How Spendbase Marketing Department Conquered Chaos Using OKRs and Oboard

Spendbase is a product-focused company whose main mission is to help tech startups save money. The company is growing incredibly fast: in less than a year and a half, its staff has tripled. Their journey with Oboard OKR App started a year and a half ago.

Instead of formalities on paper, Spendbase chooses a horizontal structure and real goals that drive its daily progress.

Challenges, or Why KPIs Don’t Work for Creative Teams

Before implementing OKRs, the marketing team worked in a state of constant busyness without clear direction. Traditional KPIs proved too rigid and purely metric-based for a cross-functional team that unites developers, designers, copywriters, and marketers. Max explains that KPIs work better for functions where employees don’t create their own tasks (for example, when a developer is simply given tickets to complete).

Furthermore, KPIs have significant drawbacks for dynamic marketing:

• Lack of context: A KPI is simply a number in a spreadsheet cell that doesn’t explain what came before it, what will come after it, and exactly how the team achieved this result.
• Focus on the result, not the process: The final product comes after specific actions, and the team wanted to focus precisely on the path to achieving the goal.
• Inefficiency under uncertainty: When a company constantly launches new products (and doesn’t always know if they will be successful), it needs milestones that make the process predictable, not just endpoints.

The Solution, or OKRs as a Compass, Not a Whip

Marketing became the first department at Spendbase to implement the OKR methodology using Oboard. For Max, it was critical to present this system correctly: not as additional control, but as a tool for focus. The team didn’t undergo complex training, as the main principle was maximum simplicity.

If a company lives at a fast pace and neglects corporate rules, then the goal-setting system should also work “as simple as a door” and fully match its culture.

The Planning Process, or a Chaos of Sticky Notes and the “Threshold of Pride”

At Spendbase, they don’t believe in goals handed down purely “from above,” because a person must be involved in developing their own goals; otherwise, they won’t work on them. They use a mixed approach in which ideas come from the team, and the manager calibrates them.

How planning happens (Step-by-Step):

1. Retrospective: First, the team analyzes the past quarter. They determine what they will stop doing, what they will continue doing, and what new things they will start doing.
2. Freeform Brainstorming: All participants simultaneously throw sticky notes with ideas of what they want to do onto a shared board (Miro or ClickUp). There are no complex spreadsheets or rules at this stage.

A greatly simplified recreation of Step 2 for illustrative purposes

3. Grouping: The sticky notes are divided into regular tasks (e.g., “create a report” or “make a dashboard”) and potential global goals (e.g., “launch an affiliate program”). The team looks for patterns in the ideas and groups them.

A greatly simplified recreation of Step 3 for illustrative purposes

4. Identifying Dependencies: A separate group is formed for things needed from other teams (most often from the manager) to achieve the result.

A greatly simplified recreation of Step 4 for illustrative purposes

With more sticky notes, goals, and tasks, you might end up needing a table to organize them. For example, this is what Spendbase’s planning board for the quarter looks like, divided by teams and projects.

Spendbase’s planning board in ClickUp, showcasing different task groups and global goals.

PRO TIP: When choosing a numerical value (volume) for a Key Result, Max uses pride as one of the factors.

Execution, or the Balance Between Goals and Routine (BAU)

The issue of balance between ambitious goals (OKRs) and routine work (BAU) is a pain point for any company. You can do a lot of work that doesn’t correlate with the goals at all. Spendbase solves this through a clear separation of systems:

• Goals are tracked in Oboard.
• Tasks live in ClickUp, where the structure is built around OKRs (an Objective serves as a goal in ClickUp).

To prevent routine from “eating” the strategy, separate priority statuses have been implemented in the task manager. In addition to the standard Low (gray/blue), Normal (orange), and High statuses, there is a “Goal” status, indicated by green.

• Every “green task” must have a direct link to an OKR (you can’t just assign the Goal status to a random task).
• Each employee must have at least two such green tasks per week.

Check-ins, or Reflection Instead of Micromanagement

The company holds status meetings every Wednesday. After many experiments (which sometimes turned meetings into hours of boredom), the team found the optimal format for updates in Oboard:

• Metrics (numbers) are updated at the Key Results level.
• Verbal updates are written exclusively at the Objective level.

The check-in template at Spendbase focuses on the core:

• Is the person satisfied with the progress? This provides an opportunity to acknowledge success even with an overall “red” status, if there was a great trend during the week.
• Insights (Green): What exactly worked and how well did it do.
• Change of approach (Orange/Red): Exactly how the approach to lagging metrics is changing (e.g., stopping work on a broken funnel). It’s not interesting to read excuses or lists of “what will be done” here; if the metric is red, you need to change the approach.
• The most important event of the week: Which event had the biggest impact (not necessarily positive or negative, but the most influential).
• Gratitude: A list of those who made a major contribution to this Objective.

Spendbase’s check-in template in Oboard

If a metric remains “red”, it is not a reason for punishment, but a signal to stop working and change the funnel. However, the issue of motivation is key.

Scaling and the Main Lesson

Today, the Marketing team at Spendbase is the OKR and Oboard ambassadors at the company.  Max uses a “Lead by example” approach: he shows screenshots of Oboard dashboards with marketing achievements at quarterly all-hands meetups. Other departments see the progress, take an interest in the goals, and are already asking, “What is this?”. In particular, the Customer Success team is considering implementing this system.

A screenshot of Oboard Custom Dashboard from the Spendbase instance.

For those just preparing to implement OKRs, Max has one simple, but critically important rule: