Christina Wodtke

Christina Wodtke is an author, speaker, and lecturer at Stanford with deep insight into human innovation and high-performing teams. Her serious resume includes re-design and initial product offerings with LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga, Yahoo! and others, as well as founding three startups, an online design magazine called Boxes and Arrows, and co-founding the Information Architecture Institute.

Christina uses the power of story to connect with audiences and readers through her worldwide speaking engagements and her Amazon category-bestselling books. Her book, Radical Focus, tackles the OKR movement and startup culture with an eye to getting the right things done. Her other books include Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web and Pencil Me In on visual thinking for the workplace. Christina’s work is personable, insightful, knowledgeable, and engaging.

There's a whole shelf of books on how to design your life. Almost none of them tell you how to actually get there.

That's the execution gap, and product people know it intimately — it's the difference between a vision deck and a shipped product. We have entire methodologies for crossing that gap at work. We just never point them at our own lives.

In this talk, Christina Wodtke shares how she used Lean experiments, the 4Es, and personal OKRs to climb out of burnout and rebuild a career as a teacher and writer — and how to pick the one metric most of us never specify: what we're actually optimizing for.