The title of Who does what by how much might remind you of Benjamin P. Hardy’s Who Not How. That was one of the reasons I picked it up, but this book is completely different. It dives into the world of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). If you work in IT and you’re not sure what OKRs are, trust me—this book will be useful, even if you try to avoid planning meetings and “agile” ceremonies. Let me explain.
Early in my career, I was asked to step in as a Scrum Master. I hated it, mainly because of the bureaucratic overhead, which didn’t seem like the best use of my skills. But being a Scrum Master, Product Owner, or Project Manager isn’t just about bureaucracy. In those roles, you need to understand whether the team is moving toward business goals or not. As a developer, an individual contributor, you might not care much beyond completing the tasks you’ve been assigned. It’s a common mindset, but I don’t think it’s the best approach.
If you want to be more than just a coding machine and become more business-savvy, you have to care about business outcomes. To do that, you need to understand the language of business people and those who bridge the gap between business and developers. Who Does What by How Much will teach you that language by explaining what OKRs are. But it goes further, especially for internal IT teams where developers often think their work has little to do with customers. The authors who used to be developers themselves emphasize that every team has a customer. It might be colleagues in another department, but you still have a customer. And the way to ensure you’re doing a good job is by measuring how well your customers respond to your work.
The authors break down the book’s title into parts of a value equation:
- Who is your customer
- Does what refers to their behavior
- By how much is the measure of change in that behavior
OKRs are built around this equation. Objectives are your high-level goals, and Key Results are how you measure success. When followed properly, OKRs ensure customer-centric behavior. The book aims to show how to implement OKRs in a way that works across all levels of an organization. This not only helps in reaching goals but also increases transparency between teams. OKRs aren’t just a goal-setting framework—they form a process that can guide your work and even become part of the company culture.
Maybe this doesn’t sound all that relevant to you if you’re an individual contributor. But if you want to increase your value to the organization and become a more product-minded developer, Who Does What by How Much offers some valuable insights.
One key idea that runs through the entire book is one that’s important enough to hang on your wall:
Output ≠ Outcome
Focus on the outcome.
“Just because you make something doesn’t mean you’ve created value.” In the uncertain, fast-paced world we live in, focusing on desired outcomes, rather than just outputs, is essential. Whether you’re an individual or part of an organization, keeping this in mind is key to success and makes Who does what by how much worth its money.
