This story will resonate if…

• You’re running OKRs but the previous tool was costing more in maintenance than it was returning in insight
• Your company is growing through acquisition and you need OKRs to carry alignment across businesses that haven’t merged yet
• Your senior leaders say they’re aligned, but middle managers can’t name the top three priorities without looking them up
• You want goals that move when the company moves, not ones that get rewritten by hand six weeks after every pivot

The challenge

They weren’t new to OKRs. The problem was the tool kept requiring more than it returned.

About three years ago, this company acquired two organisations in very quick succession. Anyone who’s been through a merger knows what that does to a company. Everything’s colliding at once. Different teams, different priorities, different definitions of what winning looks like. They needed a methodology that could get companywide initiatives communicated quickly across huge groups, get people aligned underneath shared goals, and make the reasoning visible all the way down. OKRs weren’t optional. They were the mechanism for survival.

So they started. Managers only, to build the muscle first. Then expanded to all employees. Three years in, they’re preparing to extend again as a new wave of mergers brings more companies into the fold. The programme grew. The problem was the platform it ran on.

The previous software felt like feeding an angry monster. Constant input. Updates, status entries, progress notes, everything fed in by hand. What came back was weak reporting and dashboards nobody fully trusted. One executive described it plainly: the effort wasn’t being returned in the data they got from all the work they were doing.

• Two years in, they had accumulated thousands of OKRs. Nobody had limited them early enough. The enthusiasm was real and it created sprawl. Every team wanted OKRs. Good problem to have, until the volume makes the landscape unnavigable.
• The hierarchical cascade existed on paper but not in practice. Leaders could technically align their OKRs to the company level, but the link was cosmetic. Nobody was checking whether the thread was actually continuous all the way down.
• Check-in quality was inconsistent. Some teams used check-ins seriously. Others treated them as a compliance task. Without requiring commentary, the AI-generated summaries were only as good as the data going in, and the data going in was thin.
• Strategy pivots took too long to land. A decision made at the executive level would be announced, the all-hands would happen, and then weeks later, team-level OKRs still reflected the old direction. Nobody had reconnected them. The old objectives were still live. The new direction lived in a slide deck.

They tried the usual internal fixes. Champion networks, templates, cadence reminders. It worked. Sort of. The programme was running, but it wasn’t generating the visibility and alignment they’d hoped for three years in. The tool was costing more in maintenance than it was returning in insight.

The solution

They wanted a platform that did more work for them than they were doing for it.

The evaluation wasn’t about whether to do OKRs. They’d been doing OKRs for two years. The question was whether the tool they were using deserved another year. The deciding factor was simple to articulate and turned out to be genuinely rare: they wanted a platform that did more work for them.

What tipped the decision toward Profit.co was the AI-generated PPP reports: Progress, Problems, Plans. The ability to pull a live summary of every OKR in the portfolio, broken down into what’s moving, what’s stuck, and what the plan is, without manually building a presentation every week. It’s the same data that used to take hours to assemble. It now takes a few seconds to read. For an organisation running thousands of OKRs across multiple merging companies, that’s not a convenience. It’s the difference between a programme that leadership actually uses and one they nod politely at.

The voice-recording check-in was the other one. You speak, it transcribes. That small friction removal changed the quality of the commentary going in, which changed the quality of what the AI could surface coming out.

The migration itself took about a week. Profit.co’s team handled it. Thousands of OKRs, two years of history, moved across cleanly enough that the team could look back at older goals and see what they’d learned.

How the OKR programme actually runs

How OKRs connect to Projects & Performance

Platform integration

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

The OKR module is the strategic backbone. 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. In a regulated, deadline-heavy industry like gaming and lottery, that connection is the difference between a missed contract and a clean delivery.

Why this matters: the industry evidence

Industry evidence

This isn’t a one-company problem. The data is consistent across the industry.

The results

A year in, they started measuring the programme itself. Not just the OKRs.

The real change wasn’t visible in a dashboard. It was visible in how people talked about the strategy. By year three, team members at every level could articulate why their work connected to the company’s top priorities. Not because they’d been told to. Because the platform made it structurally obvious and they’d been operating that way long enough for it to feel normal.

The numbers came out of a deliberate decision to start measuring the programme itself. They surveyed across levels and cross-referenced individual OKR performance data against leadership and cross-functional goals. The 21% accountability and focus improvement, and the 15% data reliability improvement, weren’t estimates. They were measured. That gave leadership something to point to beyond “things feel more aligned.”

The 100% OKR visibility across the business created something the team hadn’t fully anticipated: more celebrations. Progress on things that might not have gotten attention before, like a cost savings initiative, is now visible. And when cross-functional teams drive shared results, that recognition crosses departmental lines too.