At a glance
- Client: GetSetUp, a mission-driven startup with an e-learning platform for older adults
- Industry: Online Education
- Company size: About 50 employees
- Challenge: Rapid growth after a $10 million funding round, with goals too detailed to communicate, top-down processes and metrics that were hard to track
- Solution: A lean, participatory OKR rollout on WorkBoard AI with Wave Nine: an executive goal-setting workshop, 10 departmental workshops and clear, easy-to-track KPIs
- Results: Leaner processes, better communication, cross-functional cohesion and alignment across departments around a common definition of success
The challenge: growth that outpaced the startup playbook
GetSetUp, a mission-driven startup that offers an e-learning platform for older adults, found itself in the middle of a massive growth spurt in 2021. The company had just received $10 million in venture funding, and it had grown almost overnight from a handful of employees to around 50 people.
Every startup works toward results like these, and massive growth comes with its share of hurdles. GetSetUp was no exception. What works in a small startup does not often work for a larger company, and the rapid scaling meant GetSetUp had to rethink its systems and processes.
Skyrocketing growth often requires:
- Recalibrating goals to make them more streamlined and easier to communicate to the larger organization
- Rethinking processes to make them simpler and less top-down, encouraging greater ownership among employees and departments
- Setting clearer metrics with key performance indicators (KPIs) that are easy to track
Without streamlined goals, scalable processes and clear metrics, a growing startup can lose its focus and fall short of its potential. That is especially true for a company like GetSetUp, whose distributed workforce needed to collaborate seamlessly. That's where WorkBoard AI and Wave Nine entered the picture.
Finding the right implementation partner
GetSetUp's VP of Operations, Larry Sanford, approached WorkBoard AI in search of an implementation partner. He had seen an OKR rollout fail at another organization, and he knew it would be difficult to succeed without the right guidance. WorkBoard AI referred him to Wave Nine.
Originally, Larry and his team intended to rely on Wave Nine to implement the software, then have his staff take over internally. They soon realized that Wave Nine's expertise could also help them define clearly what success would look like, with precise metrics to measure it.
"I was impressed by the Wave Nine team's engagement from the start. They were highly responsive and they worked to understand our business. They came to serve as an extension of our company, making sure we were doing everything right as we streamlined our implementation."
Larry Sanford, Vice President of Operations, GetSetUp
The OKR rollout: from pages of goals to a few clear OKRs
GetSetUp's leadership came to Wave Nine with an extensive, detailed plan for improvement. In fact, the plan turned out to be a little too detailed and extensive, with pages and pages of goals that focused on micro-level outcomes and results.
During the first goal-setting workshop with the executive team, Wave Nine helped leadership focus its goals and identify a smaller set of measurable, easy-to-communicate OKRs. The principle behind it: each OKR should clearly define what success looks like, so employees and department leads can act autonomously and hold themselves accountable for reaching the goal.
With that premise, Wave Nine helped Larry and the other executives refine their OKRs around four focus areas:
- Member growth
- Retention
- Revenue growth and tracking
- Customer satisfaction
Ten departmental workshops
In the 10 departmental workshops that followed, two per team, Wave Nine worked with department heads and their teams to identify clearly defined, measurable OKRs that didn't require constant oversight from the CEO or other executives. For a startup that wants to scale, that independence is essential.
Wave Nine's guidance made the department-level OKRs:
- Clear: They define what success looks like in the months and quarters ahead.
- Straightforward: They are easy to understand and communicate.
- Participatory: They encourage buy-in and commitment from staff, unlike a series of top-down mandates.
- Cross-functional: They span teams to break up silos and support cooperation between departments.
Altogether, Wave Nine worked closely with GetSetUp to develop a lean, focused OKR strategy:
- Recalibrated goals: A streamlined set of goals that is easy to communicate.
- Simpler processes: Processes that are more distributed, encouraging ownership and buy-in at every level.
- Clear metrics: Crystal-clear metrics with easy-to-track KPIs.
The results: a startup aligned around a shared purpose
In the end, Larry credits Wave Nine's work with helping GetSetUp achieve:
- Leaner processes for greater efficiency
- Better communication throughout the company
- Cross-functional cohesion, with a shared purpose
- Alignment between departments, built on a collective vision and a common definition of success
GetSetUp now works from a short set of OKRs that every team understands. Department heads and their teams own their results, and the company can keep scaling without every decision running through the executive team.
"It was the Wave Nine team's eagerness to help that made them stand out. They were available whenever we needed them, and that made them different than a typical implementation partner. I honestly don't think we could have done this without them."
Larry Sanford, Vice President of Operations, GetSetUp
WorkBoard AI showcase
How GetSetUp uses WorkBoard AI to keep a fast-growing, distributed company focused on a few shared goals.
OKR Management
GetSetUp keeps its streamlined company OKRs and each department's OKRs in WorkBoard AI. Every team sees its own measurable results and how they connect to the company's focus areas.
Benefits:
- One place for a short, clear set of company and team OKRs
- Clear owners for every key result
- Progress visible without CEO-level oversight
Alignment
GetSetUp uses alignment views to connect department OKRs to company goals and to each other. Cross-functional OKRs are visible across teams, which helps break up silos.
Benefits:
- Departments see how their work feeds company priorities
- Dependencies between teams are visible
- A shared view for a distributed workforce
Operating Model & Cadence
GetSetUp runs regular OKR check-ins in WorkBoard AI to review progress and keep the new habits going as the company grows.
Benefits:
- A steady rhythm for reviewing progress
- Issues raised early in check-ins
- OKR habits that scale with headcount
Three lessons from GetSetUp's OKR program
Every Wave Nine engagement is unique, and each OKR program needs nuanced guidance. Still, customer stories tend to highlight lessons other companies can learn from. GetSetUp's OKR program offers three.
1. Successful scaling means rethinking systems and processes
As startups scale to 50 to 100+ employees, they need to rethink their systems and processes to reduce complexity, so they can work in a more distributed, less top-down way. OKRs work best when they're tied to results that are simple to measure and communicate, so they inspire ownership and autonomy.
2. OKR setting works best when it's participatory
When executives work with department heads, and those department heads work with their staff, the OKRs become easier for everyone to wrap their heads around. It also lets employees see the big picture, contribute to the strategy and align their actions with the company's most important priorities. That is what OKRs are all about.
3. Lean goals and radically honest discussion achieve buy-in
It can be tempting to set dozens of complex, detailed goals without gathering employee feedback. But an OKR program is worthless if employees across departments don't engage with it. Simple, lean, focused goals tend to win company-wide buy-in.
