The strategy lived in a deck.The aircraft lived somewhere else entirely.

Four operating rhythms. One five-year plan. And not a single Tuesday morning where leadership could honestly say whether the people running the airline were still pointing where the plan said they were – until a route launch wobbled in front of the press, and the diagnosis was too obvious to ignore.

Story in 3 sentences

A regional aviation group had a careful transformation roadmap – and four divisions each executing their own version of it.

They deployed Profit.co’s OKRs module – connecting flight ops, engineering, commercial, and corporate to a single cascade. Quarterly business reviews that used to take two weeks to assemble now run from a live dashboard. Cross-functional dependencies that used to surface in post-mortems now surface in planning, while there’s still time to fix them.

This story will resonate if…

Your January strategy feels like ancient history by Q3 – and nobody in the room agrees on what it even meant
You’ve watched a route launch, product release, or service rollout wobble because two divisions weren’t reading the same plan
Pulling together a quarterly business review takes a fortnight of slide assembly, and it’s stale by the time it lands
Your teams hit their own targets – but the airline keeps missing what actually matters

The challenge

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

Here’s the situation. An airline doesn’t really run as one business. Flight operations works to a schedule measured in minutes. Engineering works in hours of aircraft availability. Commercial works in seasons. Corporate works in fiscal quarters. They all overlap – and most of the time, nobody notices the seams.

Until they do.

For a long time, this group did what most carriers do. Strategy set in January. Division heads translated it. Managers filtered it further. By the time those priorities reached the people on the line – the pilots, the engineers, the ground crew – they’d passed through layers of interpretation. Not wrong exactly. Just blurry. Disconnected from the thing the CEO said mattered.

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

A new route launch was scheduled for late summer. Commercial had been selling it for months. Engineering only realised three weeks out that the aircraft type assigned to it was due for a heavy maintenance check overlapping with the inaugural week. The route launched. The schedule wobbled. One leg flew with twenty fewer seats than commercial had sold.
A digital programme pushing passengers to self-service kiosks was running in parallel with a service standard programme promising more human contact at the airport. Both were funded. Both had executive sponsors. Neither side knew the other existed until a staff briefing made it impossible to ignore.
Before every quarterly review, someone in the strategy office spent the better part of two weeks chasing department heads – assembling a picture already out of date by the time it hit the conference room.
Pilots and cabin crew – the people actually moving the airline – were rarely part of any of this. They saw goals as something corporate did. The plan, when they heard about it at all, sounded like it belonged to somebody else.

They tried the usual fixes. A new project management office. A monthly steering committee. Shared drives with strategy documents everyone was supposed to read. 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.

“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

Middle East Aviation Group

The solution

They looked at four platforms. Three cracked under the weight of four operating rhythms. One didn’t.

When the strategy team started evaluating goal-management tools, one filter cut through everything else. Whatever they chose had to make sense to a pilot, a maintenance engineer, a revenue manager, and a finance lead – four people who’d open the platform for completely different reasons, at completely different times, with completely different expectations of what it should do.

Most platforms looked fine at the top – goals cascaded neatly from company level to division. Push further down, into the actual operating realities of a 24/7 airline, and they fell apart. One was built for tech companies running quarterly sprints. Another treated the org chart as an afterthought. A third was strong on dashboards but had no way of handling a business unit operating on an annual maintenance cycle and a daily flight schedule at the same time.

Profit.co held the cascade across all four operating rhythms. That was the decision. Everything else was negotiable.

How the OKR programme actually runs

Once a year – the transformation gets translated, not just announced

Leadership agrees on a small number of group objectives covering fleet, network, digital, service, and finance. Each business unit then writes its own annual OKRs that point back to those. If a goal can’t be linked to one of the group objectives, it gets a hard look. Most of the time it either gets reshaped or it gets cut.

Every quarter – the four operating rhythms finally talk to each other

Flight ops, engineering, commercial, and corporate set quarterly OKRs in the same week. Before they’re finalised, the platform shows where one division’s goals depend on another’s. The route launch that used to surprise engineering now gets caught in planning – because the aircraft availability constraint is visible right there, next to the commercial objective that needs it.

Every week – the people doing the work check in, on their own terms

Pilots don’t sit at desks. Engineers don’t either. Check-ins are short, async, mobile-friendly, and timed around how each function actually works – not around a corporate calendar that was never theirs. The platform nudges when something’s gone quiet. Nobody has to chase.

Async updates without anyone chasing anyone

Automated nudges, async status, no synchronous reporting meetings. The picture is always current. The strategy office stopped spending half its 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 airline 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 maintenance project, a digital initiative, or a service programme can’t answer “which group 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, and whether it moved the needle.

Group 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

Two quarters in, the QBR was the part of the week people stopped dreading.

“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.”

Chief of Staff

Middle East Aviation Group

Two quarters in, meetings felt different. Department heads came into planning sessions with a clearer sense of what was expected from adjacent divisions. Dependencies that used to be discovered in week four got spotted in week one. 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 cultural shift, not the other way around.

Before Profit.co

Four business units, four versions of the strategy. The quarterly business review took close to two weeks to assemble and was already stale by the time it ran. Route launches surprised engineering. Digital projects worked against service projects. Goals lived in a deck that crew never saw.

After Profit.co

One cascade. One picture. The QBR runs from a live dashboard, ready any morning. Cross-functional dependencies surface in planning, not three weeks out from a launch. Crew, engineers, commercial, and corporate read the same plan, in language that makes sense from where they sit.

Alignment

Flight ops, engineering, commercial, and corporate finally reading from one plan

Four operating rhythms, one cascade. Pilots, engineers, and revenue managers don’t need to agree on calendars – they just need to see the same goal hierarchy. Now they do.

Speed

The QBR went from a two-week assembly project to a morning

The strategy office stopped being a deck factory. The executive committee walks in with a live picture and walks out having decided something.

Conflict prevention

Route launches stopped surprising engineering

When commercial’s route plan and engineering’s maintenance plan are visible in the same view, the aircraft-availability problem gets caught at the planning table – not three weeks before the inaugural flight.

Adoption

Crews and engineers actually using the platform – on a phone, between turnarounds

Async, mobile, short. Check-ins fit around how the operation actually works, not around a corporate calendar nobody on the line believed in.

Strategy fidelity

The five-year plan stopped meaning four different things

If a divisional goal can’t be linked to a group objective, that’s now a visible question. Most of the time the goal gets reshaped. Sometimes it gets dropped. The strategy starts looking less like a wish list and more like a plan.

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 to be the size of a global carrier for the strategy to drift between the boardroom and the hangar. If your divisions are running on different calendars, it might be time to talk.

A Middle East Aviation Group