. What's it been like? For sure. So, a few pieces to that. I'll I'll preface by saying, you know, while the product team very SQL literate, not SQL literate on my side. So I was able to do this, you know, using sort of the drag and drop interface, which I think is, like, you know, was was great to be able to do. You know, I'll I'll start off sort of specifically talking about the marketing team reporting situation that I that I came into. I think what we found was that there was lots of information scattered around, you know, a half dozen or more different systems. And I think the number one challenge I've had as it relates to marketing reporting in, like, every company every SaaS company that I've worked for is around the unification of the CRM data and the platform usage data. Right? This is such an an important thing to be able to understand who the people you're bringing in are actually engaging with the product. But in the past, you know, it's been, oh, okay. We gotta do a request and then, like, pass that data into HubSpot, and it's a whole thing and it's slow and and and, you know, it it it really sort of hinders that level of understanding. So I think, like, coming into a situation where there was a data warehouse that had the CRM data, that had the platform data, that I could just start to build charts off of was, like, such a relief to be able to have that level of insight, you know, from from my perspective, pretty much from day one. I did have to sort of suffer through the, you know, the previous state that Andy and Andy and Adam have have have talked about. So I think that's really, really important. And I think, you know, what existed within the marketing team was there was a lot of, like, really granular reporting. Right? So my my performance marketing manager, Olia, she had all of the details of every ad group and all that sort of stuff. But from my perspective coming in, trying to run the team, trying to understand channel performance, it was just I don't it was too granular for me to be able to sort of work with that. What I wanted was something where I could go and I could say, okay. These are the top line numbers across the total funnel. So free trials, meetings booked, you know, opportunities created, new customers, revenue, all that sort of stuff in one place at a total team level and then equally at a channel level. So how is paid search performing this month versus organic referrals versus organic search versus, you know, brand, or whatever it may be. And and, you know, I was able to get to that point pretty quickly. I think, Adam, correct me if I'm wrong. I think maybe I spent half an hour, an hour with you. You sort of explained the metric catalog to me, and sort of the limitations how how everything works. And then I just went off and and built it and, you know, where we had questions sort of sort of tag you in and got that. So I I found the whole experience, really easy and also, like, really empowering. It was so nice just to be able to, like, build the report that I wanted. And, you know, if I wanna change how it looks or see it on a weekly view weekly view instead of a monthly view, like, I am able to do that myself. And, you know, I don't have to, like, take out other people's time, doing that. And I think it also has gotten like, the metrics catalog in particular has also gotten me out of the cycle of you know, it's like the ask and the triage and, you know, that it's gonna take a little while before you can actually get that. Like, I can see what we have. I know that I'm not fully leveraging everything that's there right now. So, you know, as the first line of defense, when I'm trying to find something new, I can go there and look. And, of course, not everything's gonna be there, but it's it's greatly reducing this sort of, like, you know, perpetual cycle that teams can get into with with their data partners, around, you know, making available. It's it's much less reactive, than than when I've worked in other companies. So Thank you. I I all I one more point thing I wanna point out. One of these I love is that how you how much of a living document this is. We've obviously this obviously is a replica we've made of it, but you have your little note section here. You're adding thoughts about what's going on. It isn't just a place to read. It's a place to think, to place them to add commentary to work it through. And, actually, just so, we've been working with David to make his his, kind of initial dashboard into a much more of a flow based approach, all the same charts, but laid out in that metric tree format. So thank you for letting letting us play around with this for you to and and working with you to get this right. I'm sure, it's just another way of using the canvas to lay out that hierarchy, which is what you've basically been describing or verbally Yeah. As well. And so we will make sure we will get access to this particular example and the product one and the OKR one at the end or the wrap up of the webinar. So if you wanna get your hands on this to play around, then please do. Is there any we'll we'll wrap up and get to q and a. And if you have any questions, please dump them into the q and a section. We'll we've got a few already. Anything else you wanna cover off all before we we open up to the audience for questions? I'll just say one more one more thing and sort of to your point about connecting the marketing and hashtags to product OKR work is that all of that commentary on there, that's me preparing for our leadership team meetings. Right? That's me going going through these numbers with the team, understanding what's happened, what we you know, making sense of the numbers so that I can I can sort of relay that up? So that's sort of how the two things are. Awesome. That's great. