How did we achieve alignment in our multi-product business with a diverse remote team?
Response: Managing teams as a high performance sports team + OKRs + Data
We take great pride in the diversity of our team. "Nuiteros" hail from all corners of the globe, bringing a rich tapestry of backgrounds, cultures and habits that strengthen Nuitée's DNA every day.
Just as teamwork is essential in sports, we prioritize team cohesion and collaboration. We foster a supportive and inclusive environment where team members can rely on each other, communicate effectively, and work together towards common goals. These goals are ambitious yet achievable, providing a roadmap for success.
To overcome the challenges of managing diverse and remote teams, we've fostered a company culture anchored in four core values: sense of urgency, bold thinking, humility, and data-driven decision-making. These principles underpin everything we do at Nuitée.
In the practice, we have implemented OKRs and we have developed real-time monitoring dashboards available to everyone to foster transparency.
📈 Implementing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has revolutionized our approach, aligning our diverse product offerings with overarching strategic objectives. Clear and measurable goals enable us to focus our efforts, track progress, and adapt swiftly to evolving market dynamics, driving sustained growth and customer satisfaction.
Regularly, Nuitée teams gather to set measurable short-term objectives, typically on a quarterly basis, and monitor their progress through different check-in sessions. These meetings are dynamic, involving all stakeholders to ensure alignment and recognize dependencies across departments.
Objectives are crafted for each department, stemming from overarching company strategic goals and refined into achievable milestones. Cross-functional workgroups, comprising team members from diverse departments alongside their designated "OKR promoter" (regardless of seniority or level of responsibility), collaboratively review and adjust these objectives, fostering bottom-up engagement.
Our OKR coach facilitates these sessions, compiling insights from various visual workspaces into a simple spreadsheet shared with all employees, ensuring transparency across the organization.
Like a coach provides feedback to athletes to help them improve, we believe in a culture of continuous feedback. We assess performance on weekly Senior Management meetings, provide constructive feedback, and support our team members in their growth objectives achievement.
🌟 Leveraging Business Intelligence from the wealth of data points collected daily by our systems and presenting them through a user-friendly, internally developed analytics tool has not only saved valuable time but also allowed us to focus on critical aspects while automating routine tasks. This approach has spared us from hiring a huge team of data analysts and also fostered team engagement in pursuit of our weekly North Star metric.
High-performance sports teams are known for their resilience and adaptability in the face of challenges. Similarly, we encourage our team members to embrace change, overcome obstacles, and adapt to new situations with agility supported by data.
Cultivating a culture of innovation, data-driven decision-making, and thinking outside the box has empowered us to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape. By encouraging experimentation and embracing unconventional ideas—such as integrating hotel rooms with Uber rides, upselling hotel bookings to FinTech apps, or launching eSimply, an eSIM mobile data-plan venture—we've uncovered new opportunities, differentiating ourselves in the market and delivering value to both our customers and stakeholders.
Finally, like celebrating victories in sports, we celebrate the achievements and successes of our team. Whether it's surpassing a sales target, or launching a new product, we recognize and celebrate milestones to boost morale and motivation. Working hard but also playing hard…
We're excited for the future as we continue to leverage the advantages of a multi-product infrastructure approach, driven by a matrix organization (See Part I), OKRs implementation, and an unwavering commitment to pushing boundaries!
