Does the shoemaker’s son always go barefoot?

This is an expression that we normally say when the family of a skilled or knowledgeable person is often the last to benefit from her expertise.

One of the topics I talk about most with my clients, to the point that I launched a workshop on the subject (link in Portuguese), is the importance of having a clearly defined vision and strategy so that I can define OKRs.

Although I now work alone, I decided early on to use vision, strategy, and OKRs tools to help me daily. To show that here the shoemaker’s family does benefit from his experience, here are the vision and strategic objectives of Gyaco, my consultancy and training company on product management and digital transformation:

OKRs

As the company is just me, that is, I'm responsible for doing everything in my company (marketing, sales, finance, billing, operations, customer service, and providing the service to my customers), I figured I wouldn’t need OKRs.

However, while helping a client build their OKRs, I decided to try building my own OKR spreadsheet, which is the one below.

I built this spreadsheet during the week of January 23rd, and it was eye-opening. I started the year well, with almost all OKRs in green. The ones that weren’t in green were in yellow, meaning they were close to where I wanted them to be. However, the following week the scenario changed, with yellows increasing and some reds appearing. The following week, between Jan 7th and Jan 15th, was a week off that I took. When I got back from my week off and decided to do the OKRs spreadsheet, I saw that things weren’t the way I wanted, and I put energy into improving that, which we can see in the following week.

Whether you are a one-person company or a few people, OKRs derived from your vision, and your strategic objectives are a very useful tool to help you get where you want to be.

Summing up

• It is common to happen as in that phrase that says that at the shoemaker’s house, his family always goes barefoot”; that is, the family of a skilled or knowledgeable person is often the last to benefit from her expertise.
• At my company, Gyaco, I tried to ensure that the family had shoes; that is, I designed the vision and strategic objectives as soon as I decided to follow this path of being a full-time product coach and advisor.
• However, I still wasn’t using one of my favorite tools, OKRs, because I didn’t think a one-person company needed them. After a conversation with a client about this tool, I decided to apply it in my one-person company, which proved to be very useful!

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