Every January, leadership set the plan.By October, nobody could find it.

40,000 people. Multiple product lines. One strategy that kept getting blurry with every layer of management it passed through. Here’s how they built a system that keeps everyone pointed the same direction — without another all-hands that fixes nothing.

Story in 3 sentences

A large semiconductor and telecom company was watching their annual strategy dissolve into noise as it filtered through five or six layers of interpretation — and finding out in post-mortems, not planning sessions.

They deployed Profit.co’s OKRs module and for the first time any engineer or programme manager could trace their work to a company priority in under a minute. Strategic pivots that used to take six weeks now land in days. Quarterly reviews that used to take three weeks of manual assembly now run from a live dashboard any morning.

This story will resonate if…

You’ve sat in a post-mortem and realised two teams spent a whole quarter executing well — and pulling against each other the whole time — because nobody had ever showed them the same picture
You’ve asked a programme manager what the company’s top priority is this quarter and got a confident answer — then asked their peer the same question and got a different one
Someone on your team spent most of the week before a quarterly review chasing status updates — and the deck they built was already out of date by the time it sat in the room
You’ve sat in a QBR where every division reported green — and the company still missed the number that actually mattered, because nobody had been working on the same thing

The challenge

Their strategy wasn’t wrong. It just kept getting lost on the way down.

Here’s the structure. This company makes semiconductors, network infrastructure, and the software platforms that run on top of both. That’s not one business — it’s several, all running at the same time, all depending on each other. Keeping 40,000 people pointed the same direction across all of that is genuinely hard.

For years, they did what most companies do. Strategy set in January. Division heads translated it into their context. Managers filtered it down to their teams. By the time those priorities reached the engineers doing the actual work, they’d passed through five or six layers of interpretation. Not wrong, exactly. Just progressively blurred — each layer adding a little local colour, a little more distance from the thing the CEO had actually said.

Nobody was trying to lose the thread. It just kept slipping.

Two chip design teams would spend a quarter executing well — hitting every target they’d been given — then discover in a post-mortem that their delivery timelines had been pulling against each other the whole time. Neither team was wrong. They’d just never been looking at the same picture.
Two platform teams independently built the same network capability. Both shipped. Both were proud. Nobody had thought to check whether the other was doing the same thing.
In one quarter, leadership shifted priorities on a network platform programme in week three. The head of strategy knew. The CPO knew. The VP who ran the division found out in week five from a peer, not from above. The engineers on the ground found out in week nine — when their project was already slipping on milestones tied to work that was no longer a priority.
Every quarter, a chief of staff spent the better part of three weeks before the review chasing status updates across twelve teams. She’d email, follow up, consolidate into a spreadsheet, send it for corrections, re-consolidate. By the time the deck was ready, the data in it was two weeks old. Leadership would ask a question. She’d say she’d need to check. That was the moment everyone in the room knew the picture wasn’t real.

They tried the standard fixes. Quarterly all-hands. A shared wiki that was supposed to be the source of truth and slowly stopped being one. A series of tools, each solving a piece. Some of it helped. None of it held. The problem wasn’t process — it was visibility. There was no single place where the whole picture lived and stayed current.

“Setting goals was never the hard part. We’ve always been good at ambition. What actually kept me up was a simpler question: if I asked any programme manager what the company’s top priority was this quarter, would they give me the same answer I’d give? I genuinely didn’t know.”

Head of Strategy

North American Semiconductor & Telecommunications Enterprise

The solution

They looked at three platforms. Two cracked under the weight of the org. One didn’t.

When the strategy team started evaluating OKR platforms, one question cut through everything else: can this handle an org that’s actually this deep? Most platforms looked capable at the top — goals cascaded neatly from company level down to division. Push further down and things fell apart. Goals were technically “linked” but the thread was too thin to follow. Nobody believed in it.

Two of the shortlisted platforms failed at depth. One handled executive dashboards well but had no real cascade mechanism below the VP layer — an IC couldn’t trace their goal back to a company priority without leaving the platform. The other had the cascade but required manual updates at every level, the kind of maintenance that works in a pilot and collapses under real org complexity.

Profit.co held the cascade at every level — and it stayed live without someone tending it. That was the decision. It wasn’t close. The rollout wasn’t painless. The first quarter, check-in completion was lower than anyone wanted. The nudges helped. By quarter two it had climbed. That’s how adoption usually works — slower than the plan, faster than the sceptics predicted.

The rollout wasn’t mapped on a whiteboard. It started with two divisions, proved out the pattern in a quarter, then expanded to fit the actual shape of the org.

How the OKR programme actually runs now

Once a year — five to seven things that actually matter

Senior leadership agrees on five to seven company-wide objectives. Not ten. Not twelve. Five to seven — the things that, if achieved, make the year worth calling a success. Everything else traces back to these. When something can’t connect to one of them, that question surfaces in planning, not in a post-mortem after a quarter of wasted effort.

