Every January, leadership set the plan.By October, nobody on the wind farms could quote it back.

Around 9,000 people across wind, solar, and grid operations. One transition plan everyone said they were committed to. And a six-week lag between the boardroom and the turbine pad that nobody had named as the problem. Until someone did.

Story

A European renewable energy operator with thousands of staff across capital projects and live operations was watching its annual strategy dissolve as it passed through layers of management.

They deployed Profit.co’s OKRs module, and for the first time the people on site could trace their work to a top-level objective in one click. Strategic pivots that used to take six weeks to land now reach teams in days. Quarterly reviews that took three weeks now take a morning.

This story will resonate if…

Your January strategy feels like ancient history by the third quarter
You’ve sat in a post-mortem and realised two project teams were competing for the same specialist crew and nobody had seen it coming
Pulling together a leadership update takes days of chasing site managers, not minutes of checking a screen
Your field teams hit their own targets but the company keeps missing what the board actually cares about

The challenge

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

Here’s the situation. This operator builds and runs offshore wind, onshore wind, and utility-scale solar across several European markets. That’s not one business. It’s three, all running at the same time, all depending on the same specialist crews, the same supply chains, the same regulators. Add development pipelines stretching years ahead, and you start to get the picture.

Now imagine keeping close to nine thousand people pointed in the same direction across all of that.

For a long time, they did what most operators do. Strategy set in January. Division heads translated it. Managers filtered it further. By the time those priorities reached the people doing the actual work, they’d passed through five or six layers of interpretation. Not wrong exactly. Just blurry. Disconnected from the thing the board had said mattered.

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

Two flagship projects, both critical to the year’s energy-output target, ended up competing for the same offshore specialist crew during the same six-week window. Both project leads had flagged it internally. Neither flag reached anyone who could act on it. The conflict was discovered at the steering committee, two weeks before the crews were due on site.
A regional team and a corporate team independently built the same operational dashboard. Two systems. Two budgets. Nobody had known to check.
A mid-year shift in the transition plan, triggered by a regulatory change in one market, took six weeks to reach the teams who needed to act on it. Six weeks of people executing against priorities that had already moved.
Before every quarterly review, the programme office spent the better part of three weeks chasing status updates from sites, assembling a picture that was already weeks out of date by the time it hit the conference room.

They tried the usual fixes. Town halls. Shared documents everyone was supposed to read. A handful of tools, each solving one 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.

been here three

“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

European Renewable Energy Operator

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 tools, one question cut through everything else: can this handle an org that’s actually this deep and this distributed? Most platforms looked fine at the top. Goals cascaded neatly from company level to division. Push further down, into the asset management and site operations layers, and things fell apart. Goals would technically be “linked” but the thread was too thin to follow. Nobody actually believed in it.

Profit.co held the cascade at every level. That was it. That was the decision.

The rollout grew to fit the shape of the organisation. Strategy office first. Then the executive layer. Then divisions. Then sites.

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 these. When something doesn’t, that’s a signal worth paying attention to.

Every quarter, divisions set their own goals in context

Each business unit sets its quarterly OKRs and can see, right there in the platform, how their goals sit relative to the company’s priorities and what neighbouring divisions are working on. No more discovering 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 engineer, asset manager, and site lead sets goals that trace directly up the chain. Any employee can open Profit.co, find their goal, and follow it upward through their team, region, 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 status picture is always current. Programme offices stopped spending half the week asking “where does this stand?” 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 operator uses all three together.

🎯 OKRs to Projects to 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 company 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. The platform does that work. 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 the employee’s OKR completion and their 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.

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

The Results

A year 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 reconstructed 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

European Renewable Energy Operator

A year in, meetings felt different. Site leads came into planning sessions with a clearer sense of what was expected at the top. Blockers got raised earlier, not because anyone told them to, but because the platform made silence feel riskier than speaking up. The measurable outcomes followed from that shift, not the other way around.

Before Profit.co

Quarterly reviews needed three weeks to pull together. Strategic shifts took six weeks to land. Cross-team conflicts surfaced in post-mortems. Nobody had the full 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 fix them. Everyone’s looking at the same picture.

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, 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, the cascade updates and everyone sees it.

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 decisions are better.

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 about them.

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?”

Integration win

OKR health is now real, because project progress updates it automatically

Key results don’t just get manually updated anymore. Project milestones flow into OKR progress automatically, closing the gap between planning and execution.

Recognise any of this?

You don’t need 9,000 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 talk.

A European Renewable Energy Operator