This story will resonate if…

• Your January strategy feels like ancient history by Q3 — and catching the divergence takes a post-mortem to find
• You’ve watched three divisions answer the same CFO question with three different numbers, all defensible, none reconciled
• Pulling together a leadership update takes days of chasing people — not minutes of checking a screen
• Your teams hit their own targets but the company keeps missing what the board actually asked for

The challenge

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

Insurance moves slowly until it doesn’t. For most of the last decade, this company’d run on a planning horizon that worked the way long planning horizons are supposed to. Capital allocation debated in the fall. Annual plan dropped in January. Divisions translated it. Managers filtered it further. Everyone got back to work.

Then the world started changing faster than the cadence could absorb.

Loss patterns moved. Reinsurance hardened. Regulators asked new questions. Rate filings got pushed and the revenue plan had to find the gap somewhere. None of this was anyone’s fault. The problem wasn’t that the plan was bad. The problem was that the plan was a document — and documents don’t change when the market does. By mid-year, the strategy on paper had quietly stopped matching the work people were doing. Leadership was getting different answers depending on whose dashboard they looked at.

• Divisions reprioritised mid-quarter for good reasons. Nobody outside that division knew it’d happened until the quarterly review — two months after the fact.
• Flagship projects with executive sponsorship stayed listed as top priorities long after the teams owning them had quietly redirected effort elsewhere. Status reports still said green.
• When finance asked how the company was tracking against a top-line target, multiple teams gave defensible, unreconciled numbers. The figure that reached the board was whichever one had survived the longest argument.
• Shadow trackers lived in mid-managers’ inboxes because the official systems were always a cycle behind reality. Some were more accurate than what corporate had. Nobody had time to find out which.

They tried the usual fixes — a PMO refresh, clearer reporting templates, a consultant-led re-alignment offsite. Each one helped at the margins. None held past the next quarter-end. The problem wasn’t process. It was visibility. There was no single place where the whole picture lived.

The solution

They didn’t want a planning tool built for tech companies. Insurance doesn’t get to pivot every Friday.

The search ran through the spring. They looked at four platforms. Most of what they saw was built for a different kind of company — demos that assumed you’d pivot priorities every sprint, that engineering velocity was the dominant metric, that alignment mostly meant getting product, design, and marketing on the same page.

That’s fine for a software business. It’s not very useful when one division is regulated by dozens of state insurance commissioners and another books revenue on a multi-decade tail.

What Profit.co got right was the separation. The annual plan stayed the annual plan — the thing the board signed off on, the thing the rating agencies asked about. Quarterly OKRs sat underneath as the place where real adjustments happened. The annual numbers didn’t move every quarter. The work underneath them could. Plan as anchor. OKRs as steering.

How the OKR programme runs now

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 connect to the projects executing against them and the people being evaluated on delivering them. Here’s how this insurer wired all three together.

The Results

The quarterly review that didn’t start with an argument about whose number was right.

About four quarters in, the team started noticing things they hadn’t set out to measure. Quarterly reviews ran shorter and felt more useful. Leaders showed up better prepared — not because anyone told them to, but because the data was already in the room and they didn’t want to be explaining a surprise.

Cross-divisional dependencies started surfacing in planning rather than post-mortems. Underwriting decisions that affect claims volume, reserve assumptions that feed pricing, pricing changes that shape what distribution can sell — when all of it lived in separate trackers, the dependencies only showed up at year-end. With everything in one place, they started showing up in time to do something about them.

And the shadow trackers started disappearing on their own. When the official picture is current and trustworthy, managers stop building their own. Nobody had to mandate it. It happened over a couple of cycles.