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. So just to clarify what we're gonna do next. Obviously, if you wanna go and get started with count straight away, you can go build your own co k r trackers, your own metric maps, you can create a count for free today or be inspired by our gallery. As I said, at the end of this webinar, we'll be sending everyone the recordings so they can share it with their team. We'll be showing you these exact examples that that have been true of kindly letters templatized so you can go away and build and be inspired by that yourself. So if you wanna get started, you've got all the resources to get your team aligned to this, to start experimenting, to start thinking through those hierarchies, and then putting data to that. So hopefully that's a helpful sort of like, if you're thinking about how to get going, all the resources will be there for you to do that. Now let's open up to the q and a, and and ask to get feel free to ask these and anything that you would feel to help you get going. I'm sure there won't be able to tell you everything. They possibly all that in intricate secrets, but certainly in terms of OKRs, the adoption of getting it of this new way of working, I'm I'm sure that we can these everyone will be happy to to chip in. I've got a few here I'm gonna kick off with. Thanks, Jin, for this. The first question is, who owns and maintains these data assets, be it the product metric tree or the overall NorthStar data? Naturally and should be a more technical bias organization, but curious to understand the headcount resources that you allocate to designing, building, and maintaining these from ingestion to data warehouse through to count. Does that make sense? Adam, maybe it has pointed at you a bit, like maintaining all these different, metrics across the company wide and then individual departments. Sure. Yeah. So, I think, you know, the in terms of ownership, what's really nice is that we can give ownership out to, you know, the true electric owners. So, you know, it's no coincidence. So we've got David and Andy here. They're both our kind of gold star success stories from data in terms of, you know, Andy turning up on saying saying, look. Here's the product metrics tree I made with the, with the warehouse models and dbt models. And David, you know, shortly after joining us, we've recounted, you know, saying, you know, here's the metrics catalog, here's where it made, and, you know, being able to turn this out themselves. In terms of, like, our structures, data team, we're three people, you know, within a fifty, sixty person business. So, fairly lean, and we do kind of span that role of, you know, taking people from triage to the engineering of the models all the way up to then helping them analyze the results of those models and put them in context. So I think that helps. But, yeah, as much as possible, we try to put the onus of responsibility and and making sure that people really understand how those metrics are made because they're taken all the way through that process, end to end, on the, yeah, the the department, leaders or, you know, whoever's responsible for those, Anthony. Thank you. That's great. I don't think I hope that helps, Jen. And then the next question is, great. I think well, first of all, thanks for the great knowledge, sir, Intruder team. I completely agree. Thank you all very much for that. How do you educate people and new joiners on how the OKR tree works, fits together, how they understand not only the relationships, but the significance of the relationships? That's a good educational piece, I guess. Not everyone thinks in a top down way, but, obviously, when you see it, you do get that penny drop moment. How do you get a new person who hasn't been part of the journey to really buy in? I guess, David, maybe that was you maybe, David. You David, you made you come in with this it was already set up on and how did you fund to adopt? Yeah I mean from my perspective I came in and I I think I pretty quickly you know coming into a leadership role I quick pretty quickly had an idea of the things that I needed to understand that I didn't currently. So I think that sort of spurred my involvement in this and it sort of spurred a little bit of discovery. And then I think sort of on on the team part of it, and I think, you know, every team probably operates a little bit differently. Andy probably probably engages with with the product team a little bit differently than I do. But that marketing dashboard has also become a tool for our weekly marketing meetings. Right? So it's people are getting exposed to it on a regular basis. We're looking at their at those same metrics week over week understanding how they're moving. So it's building this sort of sense of consistency around it and also a sense of like what is possible with the tool. So I think it's sort of like it you know in my case it's sort of awareness via exposure like osmosis kind of thing. And just making sure that we're using it. It's not just a tool for the leadership team but it's a team for it's a tool for you know our team meetings tool for our one to ones. And if we're seeing those same numbers and we're we're looking at those same things, you know, maybe at a more granular level one place than the other, you know, that that sort of helps keep everybody on the journey. I love that. I love the way that it's a tool used that everyone in the business is using it. It's not just the leadership team. It's a separate environment that they think and look at, which is not what your team is looking at. The more you're looking at the same asset and all pointing the same direction, you have the same context. Just that that's a really important alignment point I think you just made. That's really helpful. Sorry. Thought I cut someone off there. I was I was just gonna say, yeah, like, similar to, similar to David's approach when he talks about making sure that the marketing team is, you know, exposed to this sort of stuff. Like, every time we're having or we're kicking off projects or having touch points with, projects that are underway within the product