WorkBoard Brings On New CMO & GM to Address Rising Demand as Companies Race to Enable New Models for Work

Redwood City, CA, June 23, 2020 —   WorkBoard, the leader in Enterprise Results Management, today announced veteran business leader Joelle Kaufman will serve as chief marketing officer and general manager of WorkBoard Community. Kaufman joins WorkBoard amid strong demand for its products, as enterprises rapidly re-think how to align and mobilize now-distributed workforces.

As companies revise their business plans for this new climate, they are modernizing the way they iterate, align on and drive strategic priorities — with a focus on organizing and mobilizing distributed workforces around key company goals. In the past 120 days, many of the brand’s existing customers accelerated their WorkBoard rollouts, allowing companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Reliance, Comcast, Zuora and many young startups to shift strategic priorities and empower teams to achieve alignment and be productive as they transitioned to working from home. Now, companies across industries are adopting the WorkBoard Enterprise Results Platform and its OKR approach to increase their agility, resilience and results.

“Finding a marketing and community leader that was as passionate about enabling purpose- and value-driven work as I am and one who leads with real experience, scale and speed was essential,” said WorkBoard CEO and co-founder Deidre Paknad. “Joelle’s ability to unlock her team’s fullest potential, execute for fast results along with her authentic passion for outcome-based leadership are a perfect fit for our mission and team.”

Kaufman will lead marketing, growth, revenue operations and WorkBoard Community efforts at WorkBoard. With the largest base of enterprise customers and at-scale implementations, WorkBoard has established its solution as the enterprise standard for results management. Kaufman will expand on this foundation and, with WorkBoard Community, bring insights and expertise from WorkBoard and its customers to others seeking to learn and leverage the OKR technique, results management and digital approaches to alignment and accountability. WorkBoard’s OKR Coach Certification program is the flagship of its community efforts and has certified over 2,200 OKR coaches who help their organizations increase results alignment and measurement competency. Demand for the program has peaked sharply this year, with nearly 600 new coach graduates in the past 5 months. To continue this momentum, Kaufman will scale OKR course availability and diversity, expand post-certification coach networking and skill-building and build out tools and toolkits that help coaches, chiefs of staff and OKR process leaders maximize results for their organization.

Prior to joining WorkBoard, Kaufman was the chief marketing and revenue officer for Dynamic Signal. Kaufman is a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and has a bachelor’s from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science & the Arts, where she was the first student to graduate from the Honors College with a degree in organizational studies. Although exploring new opportunities during the pandemic was a unique experience, it also provided a good filter to identify companies set to thrive in the long term. She attended the WorkBoard User Group meeting in April with over 600 customers, where leaders from Microsoft, IBM, Workday, Comcast, Zuora, GHX, BAL Global and others shared their journey with OKRs on WorkBoard. She was impressed by the level of advocacy within the group and how quickly WorkBoard customers were able to iterate on strategic priorities at the outset of Covid-19 and their WorkBoard-enabled digital operating rhythm.

Kaufman added: “Improving how people team up to define, prioritize and ultimately achieve great results has been a lifelong passion of mine. Too often, being busy with long task lists is confused with having impact, and layers and layers of management reporting are confused with value. People accept the absence of purpose, clarity and transparency as their norm at work — but this grossly undermines the potential of the organization and its people. WorkBoard unlocks that potential by making essential alignment and accountability remarkably easy and making clarity and transparency everyone’s new normal.”

Earlier this year, WorkBoard deepened its executive team with the additions of David Ginsburg as Chief Customer Officer and Stuart Crabb as Chief People Officer. WorkBoard announced a $30 Series C in January 2020 led by Andreessen Horowitz. Existing investors Workday Ventures, Microsoft’s M12 venture fund and GGV Capital also participated in the round.

About WorkBoard
WorkBoard enables large enterprises to keep teams focused on outcomes and their most important priorities with its Enterprise Results Platform that helps them run a cohesive business in a distributed world. Comcast, Cisco, Cision, Microsoft, Samsung, Workday, Zuora and others use WorkBoard’s OKR platform and expertise to align, connect and coordinate teams with shared focus. WorkBoard pioneered OKR coach certification to help companies collapse time to success with the OKR methodology and has certified 1,500 coaches using its proven methodology. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GGV Capital, Workday Ventures and Microsoft’s M12, and based in Redwood City, Calif., WorkBoard is the enterprise standard for results management. For more information, visit www.workboard.com or follow the company on Twitter @WorkBoardInc.

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Media Contact
Brad Hem
The Dialog Lab
brad@thedialoglab.com