How 3 months of OKRs made Bookwire a better company

Bookwire has only been using Oboard for three months, but it has already shown excellent results. For this case study, we spoke with Claudia Nowak — the Agile coach at Bookwire, who was directly involved in their OKR adoption and has some unique insights into the OKR process.

By the way, if you are interested in case studies for companies that have been using Oboard for a while — check out the Breakwater or Vista case study!

Oboard: So, what is Bookwire? 

Claudia: Our company, Bookwire, provides a powerful software tool for digital publishing in Europe, Latin America, and the US. With the “Bookwire OS,” we have a dedicated platform that empowers our 150 highly committed employees in several countries to make our clients’ lives easier every day.  So, we are not a big and complex company after all.

Oboard: What is your history with OKRs? Was this the first attempt, or have you tried them before?

Claudia: We had been using JIRA and Confluence for four years and OKRs for about two years before we started using the OKR Board for JIRA, initially only on the management level. Only department heads and managing directors were actively working on the OKRs. They formed a pilot group to evaluate the benefits of the method.

This “global management group” used a digital spreadsheet to note all the objectives and key results and met once a month to check the progress.

Switching to the new tool (OKR Board for Jira — Editor), we hoped to increase transparency and help the teams become part of the process, too. Collaboration is much easier now, and the option to see connections (alignment, owners, connected tasks) increases usability a lot.

Oboard: If you were to compare your company before and after adopting OKRs, what would be the most significant difference?

Claudia: The more we consciously work with OKRs, the more transparency we gain about the work of our departments. Even though we still have some work to do to gain a radical focus, at least the idea of what the departments do has become much clearer. This deeper understanding drove the urge to define our company’s and department’s success in an even more transparent and tangible way. In the next step, this helps us make data-driven decisions and learn more about how we can support each other.

Oboard: How do you structure your OKRs?

Claudia: All in all, there are three levels: Company (=org goals), department, and team in case a department consists of sub-teams or projects.

(If you need more info on this, the OKR Alignment Guide explains how to break down annual company goals to the operational levels.)

Oboard: What were the most significant challenges in your OKR adoption for you?

Claudia: As we started aligning our goals and adopting the OKR method, we realized we were still facing a lot of work. Switching from a fixed “handwritten” dashboard to the alignment view of OKR Board for JIRA forced us to see what we were missing. Our isolated islands of department OKRs were suddenly part of the same list. It looked overwhelming and somewhat untidy. Our OKRs were not linked, and everyone had their own. Even using the filtering options left us feeling insecure about this.

Examples of Bookwire OKRs. Source: Bookwire

Oboard: What advice would you give to other smaller companies adopting OKRs?

Claudia: An OKR coach once told me that fewer OKRs provide a better path to ensure an organization is truly aligned. The more we share goals and find how their results cohere, the better. Therefore, a valuable next step was to reduce the number of OKRs in general (and thus shorten a very long quarterly meeting with more than 20 participants). Then we focused on a few shared goals and determined how they contribute to each other’s success. Ideally, we will be able to work smarter, not harder.

Bookwire is using a slightly modified Classic OKR structure. Source: Bookwire

Oboard: So, fewer OKRs but with more overlap between the departments?

Claudia: Yes. For example, even though a customer success team, a product team, operations, and development do different things – they all work along the same user journey. They all try to result in a happy user who succeeds in solving a task. Their objective – the satisfied user of feature X – and their key results (user engagement in feature X, fewer bugs, calls, complaints concerning feature X, NPS for feature X) serve the same overall goal. They may have separate sub-goals to get there, but they all should achieve the outcome.

Oboard: How does OKR Board for Jira help you manage OKRs?

Claudia: OKR Board for JIRA not only allows the assignment of one key result to any group or individual available (“shared OKRs”). It can also visualize how success on one level contributes to the next. We can set custom weights and create parent and child issues as needed.

Bookwire is actively using OKR weights to track their progress better. Source: Bookwire

Claudia: Lastly, the links between OKRs and tasks in JIRA can indicate whether we are working on our core strategy. In that case, most tasks in a release will be assigned an OKR. If they are not, we have probably run into the trap of separating our work “for the strategy” from our “daily business”.

Oboard: And is there anything you would like us to implement or rework in OKR Board for Jira?

Claudia: More visibility of the process of an OKR cycle (OKR crafting, review, retro, etc.) would be nice, and an option to share custom dashboards.

Oboard: Before we wrap up, is there anything you’d like to recommend to our readers? Is there a resource or book that helped you gain a better understanding of OKRs?

Claudia: Allan Kelly recently blogged that OKRs can be a strategy debugger. They can prove if a strategy is understood and applied coherently throughout a company. They foster a dialogue between executives and teams.  When this happens, a dialogue on the horizontal level between the operational teams will further strengthen the connections within the OKR network.

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In conclusion, Bookwire’s journey demonstrates how adopting OKRs can facilitate transparency, collaboration, and a focus on shared goals in a medium-sized organization. And now that OKR Board for Jira helps Bookwire manage their already stellar OKR system, the sky is the limit — after only three months of full-scale rollout, they have already seen a profound impact. And we will check in with them later for a more detailed case study.

OKR Board for Jira is free for companies with ten or fewer employees in the Jira instance and very affordable for everyone else. If you want to see what OKR Board for Jira can do for you, book a demo with our team and prepare to be amazed!