At a glance
- Client: Tala, a lending company that offers loans to people in emerging economies who have no credit history and no path to funding through traditional banks
- Industry: Financial Services / FinTech
- Company size: 500+ employees
- Challenge: Rapid growth after a $145 million Series E round, in a heavily matrixed organization and a new industry with no established playbooks, after an earlier OKR attempt with limited success
- Solution: A four-phase OKR rollout with Wave Nine: executive and leadership training, a company-level OKR workshop, workshops with six cross-functional teams, and activation of the whole organization
- Results: Vertical and lateral alignment of strategic priorities, biweekly check-ins that keep projects on track, faster escalation of issues, better trade-off decisions and well-defined initiatives that feed into company goals
The challenge: scaling with structure in a brand-new industry
Tala is a lending company with a powerful mission: to offer loans to some of the 2.5 billion people in emerging economies who have no credit history and no path to funding through the traditional banking system.
In her TED talk, Tala CEO Shivani Siroya tells the story of Jenipher, a 65-year-old Kenyan who ran a food stand in Nairobi. Jenipher earned enough to survive, but she couldn't save for emergencies or expand her business until she applied for a loan from Tala.
Jenipher had no formal credit history, but she did own a smartphone. Her son encouraged her to use the Tala app to apply for a loan. Tala's algorithm gathered a variety of non-monetary data, such as her local travel patterns and the number of close connections in her life. Properly weighted, these factors predict someone's likelihood of repaying a loan with remarkable accuracy. After evaluating a number of data points that correlate with creditworthiness, Tala granted Jenipher a loan.
Jenipher repaid the loan according to its terms. By the time Shivani delivered her TED talk, Jenipher owned two food stands and had plans to open a restaurant. Her credit history with Tala also gave her the opportunity to apply for a traditional bank loan, something that was once completely out of reach for her.
Tala has extended credit to more than 5 million customers in emerging economies, allowing previously excluded entrepreneurs to receive larger sums than micro-loans typically provide. Tala's 90% repayment rates match those of traditional banks, proof that there are innovative ways to assess creditworthiness beyond a credit score.
Massive funding and the challenges of rapid growth
Tala's successful business model has attracted a great deal of attention. The company raised $145 million in its Series E funding round, bringing its total funding to just over $389.4 million.
As anyone who works at a fast-growing startup knows, rapid growth brings new challenges. Tala's leadership wanted to:
- Keep the culture: maintain Tala's kind, supportive culture throughout the expansion
- Collaborate well: achieve strong collaboration and communication as a distributed, asynchronous organization
- Connect the work: map project initiatives to OKRs to improve overall performance
- Clarify roles: gain greater clarity on roles and responsibilities across a heavily matrixed organization
- Add rigor: bring greater sophistication and rigor to planning, operations and project management
Ishan Gupta, Senior Vice President of Operations, describes Tala as a "heavily matrixed" organization in a fast-evolving space.
"We're a heavily matrixed organization in a nascent, fast-evolving industry. Established industries have set playbooks, but our situation was different. We chose to introduce OKRs to gain alignment, starting at the top of the company and flowing into various functions throughout the organization."
Ishan Gupta, Senior Vice President of Operations, Tala
What does it mean to be heavily matrixed? Tala groups its employees in cross-functional teams, with members of different departments, such as Marketing and Data Science, serving in country-specific business units. This brings innovation and creative problem-solving, but it can also create confusion and dilute focus, especially when there are no established playbooks for an emerging field.
Tala brought Ishan on board to increase operational rigor and discipline, and to devise more powerful project planning methods. Ishan's experience implementing OKR programs at Udacity, his previous employer, had connected him with Wave Nine. Based on Udacity's successful rollout, Ishan believed Wave Nine could help Tala implement an OKR strategy that would help it serve these emerging markets and demonstrate powerful results for its investors.
Learning from the past
Tala had tried to introduce OKRs before, with limited success. Four things had held the first attempt back:
- Set and forget: an approach that lacked follow-up and follow-through
- Too many words: OKRs that were too wordy and hard for team members to keep top of mind
- Too financial: an overemphasis on financial targets, at the expense of other strategic themes
- Hard to onboard: challenges integrating OKRs into new employee onboarding and training programs
Tala's OKR rollout: four phases
Tala and Wave Nine designed a four-phase approach to the rollout.
Phase 1: Executive workshop and leadership OKR training
Wave Nine ran two separate sessions with Tala's leadership to understand and prepare the company's overall OKR strategy.
- Part 1, senior leadership OKR training: A dedicated executive training helped the leadership team understand and engage with OKRs as a key enabler of strategic alignment and sustained growth, and set a strong operating rhythm for the program.
- Part 2, second-level OKR leadership training: Wave Nine then worked with the next level of leadership, training some 50 directors and managers in the OKR philosophy. By the end of the first phase, Tala's leaders were fully briefed on techniques for localizing OKRs and managing cross-functional dependencies.
Phase 2: Creating company-level OKRs
Wave Nine led an on-site workshop with functional team leadership and business group leaders to set company-level OKRs. These meetings produced radical clarity about strategic priorities and helped the leaders identify and measure success.
Phase 3: Localizing and implementing company-level OKRs
Over two months, Wave Nine worked with six cross-functional teams, running team-specific workshops to define each group's OKRs. Wave Nine's consultants gathered input from team members and helped them create OKRs that aligned closely with the company-wide OKRs.
In many cases, they found that so-called "best practices" needed to be adapted to Tala's specific needs. The company was pioneering a new industry and achieving results nobody had thought possible. That meant Wave Nine sometimes stepped back, giving Tala's employees the freedom and space to find solutions that worked for them.
Phase 3 delivered vertical and lateral alignment of strategic priorities across the most important layers of the organization. It also paved the way for more ownership and a lasting boost in momentum.
Phase 4: Activating the organization as a whole
Activation is critical for focused OKR execution, supported by results rituals and other management practices. Tala's efforts to improve OKR adoption and increase operational rigor benefited from:
- Biweekly check-ins that kept projects on track
- Systems for closer project monitoring
- Faster escalation, so the team could address at-risk initiatives much sooner
- Well-defined initiatives that fed into the company's larger goals
Phase 4 brought a stronger focus on results, better decisions where trade-offs were needed, and an efficient balance of competing priorities.
"The Wave Nine team was very patient during the training process for both the executives and the company as a whole. They did their homework, learned about our challenges, and came prepared. They worked well with our teams to create a highly-collaborative OKR strategy."
Ishan Gupta, Senior Vice President of Operations, Tala
The results: alignment and operational rigor
Tala's OKR implementation brought greater collaboration and operational rigor across the organization:
- Vertical and lateral alignment of strategic priorities across the most important layers of the organization
- Biweekly check-ins that keep projects on track
- Faster escalation of issues, and quicker action on at-risk initiatives
- Closer project monitoring, with the systems to support it
- Better trade-off decisions and an efficient balance of competing priorities
- Well-defined initiatives that feed directly into the company's larger goals
- More ownership and a lasting boost in momentum
Wave Nine continues to work with Tala, helping it refine its OKR program and break new ground in a field that does real good for people.
Key takeaways for fast-growing startups
What can other growing startups learn from Tala's OKR rollout?
- OKRs bring alignment to matrixed organizations. Companies with many cross-functional teams can use OKRs to align everyone on the same priorities.
- A shared vision is a must. Fast-moving startups face unique challenges, especially in nascent industries, where the company is growing quickly and breaking new ground.
- Rethink your playbook when you need to. There are best practices, but sometimes you have to adapt them to make OKRs work for your business and your industry.
