This story will resonate if…

• Your January strategy feels like ancient history by Q3
• You’ve sat in a post-mortem and thought: “We should have caught this in planning”
• A pivot at the top takes a fiscal quarter to show up in a frontline team’s priorities
• Your teams hit their own targets — but the company keeps missing what actually matters

The challenge

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

This company runs consumer broadband, a national mobility network, and a B2B enterprise services division — all on the same infrastructure, all competing for the same resources, all at the same time. Keeping 90,000 people pointed in the same direction across that is not simple.

For years, they did what most companies do. Strategy set in January. Division heads translated it. Managers filtered it further. By the time priorities reached a tier-two team in a Midwest call center or a field crew in a coastal province, they’d passed through five or six layers of well-meaning interpretation. Not wrong exactly. Just blurry.

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

• Two divisions spent a whole quarter executing well — hitting their own targets — then sat in a post-mortem and discovered their timelines had been quietly working against each other. Neither team was wrong. They’d just never been looking at the same picture.
• A mid-year strategic pivot would take six weeks to reach the teams who needed to act on it. Six weeks of people executing against a plan that had already changed at the top.
• Before every monthly business review, someone spent the better part of a week chasing status updates — assembling a picture that was already out of date by the time it hit the conference room.
• The annual engagement survey flagged the same complaint year after year: people couldn’t connect their daily work to what the company said it was trying to achieve. Leadership agreed. The next planning cycle started anyway.

They tried the usual fixes. All-hands updates. Shared documents everyone was supposed to read. A series 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 — and no mechanism to move a change at the top reliably to someone driving a service truck in Manitoba.

The solution

They looked at five platforms. Four handled the top of the org. None of them held at depth.

The trigger was a new COO, six months in, who asked something that should have been simple: which active workstreams in the company connect to the CEO’s three stated priorities — and which don’t? It took the strategy team eleven business days to assemble an answer. When they did, roughly a third of active work had no traceable link to a current priority. Some was orphaned from a strategy two cycles back.

That meeting created the mandate. A small team — three people, borrowed from strategy and HR — evaluated five platforms. Three were project management tools dressed in OKR language. One was beautiful and priced for a startup. One was a giant suite they already half-owned, with goal-tracking bolted on; the team spent a week trying to rebuild a proof of concept in it and gave up.

The recommendation had nearly gone the other direction. The existing suite had a stronger procurement track and a familiar IT relationship. The draft slide was ready. Then the Profit.co POC ran across two business units, and the conversation changed.

Two things settled it. The cascade held at every level — not as a visual link, as live weighted data that updated upstream when anyone checked in. And the check-in wasn’t a bolt-on form. It was the weekly rhythm of the whole thing: short, nudged, with a field that asked what was blocked, not just what percentage was complete. During the readout, someone said: “This is the first tool we’ve evaluated that respects the manager’s time.” That line ended up in the formal recommendation.

The rollout didn’t start company-wide. One business unit. About 12,000 people. They wanted to see whether managers would use it because it was useful — not because they’d been told to.

How the OKR programme actually runs

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 organisation uses all three together.

The results

Six months in, something had changed. Not just in the numbers — in the room.

The first real change wasn’t in a metric. It was a Tuesday morning all-hands in the network operations group. The VP pulled up the OKR tree and asked: “We changed the customer retention key result last Thursday — show of hands, who’s seen the update?” Nearly every hand went up. Four days. Six weeks of latency had become four days.

The monthly business review shifted too. Directors who used to spend close to a week rebuilding a deck from separate systems started showing up with a single screen open. Numbers were current. Everyone was looking at the same source. The conversation stopped being about verifying the data and started being about acting on it. Which is what those meetings were always supposed to be.

Blockers got raised earlier — not because anyone told people to, but because the platform made silence feel riskier than speaking up. Six months in, it wasn’t just the numbers that had changed. It was what the meetings felt like.