How Vista Reached Company Goal Transparency with Oboard OKR Software

“Oboard was simpler than other OKR tools and the automatic integration with Jira made things much easier. Other companies can integrate with Jira but it’s not as easy.”

Vista, Cimpress company, is the design and marketing partner to millions of small businesses around the world. Together, VistaCreate, 99designs by Vista, and VistaPrint represent a full-service design, digital and print solution, elevating small businesses’ presence in physical and digital spaces and powering them to achieve success.

They are also one of Oboard’s most active customers, and their input on our new features constantly helps us grow. For this case study, we spoke to Walter Scotti, VP of Manufacturing EU, and Autumn Carulli, Director of Strategic Planning.

“Vista is a unique and innovative company with an entrepreneurial culture. We have the opportunity to work with colleagues all around the world and to support small business owners as their design and marketing partner. We push ourselves every day to serve our customers in new ways that help them grow their business and it is so exciting to see the amazingly creative ways that our customers bring their designs to life with our products and services!”

Background

Vista is no stranger to OKRs — they implemented the OKR framework several years ago and initially launched a tool called Workboard as their OKR management system. After using the tool through several OKR cycles, in 2022, Vista had an opportunity to address some of the key challenges in OKR adoption and engagement, which led them to start looking into alternatives.

“OKRs help us communicate the top priorities and allow team members to allocate time and resources appropriately when faced with constraints.“

One of the challenges they sought to address  was the lack of a unified standard. While all teams had OKRs, some of them were working on an annual cadence, others on quarterly. Additionally, teams were utilizing different tools outside of Workboard, including Jira, Excel and others, leading to mixed engagement across the organization. Eventually, Autumn decided to look into alternatives and learned that several teams at Cimpress were already using Oboard. Since it met their needs at Vista too, Autumn recommended Oboard for a trial run.

“After about 6 months of use, we had really positive feedback from team members that they liked the simplicity of Oboard and the ability to link Jira items directly to their OKRs.“

Initially, Vista used Oboard only for the company-level OKRs but later allowed team members to opt-in to using it while still leaving Workboard as an option. After the trial run, they decided to decommission Workboard and switch to Oboard entirely.

Both Walter and Autumn have read Measure What Matters by John Doerr, and Autumn also reads articles by OKR trainer Fillipe Castro. This provides them with an excellent understanding of the OKR framework, so their OKR approach is methodical and streamlined.

“The Quarterly pace is crucial to set the right sense of urgency and speed of actions. Big Projects will need to be broken down into simpler sub-projects. On the contrary, simple tasks can be aggregated to deliver significant business value.”

When asked about how exactly OKRs impact their workflow, Autumn and Walter agreed on several key points:

• OKR helps to set clear priorities and even more important to align resources and efforts around them.
• If properly implemented, OKRs will help team members understand the business value of the activities they are carrying out and therefore set the bar high.
• Having a clear metric to measure the KR’s progress is a must

Vista’s OKR Challenges

Vista is very dynamic, and especially in Operations there are daily challenges that could distract the team members from medium to long-term priorities. People, including managers and leaders, could be dragged down to focus on daily KPI variation instead of looking at the trend. OKRs help them not to lose track of the long-term strategy and make sure the tactics to get there are embedded in the daily/weekly activities and priorities.

According to Autumn, the main challenge was the need for a clear strategy execution mechanism , and Vista chose OKRs as that mechanism. It allowed them to:

• Connect the work that everyone in the org was doing to the main business priorities;
• Help folks resolve conflicts between strategic priorities and everyday work

When it came to actually trying OKR Board for Jira, Walter, and Autumn admit that back then it wasn’t a polished experience.

“Frankly speaking, when we adopted Oboard, the product was not mature enough even though it was simpler/more user-friendly than Workboard. The crucial benefit is the possibility to connect Oboard/OKRs with Jira projects and Jira tickets as well as with Confluence”, said Walter.

That said, a lot of things have changed since then. Oboard has added administrators’ features, Confluence reporting, and streamlined user experience quite a bit. We are still in the process of rewriting our Knowledge Base, but that will also be finished sooner, rather than later.

However, Oboard managed to keep things simple — and that’s important. Because, according to Autumn, “The main problem to solve was getting people to use the platform, develop OKRs, make them visible and transparent, and report their progress. Oboard was a simple tool to make that happen and could easily link from where a lot of work was being done already (Jira).”

Oboard Solution

According to Walter, Vista is a prolific user of Jira, utilizing almost every available feature of the task management system. Every function in the Venlo facility has to have all the running projects and activities in Jira.

Since the OKR Board for Jira allows users to integrate every step of the OKR framework into Jira, it allowed Vista to greatly optimize its OKR process. Once the OKRs are set, teams will identify key initiatives and link them to specific KRs in the OKR Board. For teams already working in Jira, .this allows for the Jira project progression to be automatically tracked in Oboard.

Autumn adds that another complaint they had from the employees was that Workboard was complex and had a high learning curve. They are still wishing for some additional features — and we are working on them — but overall, keeping it simple improves engagement.

“As Oboard offers the possibility to create users as well as groups, the leader of a given function can always filter the KRs according to their group and have a team review rather than an Objective review.”

Vista’s OKRs require a high-degree of collaboration and are often shared between functions, requiring cross-department contribution. So, it is not unusual to see different functions having KRs under the same objectives.

When it comes to high-level OKRs, Autumn clarifies, “We created workspaces for the top company OKRs and teams also created their own workspaces for team-specific OKRs. Everyone across the company has access to use Oboard if they wish, but anyone who works on top company OKRs is required to use and report via Oboard. We also custom-coded a confluence output from APIs for all team members who just need view access to the OKRs. I think I saw you added this feature to do this easily now, so that’s great. I want to learn more and try that out because it took quite some time and effort to do it ourselves.“

With this setup, KR assignees have to provide bi-weekly updates in Oboard.

The main benefits Oboard brings Vista

Overall, when it comes to the benefits OKR Board for Jira brought to their company, Autumn broke them down like this:

• Transparent view of progress
• Engagement and active updates every two weeks.
• Executive-level involvement and regular management of the OKRs.
• Resolving key blocks and dependencies in real-time as they are surfaced.

Conclusion

Vista was an almost perfect test case for Oboard — the company had a foundational understanding of the OKR framework and always knew exactly what they needed from our tool. So in the end, we asked what they would consider the most valuable aspect of Oboard. Here’re the answers:

• Jira integration.
• Automatic notification for async alignment and updates.
• KR filtering per group, user, and intervals.
• A simple and understandable user interface
• Organic engagement with the tool.
• Simplicity for connections with Jira.

We hope that our future updates will make the OKR Board even better for Vista, as we continue to listen to their feedback and develop our apps. We will also discuss additional opportunities for training materials with them — as they are committed to using Oboard in the future, their input will once again be invaluable!

If you want to repeat Vista’s success and bring transparency to your organization, book a call with Oboard and we will guide you through the OKR process. We are always happy to provide help with the framework and find the perfect OKR consultants for you. And if you don’t want to talk to anyone — we get it — you can start your free trial of OKR Board for Jira and make use of our excellent onboarding.