A Global eLearning SaaS Platform

Industry

Technology & Software

Org Size

Mid-Market (1,000)

Module

OKR

They called the first three quarters learning quarters.By Q4, the whole company felt it.

A publicly traded eLearning company launched OKRs across the entire organisation in one go. No pilot. No phased rollout. Everyone in, from day one. Three quarters later, 45% more employees could name their top priorities clearly. This is what they built and how they built it.

Story in 3 sentences

A globally distributed eLearning company partnered with Profit.co to create focus, accountability, and clarity across roughly 1,000 employees.

They launched company-wide in Q1, maintained a 75% on-time check-in rate across three learning quarters, and by Q3 had a 45% increase in employees reporting clarity on their top priorities and an 11% increase in cross-team collaboration. 100% of their OKRs are published and visible to every person in the business.

This story will resonate if…

Your leadership team sets direction in January and can’t tell by October whether it reached the people actually doing the work
You’re about to launch OKRs company-wide and want to know what “learning quarters” looks like in practice before you commit
Your check-in process dies by week three of every quarter and you’re not sure how to keep it alive
You want OKRs to create focus and discipline, not just another layer of reporting nobody reads

The challenge

Everyone was working hard. Not everyone was working on the same things.

They’d done planning well for years. Leadership would come together, agree on the priorities, and communicate them. The deck would go out. The all-hands would happen. Everyone nodded.

Then the quarter would start and the focus would scatter.

The problem wasn’t commitment. It was the gap between hearing a priority and knowing, concretely, how your own work connected to it. Individual contributors across North America, the UK, and AMEA were working hard. Some of them were working on the exact things the company needed most. Others were working on things that had drifted from the plan without anyone consciously deciding they should.

The EVP and Chief of Staff described the core tension plainly: if every team member is given five things to do in a day but can only focus on three, OKRs should be the guidepost that tells them which three. Without that guidepost, everyone makes their own call. And those calls don’t always point the same direction.

Strategy arrived at the functional level and got filtered through each leader’s interpretation. By the time it reached individual contributors, the connection back to company priorities was thin at best.
Teams were meeting their own targets without always knowing whether those targets were the ones the company actually needed. Post-mortems revealed the misalignment. Planning sessions didn’t.
Check-ins happened, sort of. But without a cadence and without accountability, they were inconsistent. Nobody was seeing the full picture at the same time.
The planning cycle and the execution cycle were separate. Goals were set in one place. Work happened in another. The two didn’t speak to each other.

It wasn’t a strategy problem. The strategy was clear. It was a visibility problem, and visibility, it turned out, was something that had to be designed.

“Before OKRs, we were good at setting direction. We were not good at holding it. By the time a priority passed through three or four management layers, it had been adapted so many times that the connection back to what the CEO actually said was thin at best. That was the problem we needed to fix.”

EVP and Chief of Staff

Global eLearning SaaS Company

The solution

They launched the whole company at once and called it a learning quarter.

Most organisations pilot OKRs with one team. They did it differently. They launched the entire company in Q1, set the expectation that the first three quarters would be learning quarters, and built the infrastructure to make that learning stick.

The framing mattered. Calling it a learning quarter took the performance pressure off. People could engage with the methodology without feeling like they were being graded on it from day one. The Chief of Staff described it as breaking the muscle of chasing all the shiny things and being fiercely disciplined about where you place your focus. You can’t instil that discipline by announcing it. You have to build toward it.

The training support from Profit.co was a significant part of the foundation. Live sessions, coaching, Q&As, materials the team could remix and redistribute. An internal learning hub was built on top of those foundations, stocked with courses, philosophy, tips, FAQs, podcasts, videos, and quizzes, all in one place, accessible to every team member regardless of where they were in their OKR journey.

By Q4, the infrastructure was holding. Not perfectly. But consistently.

How the OKR programme actually runs

OKRs are built into planning, not added on top of it

When the executive team sits down each quarter, OKRs are part of the session from day one. Day one covers organisational vision and strategy. From there, each functional area works out how it supports that strategy, and the org-wide OKRs are architected as the north star. The goals aren’t created after the strategy is set. They are the strategy made visible.

70% committed, 30% stretch, and 70% on stretch counts as success

This is the ratio they run. The stretch goals are real stretch, not padded targets. And because the organisation is committed to innovation, missing a stretch goal isn’t failure. 70% achievement on an ambitious goal is still honourable. That cultural framing has to be set before the goals are, or the ambitious goals never get written in the first place.

Async check-ins plus OKR-focused 1:1s, not one or the other

The async check-ins surface the data. The 1:1s add the context the data can’t carry. 23% of the business holds at least one OKR-focused 1:1 per month. Managers get to celebrate early wins, catch blockers before they compound, and give the kind of coaching that a status update can’t replace. The two rhythms together are what’s kept the 75% check-in rate alive across three quarters.

Check-in comments are required, they feed the AI, the AI feeds leadership

Profit.co’s AI generates PPP reports from check-in data: Progress, Problems, Plans. But the quality of those reports depends entirely on the quality of what’s being logged. So check-in commentary isn’t optional. The result is that leadership gets a genuinely useful picture, assembled automatically, without anyone spending a weekend building it by hand.

100% of OKRs visible to 100% of the business, always

Every OKR, every team, every function. Published. The byproduct nobody expected was empathy. People started understanding what their colleagues were carrying, not just what they themselves were doing. That cultural shift wasn’t a goal of the programme. It became one of its strongest outcomes.

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 company priority does this serve?” that conversation happens in planning, not in a post-mortem six months later.

Projects feed OKRs

As projects hit milestones, their progress automatically updates the key results they’re tied to. Leadership doesn’t have to chase status to understand OKR health. An OKR marked at risk now comes with a visible reason.

Both inform Performance

When review time comes, a manager opens the performance form and sees the employee’s OKR completion and project contributions in the same screen. The review isn’t a memory exercise. It’s a conversation grounded in what the person actually delivered.

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

The results

Three quarters in, something had changed. Not just in the numbers, in how the company moved.

“The check-in tells you what the number is. The one-on-one tells you what’s actually going on behind the number. You need both. We’ve maintained a 75% on-time check-in rate across three quarters and that discipline, combined with the coaching conversations, is what’s moving the needle.”

EVP and Chief of Staff

Global eLearning SaaS Company

What changed in the room wasn’t dramatic, and that was the point. Planning sessions started with people who knew what was expected upstream and had already thought about how their work connected to it. Blockers came up earlier. Misalignments surfaced in conversations instead of post-mortems. The monthly survey, published inside the Profit.co platform, started returning a different picture: more people feeling focused, more teams feeling connected to something larger than their own backlog.

The 45% clarity gain from Q2 to Q3 wasn’t a one-time spike. It was the visible part of a cultural shift that had been building since Q1.

Before Profit.co

Strategy communicated at all-hands, filtered through management layers, disconnected from daily work. Check-ins inconsistent. No single visibility picture. Misalignments discovered in post-mortems.

After Profit.co

OKRs built into planning from day one. 75% on-time check-in rate sustained. 100% of goals visible across the business. 45% more employees reporting clarity on priorities. Misalignments surfaced in planning, not post-mortems.

Clarity

45% more employees know their top priorities, not directionally, specifically

From Q2 to Q3 alone. People could name their top 1 to 3 priorities and trace them back to what the company was trying to achieve. Faster decisions followed.

Collaboration

11% increase in cross-team alignment and less handoff friction

When every function’s goals are visible to every other function, the overlap problem changes. Teams stop building the same thing in parallel without knowing it.

Discipline

75% on-time check-in rate, held across three consecutive quarters

Not just in the first enthusiastic weeks. The combination of async check-ins and OKR-focused 1:1s kept the cadence alive through the full learning period.

Visibility

100% of OKRs published and visible to everyone, always

The byproduct nobody planned for: empathy. People started understanding what their colleagues were carrying. That changed how teams talked to each other.

Reporting

PPP reports generated automatically from check-in commentary

Progress, Problems, Plans. Profit.co’s AI assembles the picture from logged check-ins. Leadership gets something useful without anyone spending a weekend building it.

Focus

The “shiny things” problem got a name, and a discipline to go with it

OKRs became the guidepost for deciding which three of five things to actually do. Not a list of everything. A filter for what matters most.

Recognise any of this?

You don’t need a thousand people for strategy to drift. If your goals live in one place and your work lives in another, it might be time to talk.