Creating a Unified Planning & OKR Platform for a High‑Growth Company
An NDA client—an emerging product company—experienced hypergrowth, expanding from about 30 to 200 employees within year. As teams multiplied, planning processes that once relied on informal communication and scattered Google Docs became brittle. The founders realised that when a startup shifts from a small “family” to a company, things “start to get really hard”; at around 50 people, employees begin to feel they no longer know what’s going on. By the time a company approaches 200 employees, the organisation faces teenage‑like growing pains. To maintain clarity and alignment, the client needed an enterprise‑ready planning platform that centralised goals and connected everyone to the same objectives.
Project Snapshot
Client profile
Our NDA client is a rapidly scaling software product company that delivers online solutions to customers worldwide. After raising significant investment, the company tripled its headcount in a year. Previously, each department managed goals and initiatives with spreadsheets, slide decks and chat threads. This made it hard to track progress, caused duplication and limited transparency across teams.
Project goal
Build a cloud‑based planning and OKR platform that serves as a single source of truth for goals, objectives and ideas. The platform needed to centralise data across business units, enable collaborative planning, integrate Objectives & Key Results (OKR) frameworks for alignment, support notifications and reminders, and provide real‑time dashboards. Once validated internally, the client planned to commercialise the solution as a SaaS product for other growing companies.
Business challenge
Rapid growth exposed serious planning gaps. As headcount exploded, the organisational clarity that exists in a small team evaporated. Without a central system, different groups tracked goals in isolated documents, leading to the following.
- Imminent deadline: The company’s next quarterly planning session was scheduled for just one month away, leaving little time to adopt a new platform. Without an enterprise-ready solution in place, leadership risked another chaotic planning cycle. Meeting this deadline required fast mobilisation and accelerated delivery from our team
- Loss of alignment and accountability: Employees weren’t sure which objectives mattered most, and priorities shifted without everyone’s knowledge. According to OKR experts, the OKR framework helps organisations align teams, set clear goals and drive accountability, innovation and agility across all levels. Without such a framework, confusion and misalignment grew
- Data fragmentation: Information spread across spreadsheets and shared drives lacked structure. In SaaS businesses, data distributed across multiple systems causes inefficiencies; a single source of truth centralises data, maintains integrity and reduces errors
- Limited transparency: Teams had little visibility into each other’s progress or decision making. OKR platforms promote transparency, cross‑functional synergy and real‑time progress tracking
- Inefficient decision making: Without consolidated data, leadership couldn’t easily see if the organisation was doing the right things. Near real‑time OKR dashboards provide detailed insights and analytics, allowing leaders to make informed decisions
Solution
Advantrix Labs partnered with the client to build a multi‑tenant SaaS platform that centralises planning, objectives and execution across the organisation. The solution combines goal setting, ideation and execution tracking in a single interface.
- Rapid delivery with modern development practices: To meet the one‑month deadline before the quarterly planning session, Advantrix Labs assembled a dedicated team and adopted an agile delivery model with two‑week sprints. The engineers followed trunk‑based development and implemented feature flags to ship incremental features without branching complexity. We leveraged AI‑powered coding assistants and code generation tools to accelerate development and testing. This approach enabled us to deliver a MVP of the planning platform in under four weeks, allowing the client to use it during their next planning cycle and gather real feedback
- Centralised goal management & OKRs: The platform provides a structured hierarchy of company, team and individual objectives with associated key results. Users can create, cascade and align OKRs, ensuring every task rolls up to organisational goals. Built‑in dashboards highlight progress, resource allocation and alignment, reflecting the benefits of OKR frameworks such as clear direction, real‑time progress tracking and improved teamwork
- Single source of truth: All data resides in a central repository, eliminating silos. A single source of truth improves data consistency, reduces duplication and fosters collaboration, as noted in SSOT research. The platform integrates data from external tools (ticketing systems, CRM, analytics) via APIs and consolidates them into unified views
- Collaboration and ideation: Teams can capture and prioritise ideas, attach context and link them to objectives. Real‑time commenting, document attachments and version history support asynchronous collaboration. Notifications remind stakeholders of due dates and check‑ins
- Analytics & insights: Interactive dashboards provide near real‑time analytics on progress against objectives, resource usage and bottlenecks. Weekly check‑ins and automated data refreshes ensure that leaders have up‑to‑date insights to make data‑driven decisions
- Ready‑for‑market platform: The product was designed as a SaaS offering, supporting multi‑tenant configuration, role‑based permissions and SSO integration. After rolling it out internally, the client packaged the platform to sell to other high‑growth companies
Business outcomes
By delivering a unified planning and OKR platform, Advantrix Labs helped the client move from ad‑hoc, document‑based planning to an enterprise‑ready process. The platform centralises goals and ideas, fosters transparency and collaboration, and provides the analytics needed to make confident, data‑driven decisions—paving the way for sustained growth and a new SaaS offering.
- On‑time delivery under tight deadline: MVP of the planning platform was delivered within a month. This allowed the client to run their upcoming quarterly planning session on the new system, avoiding another chaotic cycle and demonstrating the platform’s value and establish their credibility through our expertise. The rapid delivery proved the feasibility of the product, strengthened stakeholder confidence and very strong desire to move further with us
- Improved alignment and accountability: By centralising goals and implementing OKRs, the company achieved clear direction and alignment across teams. The OKR framework’s emphasis on outcomes and accountability improved teamwork and decision making
- Enhanced transparency and collaboration: The single source of truth eliminated data silos and gave everyone access to accurate information. SSOT research shows that centralising data improves data consistency, fosters collaboration and reduces duplication. Real‑time dashboards and check‑ins promoted transparency, enabling employees to see what others were working on and driving accountability
- Better decision making: Leadership gained near real‑time insights into progress and resource allocation. With consolidated data and analytics, managers made informed decisions and course corrections quickly
- Scalable planning process: The platform provided structure as headcount grew, preventing the confusion that occurs when a company moves from 30 to 50 or 200 employees. Employees no longer had to search through disparate documents; instead, they used a unified tool that scaled with the organisation
- New revenue stream: After successful internal adoption, the client commercialised the platform as a SaaS product. Other high‑growth companies adopted the solution to manage their own planning and OKR processes, creating an additional revenue line for the client