Every quarter — divisions set goals in context, not in isolation

Each business unit sets quarterly OKRs and can see — right there in the platform — how their goals sit relative to the company priorities and what other divisions are working on. No more discovering in a post-mortem that two teams had been pulling against each other. That conflict surfaces in planning, where someone can still do something about it.

Every quarter — individual goals that connect to something real

Every engineer and programme lead sets goals that trace directly up the chain. Open Profit.co, find your key result, follow it upward through team, department, division, all the way to a company objective. That connection — visible and navigable — changes how people think about the work in front of them. It’s not a motivational exercise. It just makes the context visible.

Weekly — async check-ins without anyone chasing anyone

Automated nudges, async updates, no synchronous status meetings required. The picture is always current. Chiefs of staff stopped spending the first half of every week asking “where does this stand?” — the answer is already in the platform, updated by the person who actually knows.

Platform integration

OKRs don’t live in isolation. Here’s how they connect the whole platform.

The OKR module is the strategic backbone. But its real power is what happens when OKRs are connected to the projects executing against them and the people being evaluated on delivering them — one operating picture instead of three.

🎯 OKRs → Projects → Performance: how the connection works

OKRs give projects a strategic reason to exist

Every project in the portfolio must link to at least one OKR before it gets resourced. If a project can’t answer which company priority it serves, that question surfaces in planning — not in a post-mortem six months later. OKRs become the filter that keeps the portfolio honest before work begins.

Projects feed OKR progress back automatically

As projects hit milestones, progress automatically updates the key results they’re tied to. Leadership doesn’t have to ask for project status to understand whether an OKR is on track — the platform connects them. An at-risk OKR now comes with a visible reason: which project is behind, and by how much.

Both inform performance reviews

When review time comes, a manager opens the performance form and sees the engineer’s OKR completion and project contributions in the same screen, live and connected. The review isn’t a memory exercise. It’s a conversation about what the person actually worked on — and whether it moved the needle.

Company OKRs set → Projects linked to OKRs → Project milestones update key results → OKR + project data feeds performance reviews → Review insights inform next OKR cycle

The results

Six months in, something had changed. Not just in the numbers — in the room.

“Strategy reviews used to feel like archaeology. You’d come in with a picture stitched from emails and spreadsheets — and everyone in the room knew it was three weeks out of date. Now I walk in with a live picture. It’s a different conversation. Completely different.”

VP of Operations

North American Semiconductor & Telecommunications Enterprise

Six months in, planning sessions felt different. Team leads came in with a clearer sense of what was expected upstream. Blockers got raised earlier — not because anyone mandated it, but because the platform made the cost of staying quiet more visible. The process changed. The numbers followed.

They usually do, when the behaviour changes first.

Before Profit.co

Quarterly reviews needed three weeks of manual assembly. Strategic pivots took six weeks to reach the teams executing against them. Cross-team conflicts surfaced in post-mortems, not planning. Nobody had the same picture at the same time.

After Profit.co

Reviews run from a live dashboard any morning. Pivots reach teams in days. Conflicts surface in planning sessions while there’s still time to act. Everyone’s working from the same current picture — updated by the people who actually know.

Alignment

“How does my work connect to what we’re trying to do?” — answered in under a minute

Any engineer, any level, any time. The connection is real and navigable — not something they have to take a manager’s word for or dig out of a slide deck from January.

Speed

A strategic pivot that used to take six weeks to land now takes days

No manual translation chain. When priorities shift, the cascade updates and every affected team sees it — without waiting for it to filter through five layers of interpretation.

Reporting

The quarterly strategy review stopped being a three-week archaeology project

Leadership walks in with a live picture — not a reconstructed one. The data is current. The conversation is about what to decide next, not what happened last month.

Conflict prevention

Problems that used to show up in post-mortems now show up in planning

When dependencies are visible before work begins, teams catch misalignments while there’s still time to act. The post-mortem becomes a rarity, not a ritual at the end of every quarter.

Culture

The org stopped measuring what shipped and started measuring what moved the needle

When every team works from the same definition of success, the conversation shifts from “what did we deliver?” to “did it matter?” That’s a different question — and it produces different work.

Integration win

OKR health is real — because project milestones update it automatically

Key results don’t rely on someone remembering to update them. Project milestones flow into OKR progress as they happen — closing the gap between what was planned and what’s actually being executed, in real time.

Does your January strategy make it to October?

You don’t need 40,000 people for your strategy to go missing. If your goals live in spreadsheets and your teams are guessing at priorities, it might be time to see what the picture looks like in Profit.co.

A North American Semiconductor & Telecommunications Enterprise