OKRs that worked after a failed first attempt

Where they started

A new CEO had joined a Series D SaaS startup with a clear ambition: grow beyond its first market and its first product. The company had tried OKRs before, on its own, and they had failed. The OKRs didn’t connect to teams’ real work, so they always got deprioritised. On top of that, a heavy planning process borrowed from a much bigger organisation was slowing every decision down.

What we did

I started by interviewing the executives one to one, then trained them in OKRs and ran an alignment workshop on how OKRs should work in their company. We set the first company OKRs together, using one real objective to learn by doing. Over the next three quarters I ran the planning cycles, check-ins and reviews alongside them, and coached the people who would run the process after I left.

When the leadership team started trying to document every role before changing anything, I suggested they start from the real pain points instead and define only the interfaces they needed.

The real bottleneck

Setting OKRs made something visible. The team that onboarded partners was stuck working through commitments in contracts signed years earlier, with people on both sides who had since moved on. Every new product or market depended on that same team, so whatever else the company promised, growth would wait for it.

The OKRs put the leadership’s attention on that cause. Onboarding, customer success, product and commercial teams had to work on it together, rather than each optimising their own part.

What changed

Within six months the company was running its own OKR cycle: two quarters and two mid-quarter reviews without me. The OKRs became the company’s agreed focus areas, and the person running the process kept using the approach in OKR meetings. With the bottleneck tackled, the company went on to launch new product lines and capture more growth. The CEO later recommended the work to another scale-up, which became a client.