4,000 people, five countries, one way of running OKRs in twelve months.
An organisation of more than 4,000 people, with 1,000 OKR users spread across five countries, many product categories and every major function, set out to get the whole organisation using OKRs the same way within twelve months.
The brief
One way of setting, running and reviewing OKRs across the entire organisation, in a year. Not a pilot, not one division: every country, every product category and every function, on the same shape of goal and the same rhythm.
What made it hard
Five countries meant different markets, languages and working cultures. Many product categories meant teams with genuinely different economics and priorities. And every function, from product to finance to people, needed OKRs that made sense for its work while still reading across to everyone else's. Each part of the organisation had its own habits, and good reasons for them.
How we approached it
We started by understanding what each part of the organisation already did well, then converged on what had to be common: the shape of a goal, the review rhythm and the measures that read across. Teams kept what worked. We trained OKR leads and champions to carry the method into every country and function, and sequenced the rollout so that early teams showed everyone else what to expect.
Why it matters
This is the hardest version of the job: scale, geography and variety at once, against a fixed deadline. It's why we can say with confidence what makes enterprise OKRs work, and what quietly breaks them.
Anonymised at the client's request. Figures are the client's own; no numbers have been added. Written by Matt Roberts.
A UK-based strategy and OKR consultant and two-time SaaS founder with a venture-backed exit, Matt turns strategy into execution for teams scaling from tens to thousands. He co-founded ZOKRI in 2018, having previously co-founded Linkdex, a venture-backed enterprise SaaS platform he led to a trade sale.
New leadership and big ambitions need a single, clear direction the whole organisation can act on. Our transformation programme builds the narrative, the metric tree and the OKRs to get there.
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