Where the OKR brain trust and transformation thinkers come to share experience and progress!

Deidre Paknad
CEO and co-founder, WorkBoard

Deidre is CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard. She’s led several high growth organizations as CEO and founder and as an executive at IBM. She’s seen first hand how alignment, accountability and transparency drive results and create resilience. Deidre has over a dozen patents and has twice been inducted into the Smithsonian Institution for innovation. Goldman Sachs named her one of the 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs of 2019.

Geoff Moore
Author, Crossing the Chasm, Escape Velocity, and Zone to Win

Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and advisor who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolios and established high-tech enterprises. His first book, Crossing the Chasm, focuses on the challenges start-up companies face transitioning from early adopting to mainstream customers. Moore’s most recent work, Zone to Win, addresses the challenge large enterprises face when embracing disruptive innovations, even when it is in their best interests to do so.

Marcio Souza
President and CEO, Praxis Precision Medicines

Marcio Souza has served as a director and our President and Chief Executive Officer since April 2020. Prior to joining us, Mr. Souza was at PTC Therapeutics, Inc., or PTC, where he served as its Chief Operating Officer from May 2017 to April 2020 and its Senior Vice President and Head of Product Strategy from July 2016 to May 2017. Prior to joining PTC, Mr. Souza served in positions of increasing responsibility at NPS Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Shire Human Genetic Therapies Inc. and Sanofi Genzyme Corporation.

Greg Higham
Chief Information Officer, Malwarebytes

Greg is a Silicon Valley technology executive who brings more than 25 years of experience driving technology vision, strategy, global operations management, acquisition integration and scalable business growth. As Malwarebytes CIO, Greg oversees company security, business applications and information technology. Prior to joining Malwarebytes, he was CIO of Marketo, where he helped navigate a successful IPO and sale to Vista Equity Partners for $1.8 billion.

John Nisi
GM & COO of US Cloud & Enterprise Business, Microsoft

John is the General Manager & COO of the US Cloud & Enterprise Business, where he is responsible for the US business, marketing and operations across the cloud and infrastructure portfolio of products including Azure, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Data, GitHub, Windows Server, System Center, SQL, and Developer Tools. He also leads the Developer Audience Experience and Engagement in the US. The charter of the organization incudes business planning, integrated marketing planning, key Go To Market plays and programs, digital campaigns, customer offers, sales readiness, customer evidence, market planning and competitive insights to deliver our Customers the fastest path to value on their digitization journey.

Kent Young
Strategic Program Manager, VMware

Kent Young is a Strategic Program Manager at VMware in the Cloud Platform Business Unit and leads one of the top cross-franchise programs at VMware. Kent has demonstrated achievements in delivering some of the largest and most complex business, system & digital transformations in the world and he achieves that with a special focus on change management & operational excellence. Kent is a passionate leader and change agent, which is why he volunteered to become an OKR coach and WorkBoard SME to help guide VMware through this transition to ensure they deliver on their strategy. On a side note, Kent’s passion is to mentor and coach and he has utilized the OKR methodology to provide pro bono coaching to a small community of women owned businesses outside VMware as well.

Jeff Samuels
Chief Operating Officer, Iterable

Jeff currently serves as Chief Operating Officer at Iterable. Prior to Iterable, Jeff was Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, Cisco Security at Cisco, where he developed modern go-to-market strategy, and oversaw marketing for the company’s multi-billion-dollar security products and solutions portfolio. Jeff joined Cisco from OpenDNS (acquired in August 2015) where he served as Chief Marketing Officer tasked with driving global adoption of OpenDNS’s cloud-delivered security services. Prior to OpenDNS, he served as CMO at GoGrid, a leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service company. Under Jeff’s leadership, GoGrid scaled cloud services and successfully repositioned itself from a regional hosting company to a dominant cloud player recognized by Gartner as one of the world’s largest providers.

Denise Kanfield
Transformation Leader and OKR Guru, Cisco

Denise is a Business Agility Leadership Coach and OKR Guru recognized for being an action-biased leader to support leaders and teams through transformational change. She thrives on coaching senior and executive leadership, bringing a ‘meet you where you are’ approach while using data and OKRs to drive meaningful results and lasting adoption. Denise is leading OKR adoption within the Cisco Security Business Group and has experience in OKR adoption in small, mid and enterprise level organizations. She has expertise in training, organizational development, operations, and sales leadership which allow her to quickly understand and align her work to the company’s strategy & roadmap for change.

Derek Samford
Director of Product Security, Avalara

Derek Samford leads Avalara’s Security Engineering team. This group enhances engineering’s security capabilities through threat modeling, adversarial testing, gamified and instructor-led training, and example security services/code. Derek has over 20 years of experience in the engineering industry, including managing the SaaS Security team at MobileIron and building a robust Security Validation Testing program and team at Citrix, where he operated as principal test engineer and release lead of XenMobile.

Sam Meckey
EVP - Head of Healthcare, EXL

Sam Meckey is Executive Vice President and Business Head of EXL Health. He is a member of the Executive Committee. A seasoned executive with a consistent track record of exceptional results, Sam is responsible for driving growth and profitability for EXL’s healthcare business and oversees strategy, capability and solution development. Previously, Sam served as President of Optum Global Solutions, overseeing the company’s global operations and technology services organization. He held various executive roles with UnitedHealth Group, including Senior Vice President, Population Health, and Chief Operating Officer, Care Management and Advocacy.

Kari Pfeiffer
Vice President, Program Office, EXL Health

Kari Pfeiffer joined in EXL in 2020 and leads the EXL Health Program Office. Kari bring 25 years of healthcare and retail industry experience with wide ranging positions in operations, business and strategic planning and program management. She is a results oriented, collaborative leader with a bias to drive results. Prior to joining EXL, Kari spent more than ten years at Optum in a variety of roles across population health, automation & transformation and global operations. Kari also held various technology roles at Target driving a large program supporting their guest loyalty initiatives.

Daisy Hernandez
SVP, Strategy & Operations, Zuora

Daisy Hernandez joined Zuora in January 2020 bringing over 20 years of enterprise software experience. She spent the last decade at SAP, most recently serving as Global Vice President of Product for the collaboration and communities portfolio. Leading a global cross-functional organization, she was responsible for driving business growth by creating verticalized solutions and enabling marketing and sales through multiple routes to market. Organizations experienced benefits of nearly $31 million over three years versus costs of $4.2 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $26.8 million and an ROI of 631%. Daisy also defined the business & commercial subscription model for one of the first multi-tenant SaaS solutions at SAP. After just 1 year as SVP of Strategy & Operations, Daisy has grounded Zuora’s mission in 4 strategic pillars aligning Zuora’s global organization around our annual objectives. In addition to pushing Zuora to be the best-run business in the subscription economy, she spearheads strategic initiatives, oversees Zuora’s IT and Data departments, and drives growth and operational excellence.