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The network ran on a clock watched every second of every day. The strategy ran on a clock checked once a quarter, mostly to find out what hadn’t happened. One company, two clocks, and almost nothing connecting them.
Story
They rolled out Profit.co’s OKR platform across the company. Check-ins started running on their own. QBR prep collapsed from weeks to a morning. And when leadership leaned harder into the enterprise business, the pivot reached the field in days, not the usual quarter and a half.
You’ll recognise this story if you’ve ever…
The thing about running a telecom is that the operational side already works. It has to. The NOC dashboards never go dark. Someone’s watching latency, drop rates, and tower health every minute of every day. That part of the business knew exactly what mattered, exactly how it was performing, and exactly what to do when something slipped.
The strategy side didn’t work like that.
Every March, leadership locked in priorities for the year. Grow postpaid. Expand the enterprise business. Lift NPS. Push fibre into more homes. Get serious about the digital services bet. All reasonable. All written down. All printed on the back of the lanyard, almost.
Then the year would start. The network team’d go back to watching uptime. The circle heads’d go back to chasing ARPU and churn. The enterprise sales team’d go back to closing whatever deals were in front of them. Nobody was ignoring the strategy. They just couldn’t see it anywhere in their day.
This is what it looked like on the ground:
They’d tried the obvious things. Town halls. A strategy intranet page nobody opened twice. A balanced scorecard exercise that lived in a spreadsheet for nine months and then quietly died. Each one helped a bit. None of them held.
And here’s the thing they kept circling back to in the leadership room: it wasn’t that people didn’t care about the strategy. They did. It’s that nobody could find it in their week. The strategy was real on Monday at the offsite. By Wednesday it was a slide. By Friday it was a slide nobody’d opened. You can’t blame anyone for chasing the thing in front of them when the thing above isn’t visible anywhere they live.
The strategy wasn’t vague. It was specific enough. But there was no place anybody could go, engineer in a circle office, AVP in HQ, RM in enterprise sales, to see whether the strategy was being executed. So mostly, it wasn’t.
Head of Strategy
Indian Telecommunications Operator
Chief Operating Officer
Indian Telecommunications Operator
The evaluation was led by a small group. Someone from strategy, someone from HR, a network engineering lead, and one of the enterprise business heads. That mix was deliberate. They wanted at least one person in the room who’d walk out and say “my team will never use this” if it was true.
Most of what they saw looked good in a demo and felt impossible at scale. Beautiful cascades that broke past the third level. Check-in flows that assumed everyone had thirty quiet minutes on a Friday afternoon, which in a telecom, nobody does. Reporting that looked clean until you tried to roll it up across functions that didn’t share a vocabulary.
Profit.co got past all of that. The cascade held. The check-ins were short enough that a field engineer could fill one in from a tower visit. The alignment map was the bit the enterprise head kept coming back to. He could see, on one screen, how his goals depended on network, marketing, and IT. Nobody’d ever shown him that before.
The rollout didn’t happen all at once. It started with the strategy office, then the enterprise vertical, then the circles, then network ops. Each wave learned from the one before it. By the third quarter every function was on the platform.
The exco picks five company-level objectives. That’s the cap. If a sixth one wants in, an existing one’s got to leave. The discipline was painful at first. Leadership had to choose between things they all cared about. But everybody in the company can now name the five, which before, almost nobody could.
Each circle, each function, each business vertical sets quarterly OKRs that ladder up to the company five. The interesting thing happens during planning. Teams can see what other teams are committing to. The CX team can see what network ops is promising. The enterprise sales team can see what product’s shipping. Conflicts that used to surface in October surface in week one.
Goal owners get an automated nudge. They update progress, flag risks, write a sentence about what changed. That’s it. No managers chasing. No status meetings. The picture stays current because the people closest to the work keep it current, and the friction’s low enough that they do.
Company-level OKRs updated in the platform. Dependent functional OKRs shifted within days. Circle heads briefed teams immediately because they could see the change, not because someone chased them through email chains.
Two things caught the team off guard once Profit.co was live across the org. Neither was the dashboard. Neither was the speed. They’d expected those. What they hadn’t expected was what the platform did to the people using it.
