On their growth journey, the challenges faced by the Finch Technologies team isn’t anything new to startups and scaleups: they needed to focus their efforts on high impact initiatives with limited resources. During our engagement, we spent time with the leadership team agreeing on strategic priorities through robust debate and translated them into shorter-term Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The clear priorities, roles and responsibilities enabled two crucial elements: it created focused decision-making around product iterations, and it increased the speed of onboarding new team members through a clear vision. The result? Two successful product launches and a 3x growth in revenue from their core product by the end of the year.
“We knew we needed to buckle down and focus, but we did not have the framework and communication methods to agree and align on the most important opportunities. The OKR process facilitated by Step provided the clarity, direction, and accountability that was required.”
CHRIS BALL, CO-FOUNDER at FINCH TECHNOLOGIES
CLIENT
DATE
2022
DURATION
One month
INDUSTRY
Fintech
The team at Finch live out their mission to close the gap between companies and their customers by creating technology that enables every company to offer fintech products in a digital ecosystem. In a startup journey and with a big dream like that, individuals typically pick up a wide range of responsibilities – anything that the company needs at that stage. At some point, a level of specialisation and narrower focus is required. This was the need at Finch when we started talking.
David Packard said that more companies die from indigestion than starvation. This was true for Finch as well – there were more opportunities than they knew what to do with. They had a clear mission, vision and strategy, but too many goals and focus areas. As a starting point, we facilitated a two-day session with the leaders to prioritise the most important focus areas in the business. This also included onboarding into the OKR methodology to ensure everyone is speaking the same language.
During the session, accountability was assigned to the respective individuals. This was important to create transparency – as a company scales, there is a need to clarify what different individuals are working on, these conversations don’t happen as organically anymore. This was the starting point of delineating roles and responsibilities.
We spent time considering their weekly calendar and standing meeting to drive further candour and coherence of the strategy and focus areas. Different stakeholders need different levels of details, which was enabled through the right agenda, facilitator and tools.
The Finch team and product range are constantly growing. With clarity of their strategic priorities, new team members can quickly get a feel for the organization. With this understanding, they are empowered to decide where to allocate their own effort, especially when trade-offs are at play. Product launches and significant growth have also been enabled through OKRs. Their flagship onboarding product, Gathr, has doubled over the last few months of 2022.