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

~11,000 people. Multiple regulated divisions. One strategy that kept dissolving between layers of management. Here’s how they built a system that keeps everyone pointed in the same direction — quarter after quarter — without anyone having to chase it.

Story in 3 sentences

A regulated insurance carrier was watching their annual strategy dissolve into noise as it passed through management layers — with no reliable way to know which priorities were actually being worked on by October.

They deployed Profit.co’s OKRs module — and for the first time, any employee could trace their work to company priorities in 30 seconds. Strategic pivots that took six weeks now land in days. Quarterly reviews that took three weeks of prep now run from a live dashboard in a morning.

This story will resonate if…

Your January strategy feels like ancient history by Q3 — and nobody can explain where it went, only that it got “filtered” somewhere between the boardroom and the floor
Two teams spent an entire quarter executing well, hit their own targets, then sat in a post-mortem and realised they’d been pulling against each other the whole time
Pulling together a leadership update takes days of chasing people across emails and spreadsheets — by the time it lands, the data is already three weeks stale
Your teams consistently hit their own targets. The company keeps missing what actually matters. Nobody can explain the gap.

The challenge

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

This is a regulated carrier running underwriting, claims, distribution, and shared services — all at the same time, all depending on each other. Keeping thousands of people pointed in the same direction across all of that requires more than a good strategy deck.

For a long time, they did what most organisations do. Strategy set in January by the executive team. Division heads translated it into their own priorities. Managers filtered it further. By the time those priorities reached the people doing the actual work — claims analysts, underwriters, the IT teams running regulatory remediation — they’d passed through five or six layers of interpretation. Not wrong exactly. Just blurry. Disconnected from the thing the CEO had said mattered in January.

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

Two divisions would execute well all quarter — hitting their own targets — then sit in a post-mortem and realise their timelines had been quietly pulling against each other. Neither had been looking at the same picture.
A mid-year regulatory priority shift would take six weeks to reach the teams who needed to act on it. Six weeks of executing against a direction that had already changed.
Before every quarterly review, someone spent three weeks chasing status updates — assembling a picture that was already weeks out of date by the time it hit the conference room.
Cross-team dependencies weren’t visible until they became conflicts — surfacing in post-mortems, not planning sessions, when there was nothing left to do about them.

They tried the usual fixes. All-hands updates. Shared documents. A series of tools, each solving one piece. Some of it helped. None of it held. The problem wasn’t effort — it was visibility. There was no single place where the whole picture lived.

“Setting the goals was never our problem. We’ve always been good at ambition. What worried us — what actually kept people up at night — was not knowing whether the goals we’d set in January were still the ones being worked toward in October.”

Head of Strategy

Insurance & Financial Services carrier

The solution

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

When the team started evaluating goal-management platforms, one question cut through everything else: can this actually hold a cascade this deep?

Most platforms looked fine at the top. Goals cascaded neatly from company level to division. Push further down — into department, team, individual contributor — and things fell apart. Goals would technically be “linked” but the thread was too thin to follow. Nobody believed in it.

Profit.co held the cascade at every level. Not just technically — visibly. Any employee could open the platform, find their goal, and follow it upward through their team, department, and division all the way to the company’s top priorities. That connection, real and traceable, is what the selection team had been looking for. The note from that demo: “First platform where you could actually pull the thread all the way to the top.” That was the decision.

The rollout wasn’t mapped out on a whiteboard. It grew to fit the shape of the organisation.

How the OKR programme actually runs

Once a year — the things that matter most

Senior leadership agrees on five to seven company-wide objectives. Not ten. Not twelve. Five to seven. These are the things that, if achieved, make the year worth calling a success. Everything else connects back to them. When something doesn’t, that’s a signal worth paying attention to in planning — not in a year-end post-mortem.

Every quarter — divisions set their own goals, in context

Each business unit sets quarterly OKRs and can see — right there in the platform — how their goals sit relative to company priorities and what neighbouring divisions are working on. No more finding out in a post-mortem that two teams had been pulling against each other all quarter.

Every quarter — teams and individuals set goals that actually mean something

Every team lead and individual contributor sets goals that trace directly up the chain. Any employee can open Profit.co, find their goal, and follow it upward — through their team, department, division — all the way to the company’s top priorities. That connection, visible and real, changes how people think about their work.

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 half their week asking where things stood. The answer is in the platform.

Platform integration

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

The OKR module is the strategic backbone of Profit.co. But its real power isn’t just goal-setting — it’s what happens when OKRs are connected to the projects executing against them and the people being evaluated on delivering them. Here’s how this organisation uses all three together.

🎯 OKRs → Projects → Performance: how the connection works

OKRs power Projects

Every project in the portfolio must link to at least one OKR before it gets resourced. If a project can’t answer “which priority does this serve?” — that conversation happens in planning, not in a post-mortem six months later. OKRs become the filter that keeps the portfolio honest.

Projects feed OKRs

As projects hit milestones, their progress automatically updates the key results they’re tied to. Leadership doesn’t have to chase project status to understand OKR health. An OKR marked “at risk” now comes with a visible reason: which project is behind, and by how much.

Both inform Performance

When review time comes, a manager opens the performance form and sees OKR completion and project contributions — in the same screen, live, connected. The review isn’t a memory exercise anymore. It’s a conversation grounded in 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 walk in with a picture stitched together from emails and spreadsheets — and everyone knew it was already three weeks out of date. Now I walk in with a live picture. It’s a completely different conversation.”

VP of Operations

Insurance & Financial Services carrier

Within the first quarter, meetings felt different. Team leads came into planning sessions with a clearer sense of what was expected upstream. Blockers got raised earlier — not because anyone told them to, but because the platform made silence feel riskier than speaking up.

Cross-team conflicts that used to surface in post-mortems started surfacing in planning sessions instead. By quarter one, this had already happened twice — both times caught early enough to fix without losing a week. The difference between finding a conflict in planning and finding it in a post-mortem isn’t just efficiency. It’s whether the quarter was wasted.

By the end of the first half-year, the quarterly review that used to take three weeks of prep ran in a morning. Not because it got smaller — because the data was already live. The Head of Strategy said it plainly: “We’re not discovering our problems in retrospect anymore. That might sound like a small thing. It isn’t.”

Alignment

“How does my work connect to what the company is doing?” — answered in 30 seconds

Any employee, any level, any time. The connection is real and visible from week one — not something they have to take a manager’s word for.

Speed

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

No manual translation chain. When priorities change at the top, the cascade updates — and teams see it the same week the decision was made.

Reporting

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

Within the first half-year, the review that used to take three weeks of prep ran in a morning. Leadership walks in with a live picture. Decisions, not status narration.

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 they can still do something. By quarter one, this had already happened twice.

Culture

The org stopped measuring what people did and started measuring what they achieved

When the whole company shares a language for what success looks like, the question shifts from “what did we ship?” to “did it matter?” That shift takes a quarter to feel and a year to believe.

Integration win

OKR health is now real — because project milestones update it automatically

Key results don’t get manually updated anymore. Project milestones flow into OKR progress automatically — closing the gap between planning and execution that used to swallow weeks of reporting time.

Is the strategy you set in January still the one being worked toward right now — at every level?

You don’t need thousands of people for strategy to go missing. You just need a few layers of management and no single place where the picture lives.

A North American insurance & financial services carrier