team. First thing we do is, like, why are we doing this? Like and I know it it does get repetitive. Yes. But, like, reinforcing that we're here today because our customers need x, y, and zed. It's going to help them by doing this, and it's gonna help us by do it, like, by solving this, objective that we currently have. And you do that every single week, and people do buy into it. Yeah. It starts so the meeting starts off with a little smirk from some of the perhaps more engineering focused, maybe the, the odd cynic in the, in the meeting because you're you're banging that drum again doing the whole product side of things. But it it helps them if if you reiterate, like, continuously, like, this is the thing we're moving by doing this project, then everybody comes on board and is there for the journey as well. Thank you. That's really yeah. That was a good job to say. The nice thing about that tree structure is it really does, you know, underline that there there is empirically a relationship between those things. Right? Like, I think in the survey results, someone called out that you tried to, like, fit projects that you already wanted to do under an objective, which is definitely the case when you're not actually looking at, you know, how does this number relate to this number? But that even just putting it in that in that tree structure helps people to think in that way. And, you know, you have to pick things that are really relevant. Love it. Oh, I've got a few more questions that have come coming flooding in. So one is from waiting. She asks for, thank you for the process talking through. For those of us at the beginning of the journey, could you share approximately how long it is taking to get to this point? Do you, did you already have all your foundation set, for example, ingesting all the relevant data into your data warehouse, or did you have it to prioritize those pieces of work initially? I guess that's the question of, like, can you get going with an incomplete data set, or do you have to wait? That's a good that's a good question, and time frames. Yeah. I can speak to the data warehouse side. So, yeah, a lot of the models that all of the models that underpin this were already in place. We had, you know, at least a year and a half head start on that. And, you know, great thanks to the, team Floss and Thomas, work on that day after day. So Oh, I think we've lost Adam. I know. Oh, I'm seeing the prices in my team. Yeah. Sorry. I, just as you're getting cut off, I think you were talking about how you had you had some data warehouse set up already, so you had a bit a bit of a base to start from. Yeah. So this wasn't for scratch. This wasn't the first project by any means. And it's, yeah, kind of testament to what was there already. I guess that most of the process, that went into this, into getting this board together was, like I said, that that background work of really making sure people understood what they wanted to measure, why they were measuring that. Yeah. So kind of, yeah, the the the background kind of consultation piece, which is, you know, just as important as putting together the front end. And I I actually waiting just on that point, I can share some of what we've seen by other other customers all who've been on a similar metric metric tree or OKR journey, which is that usually an OKR process is already happening. It's usually, as as the guys were saying, kind of happening in a kind of, manual updating, cutting and pasting numbers kind of way. So there's usually something there that you can bring into the canvas and then just plug in data when you have it. One of the one of the big differences is to get the alignment on what metrics you wanna measure and then fill it then fill it in for modeling. So you don't wanna have the the way to over engineer is to do all the modeling first and then hope it matches to the metrics the business wants. The way to do it is build the tree the business needs, the the way you wanna measure the objectives, get the thinking right, and then then you've then you've got very targeted modeling modeling project to them feed in the right data to the to the metrics that's been agreed. And if you've got gaps, you can leave those gaps visible. Maybe have a bit of manual step for some bits of the tree while others are more automated, and you can sort of organically build it up over time. Doing it the way around leads you to overwork because you don't know what the business is already bought into yet. That's what we see from other customers actually build the tree and then model the tree. Yeah. That works really well for us. Like, the question I can see says, like, what did it take you to get to this point? And I think what's really important to notice is, like, we're not done. Right? Like, this it's a journey. Right? You go from nothing to, yeah, to to where, like, where you hope there's some potentially some solution at the very end of that journey, but it's it's always evolving. It's always changing. And, yeah, we'll we'll ask Adam for a particular metric and his team, like Tom and Floss, will be like, hey. We need this. Can we measure it? And then, yeah, they have to go away and work out how we can ingest that data and then present it into count as well. And, yeah, that that happens, yeah, frequently. So, yeah, we we build it out as we go. I love it. It's a good great way for Adam's team to be really targeted on the right bits as well. Few more questions if I can. So, BVIS has said, I'm curious what are the ways we can keep and document those insights in the OKR. I saw the little memo. I think he's, I I think pointing out the the fact you are using post it notes as you're working through, the metrics. How so how does that work? Maybe it's could maybe you could explain. Maybe the one thing I should say is it's this is a live interactive whiteboard with live data in it. That's the big innovative leap that most BI tools don't have is that collaborative real