Case Study: Digital Product help Roamer scale to support rapid growth

The company

Founded in Leeds (UK) in 2020, Roamer makes Lithium batteries for camper vans, boats and off-grid houses. They have achieved rapid growth in a niche market with 91% growth year on year. Their mission is to support adventurous lifestyles by delivering high power batteries with ultimate reliability, user friendly features and expert support. They take technical products and make them accessible to everyone and proclaim that ‘lead is dead’! 

The problem

As a rapidly scaling startup seeking investment, Roamer are focused on sustaining the high levels of growth they have experienced through continuous improvement and further market penetration. To support their ambitious growth plans, the company has significantly scaled recruitment in a short period of time.

As a result, the organisation was struggling to align their strategic growth plan with department and employee roles. Specifically, it wasn’t always clear how different roles could collaborate in working towards the company’s vision and mission and the contribution required from each role to meet strategic growth targets. An additional challenge came through the rapid evolution of team roles and responsibilities as the organisation continued to scale.

A need existed for clear and defined relationship between the roles and responsibilities of multi-functional teams and growth targets as well as a framework which ensured teams could be empowered to develop their respective areas whilst remaining fully accountable for results. Any framework adopted needed to provide the flexibility to allow for further scaling including splitting of existing roles, recruitment of new roles and maturing of processes.

It was identified that further support would be required to help:

• Provide clarity on vision and mission and create a shared understanding of each individual’s role in working towards
• Identify strategic risks and constraints which goals would need to address to enable continued high growth
• Facilitate implementation of an OKR framework which can evolve and scale with the organisation.

The solution

Digital Product helped support Roamer through a period of rapid scaling of teams through construction of a goals framework and alignment with growth strategy. We helped across three key areas:

Clarity of vision and mission

Worked with CEO and functional business leads to ensure that business vision and mission were clear and understood by all. Worked with the leadership team to help refine and map strategic goals back up to the vision and mission to ensure each leader was clear on their contribution.

Identification of risks and constraints

Coached CEO and teams on identification of risks and constraints that were priorities to optimise to avoid missing growth targets. Facilitated the process of mapping back to the emerging set of OKRs to identify bottlenecks which required short and medium-term attention.

Implementation of an OKR framework

Supported CEO on introducing the concept of OKRs to use as a goals framework and provided the tools and templates required to define and document the framework. Facilitated a series of workshops to collaboratively develop more detailed team and role objectives and key results.

The objectives of the workshops were firstly to establish a common understanding of strategic vision, mission and goals and provide the opportunity for feedback from the team and further shaping and refinement. Secondly, to support functional leads in developing appropriate team level objectives and key results for their respective areas that supported strategic goals. Finally, to ensure everyone was clear on their role and accountability in working to meet strategic growth goals.

Roamer prioritises quality and customer satisfaction above everything else, this focus on customer value at a strategic level helped the process focus on creating and maintaining value for customers as it is the foundation for all strategic decisions and plans.

During the workshops and based on team feedback, we identified and agreed some important principles which guided the development of the framework:

• Keep it simple - no-one wanted death by process, simple whiteboards and Milanote virtual boards were used over complex documents
• Develop collaboratively - each session allowed for each and every member of the team to contribute, input and shape the process
• High flexibility - due to the rapid scaling of the business, any framework needed to be highly flexible to adapt as the team in sixth months would likely be completely different in composition
• Be prepared to evolve - review periodically and review what worked and what didn’t
• Common goals over ownership - focus on collaborating to achieve common goals over ‘owning’ functions (people will wear multiple hats and those hats will change and evolve as the company scales)
• Transparency is key - make the OKRs fully transparent so everyone can have site of each others - a virtual tool was used due to the distributed nature of the many roles

One challenge faced was ensuring that the most valuable thing was measured, i.e. finding the metrics which mattered most and avoiding vanity metrics. For example, rather than simply measuring the quantity of things as outputs, the team instead focused on outcomes such as how quickly stock could ship and the quality of products. This ensured that each role was able to deliver on the strategic quality and customer satisfaction objectives.

Each session created a further iteration of the OKRs which was shaped in the room by the team, this ensured that the process maintained momentum and that maximum use was made of our time together.

The outcome

The Roamer team positively embraced the concept and implementation of OKRs, providing positive feedback as we worked together. The organisation is now starting to actively use the framework to actively drive growth, support investment rounds and form the basis of performance reviews.

Founder and CEO Steve Kennedy commented "As a rapidly scaling startup, we have taken on a lot of new employees this year and were struggling to keep up with growth and rate of change in the organisation. Digital Product helped us to put a new OKR framework in place to support the transition by helping us to align company objectives with department and employee roles. We now have a much stronger foundation to build the business, the team is happier, more motivated and laser focused on the next year of growth."

Unlike other consultancies, we help deliver positive change and support through doing rather than slide decks and set piece workshops alone, we elevate and amplify client teams to achieve success through collaboration and championship.