The Stepstone Group Increased Alignment and Transparency with Quantive Results

Challenge

The Stepstone Group, a leading recruitment platform, aimed to disrupt how talent and businesses connect. The product and technology team started exploring OKRs in early 2020 to stay aligned at the start of COVID.  

Their goal-setting method, OPKA (opportunities, priorities, and key actions), defines their multi-year, annual, and quarterly goals — they successfully translated OPKA into OKRs tracked across the Product and Tech teams. However, they tracked their OKRs in spreadsheets, leading to an output-focused and admin-heavy exercise.

The portfolio managers wanted to tell a consistent story across their 85 teams, as well as have transparency on necessary improvements. Stepstone looked for a better solution to make OPKAs and OKRs work together.  

Solution

Stepstone implemented Quantive Results to visualize the interconnectedness of work across all teams. The head of product portfolio planning, Grant Turtle, was brought in to head the project.  

"The actual process of implementing Quantive Results was straightforward, and it took almost no time," Grant noted.  

Through regular customer success meetings with Quantive, they matched the OKR planning cycles to the strategy execution framework the team had already defined. Moving their strategy and goals out of spreadsheets and into a fully transparent system was complete. Next was the next most crucial step: adoption.

Stepstone navigated adoption through a team of OKR champions — they managed town hall meetings, team training sessions, and the Insightboards and Jira integration. Their goal was to translate the value of OKRs and why Quantive Results wasn’t another admin task — dedicated software gave them visibility into strategy and goals, the ease of updating OKRs, and reduced presentation decks.  

Stepstone continued the momentum by linking Quantive Results to their Jira instance, breaking down high-level multi-year corporate goals into annual, quarterly, and team goals — at the center were the epics and user stories contributing to those goals. This illustrated how their daily work contributes to the success of the department and the company.  

Outcomes

Visibility into strategy, goals, and progress has been Stepstone’s most significant benefit using Quantive Results. OKR reminders and Slack integrations have helped drive OKR adoption and updates, with ~1,000 updates in the first quarter after implementation.  

Quantive Results also makes it easy to dial in on focus areas, helping Stepstone spot misalignment early in what teams are working on. When it’s time to shift, working with their OKR leaders and Quantive customer success manager gives them better insight into output-focused OKRs during quarterly retrospectives. — one of the most significant results was a decrease in the low-quality KRs by 40% YoY.

“Implementing a successful OKR program should not be underestimated. Even after almost a year, we are still refining and improving our approach,” Grant emphasizes.  

The transition to OKRs takes patience and a willingness to leverage resources for smoother adaptation — Stepstone uses Quantive Results to shorten the learning curve and reduce friction in their OKR process. 

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