time layer where you can then write next to a number which is coming from the data warehouse, and that allows you to have post it notes next to metrics. And how so how are you using post it notes maybe as you're working through this kind of stuff? Yeah. I mean, I I can I can share a bit of my experience with that? You know, from my perspective, when I'm preparing for a team meeting, and I'm, you know, gonna be talking to the team about this, I sort of spend fifteen, twenty minutes before before that meeting going through using the sticky note feature to sort of comment on the things that I want to raise or comment on the things that I think are important, to discuss, in that meeting. And then, you know, if I get an insight from a performance marketing manager or my dementia manager as to why something might be occurring, I just jot that down so that I know I'm ready for the inevitable question about that that's gonna come up with a leadership team meeting the following week or whatever it is. So so that's really how I use it. It's just a way of just like brain dumping when I'm sort of preparing for those, various meetings and and making sure that, you know, the good little nuggets of insight that are coming through the team discussions are are being captured. And then, you know, when once something sort of been sorted or we've moved on to the next thing, you you can remove it or you can document it elsewhere. But, you know, I very very much use them sort of as a, you know, this is important for right now and, keep it there until I don't need it to be there anymore. Yeah. I think, mine's very similar as well. Right? On the product side of things, maybe not necessarily just on the OKRs, but if you're building a whole product metrics tree, I I saw that you had very kindly removed some of the, post it notes that had more of my colorful language in there. Like, what in what is happening here? Why is this thing happening? And, yeah, we use post it notes because it's really useful for collaboration. Right? Like, the product team has access to the product metrics. So does our design team, the engineers do as well. And you you'll see post it notes pop up and like comments drop in and be like, you know, what's happening? Why, why is this like, why is it going in this direction? Like, what have we done? And, yeah, it, it, it does, it does really help document. You kind of see that, yeah, see that journey in kind of different parts of your tree as well. Love it. Thank you. I've got we got to offer one more question, I think. So this one actually is back to David, which is how does David work with his own marketing team in the canvas he built? Do they all, buy into using this too? Are they all building and working within the the the canvas and building their own metrics? Yeah. For sure. So I think, you know, certainly, the team was already using count before I came in. I think this new, like, sort of management team level dashboard is new. But there was already some familiarity with count across the team, you know, using it to track various campaign performance, all that sort of stuff. So I in in that sense, it's been sort of a natural extension. And I I think, you know, we just try try to build good team routine around this and making sure that it's, you know, the first agenda item at every team meeting and that everyone understands what's being measured, why it's being measured, why what's not being measured and why. Right? Like, you know, we're not gonna put that on there because it's a vanity metric, and we don't wanna distract ourselves with that. And these are the things that are gonna gonna impact the sort of company OKRs. So, yeah, in terms of buying it, I I think it's there. I think everybody, you know, the the the the team I'm fortunate to have a team that's sort of, like, seeking out the data and, you know, they want they wanna sort of get into this. So, in that sense, I I think it's gone well. But, you know, certainly a lot of that predated me. And I think it's down to the the great work that that Adam, sort of outlined in in terms of sort of the culture of intruder around data. It's been so great to have you all. Thank you so much, for the answer, and just thank you so much for sharing. It's been so great to have Adam and then all and then David and Andy all sharing how their own teams work in this, how the data team is working with you both to sort of empower this to get everyone aligned. I hope it's been useful to everyone watching to help you think about how you can move from that kind of siloed OKR dashboard world to a kind of unified version where everyone's aligned, looking at the same metrics, seeing how they all fit together, and then collaborating on those on those reports and making them living documents. We, as I said before, we're gonna send out, this recording so you can send it to your team with these example reports and, both the product metric team at marketing and also the company wide OKR tree so you can see how this all fits together, how you can be visualizing this differently so you can get people excited. Andy, David, Adam, I'm so grateful. Thanks for being so upfront for this, talking to us through this journey, being really open about what you're doing, what you're not doing well. That's still a journey. If there's any other questions people have and you want, like, the them feel you got answered or felt sheepish to ask in the session, email us off the afterwards. I'm sure we'll get the answer back from these guys, or we can answer it ourselves. We we get that this is a new way of working, but, hopefully, you can see that there's so much fruit if you can do this well. It really streamlines how you work. So thank you all so much. Thank you for those watching it. Hope it's being valuable, and we'll, send you some assets and all things you can take away for next steps very shortly. Cool. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, Ali. Appreciate it. So much. Bye, all.