The Value of OKRs for Successfully Launching a Fintech Startup

This article is part of our Q1 spotlight on Partner Program Planning, Goal Setting, and Forecasting. Learn more in the series introduction.

Stealth Startups are common in the venture capital industry. These companies begin in private (or stealth) as they begin the crucial growth phase. Abril Benhumea is working with her team on an open banking platform that closed a $5.3MM fundraising round in August.

As her organization launches in Latin America, Abril manages professional and business partnerships. Today, Abril joins us to discuss how OKRs are helping her launch successfully.

Goal Setting at a Startup

Abril Benhumea works with a team of professionals who already have a ton of experience. She shared, “Our team is senior — everyone has over ten years of experience. The CTO shared goals on features to enable; then, the team sets their OKRs and KPIs. We need to ensure we’re ready to launch in March to align with the corporate strategy.”

In their current state, Abril is in an exciting position where their team doesn’t just answer to leadership’s OKRs, but also OKRs set by investors. She explained, “We’re a team of fourteen right now and are hoping to hire for three open roles. By the end of the year, we need to bring on country team leads, but right now, we’re focused on getting highly experienced team members so they can handle things on their own. Sometimes growing the team is an OKR to show to investors, but we don’t want to grow the team unnecessarily.”

Leveraging OKRs for Cross-functional Alignment

OKRs can be a powerful tool for aligning your entire organization toward a common goal. For Abril, her team is working toward launching across Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, so they use OKRs to align toward that mission. “We’ve broken down our broader goal for launching for each of our teams,” she explained. “For example, the product team is enabling the different features we need to sell into the market and align with potential vendors. From there, each individual has their OKRs based on the overall team mission.”

Abril’s team has the support of their investors, which is beneficial. “We have a strong pool of investors in all the different markets who support us. They are revisiting our OKRs every month, measuring and tracking our progress. We have a bi-weekly revision of OKRs for the Product team. For the Sales team, we’ll likely revisit in two months after launching the product; then it will be a weekly sync of objectives.”

Something helpful for Abril is maintaining a single source of truth. “For tracking data, we use Trello and Confluence. We also use Salesloft, Trello, and other tools to see how many calls the Business Development team tracks. It’s easy if you have just one place to track progress,” Abril shared.

Abril’s 2022 Goals

This year, Abril is focused on launching for the first time, a goal she has broken down into departmental and individual goals for contributors across the organization. As she grows into new territory, Abril plans to expand her team. If you’re interested in working with Abril in the fintech space, you can explore her open roles for Front-end, Back-end, and Full-stack engineers who want to have fun and build amazing financial products for Latam and the ROW. You can reach out to abril@getpassport.co. 

Learn more about the value of OKRs and best practices for getting started when you download Strategies for Achieving your Partnerships Goals.

Learn more about goal setting in partnerships when you download Strategies for Achieving your Partnerships Goals. Experienced partnership professionals like Abril will join us over the next few weeks to share their planning, goal setting, and forecasting insights. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to catch all of the interviews as they’re published. 

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