The first was how fast the enterprise pivot started landing. Leadership decided to push harder into B2B. More aggressive pricing on dedicated lines, a stronger play in cloud connectivity, a sharper focus on mid-market accounts. In the old world, that would’ve meant a deck, a roadshow, weeks of cascading meetings, and a string of polite emails. This time, the company-level OKRs were updated in the platform, the dependent functional OKRs adjusted within days, and the circle heads were briefing their teams the same week. Nobody’d told them to. They could see the change and they moved.
The second was the network ops team, the part of the business everybody’d assumed would resist this hardest, turned out to be the most fluent users. It made sense after the fact. These were people who already lived their working lives by metrics and dashboards. Giving them strategic context for those metrics was, for many of them, the first time their work had been visibly connected to what the company was trying to be. The dashboards they’d already loved suddenly meant something bigger.
What the platform didn’t fix
Every annual planning cycle, leadership tries to fit seven or eight objectives into the five-slot cap, then negotiates back down. The platform enforces the cap. It doesn’t enforce the discipline. The first round of every year still produces an honest fight, and that fight still takes a week longer than the COO’d like. That’s a management muscle. Software won’t build it for you.
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 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.
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.
Company OKRs set → Projects linked to OKRs → Project milestones update key results → OKR + project data feeds performance reviews → Review insights inform next OKR cycle
Head of Strategy
Indian Telecommunications Operator
Some time after rollout, the strategy office noticed something they hadn’t planned for. The obvious metrics had moved. Check-ins were getting completed without anyone chasing. QBR prep had collapsed. Mid-year pivots were landing faster. Those were the board-update numbers.
What was harder to point to was the change in how meetings felt. Town halls started naming specific OKRs and their progress. Not vague themes. Specific objectives, with owners. Circle reviews opened with the platform, not a deck. When something was off-track, the conversation happened earlier, often within the same week, because the slip was visible to everyone who needed to see it.
The enterprise business, the one that used to feel like a strategy nobody’d executed, started showing up in conversations across the company. Not because anyone told people to talk about it more. Because network engineers and CS team leads and circle finance heads could see their own goals connected to it.
QBRs took weeks to assemble. Pivots needed a quarter or more to reach the field. Cross-functional conflicts surfaced after the quarter was done. The strategy lived in a deck. The operation lived in a NOC. The two rarely met.
QBRs run from a live dashboard, ready any morning. Pivots reach the field in days. Conflicts get caught early in the quarter, not at the end of it. Strategy and operations look at the same screen.
What tends to happen next
Organisations that hit this rhythm by quarter three usually find that planning gets shorter, not longer, by year two. The first annual plan after a live cycle takes a fortnight instead of six weeks. The conversations get harder, but they end. And the dashboard’s the meeting now, not a slide in the meeting. That’s where you know it’s working.
Alignment
An engineer in a circle office can name the company’s top five priorities, and find her work inside them. Not because she memorised them. Because the platform shows where her goal sits, all the way up the chain, every time she opens it.
Speed
A pivot that used to take a quarter to reach the field now lands in days. When the company-level objectives update, the dependent goals adjust visibly, and the circle conversations start the same week.
Reporting
QBR prep stopped being a multi-week scramble. The dashboard’s the deck. The strategy office stopped being a status-collection function and started doing strategy work again.
Cross-functional
When the rest of the company could see how their goals connected to the B2B push, the slogan became a thing people optimised for. A circle ops manager flagged an enterprise dependency from a routine call. A sentence that’d never been said in that meeting before.
Culture
Conflicts that used to surface only after the damage was done now show up while there’s still time to fix them. That changes what gets celebrated. It changes what gets escalated. It changes who’ll speak up early in a quarter, and how soon.
Accountability
Without anyone being told to flag them. When progress is visible to peers, boss, and the wider org, raising a problem early feels easier than carrying it quietly to the end. It’s a small shift. It changes everything downstream.
You don’t need 7,000 people for the strategy to vanish between the boardroom and the work. If your QBR’s a reconstruction project, and your network team’s never opened the strategy deck, it’s worth a conversation.
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