Simone Mancini, Chief Executive Officer

What got Scalapay started?

Scalapay was born out of necessity. Johnny and I founded Scalapay in 2019 after launching a number of startups and seeing how constrained existing Buy Now Pay Later products were. The merchants were missing out on loads of sales, and the customers had inconvenient checkout experiences. We wanted to change that.

We drew up an initial version of the idea, which was a truly unique and compelling BNPL product. We knew the product worked really well in lifestyle, and we wanted to focus on a core niche and absolutely own that space. That led us to Luxury Fashion, and to Milan. With our focus set, the challenge was to scale fast. We made a real point of hiring a world-class leadership team with deep experience in tech, retail, fashion, and hypergrowth.

Unsurprisingly this led to the insane growth we hoped to achieve. The next challenge for us was maintaining alignment as we scaled.

What made us decide to explore OKR?

We managed to drive alignment and focus across the business quite easily in the early stages. It was a lot of testing and learning. We could quickly set goals and move fast to achieve them.

As we grew the team, it became harder and harder to maintain the alignment, focus on outcomes and speed. This is why we turned to OKR. We needed to maintain the speed and agility of a small start-up, but grow our ability for large-scale execution. We wanted a common language that allows teams to work together. Most importantly, it needed to be lightweight. We couldn’t have the desire to set and align the right goals getting in the way of real progress. People get way too caught up on perfection and permission. OKR really just made sense.

What was our experience like with Product Coach?

We reached out to Product Coach as an afterthought. After trying out OKRs on our own for a few cycles, we realised that getting help would really enable us to get a lot more out of it. We just found that without help we weren’t living and breathing them. We had too many goals which were hard to measure and the teams weren’t really involved.

As we approached our next quarterly planning, we realised we needed to drive that focus and get alignment by including the teams. I knew this would be a massive change piece, but wasn’t sure we could do it well. We were already juggling enough priorities. This is where we reached out to Product Coach. They were already overbooked, but after putting on a bit of charm, Tim was a pushover and we got started.

The experience was insane. Within a couple of weeks of starting with Product Coach, everybody had meaningful OKRs. I’m not just talking about teams having set their OKRs. I’m talking about living and breathing them. They were adapting their roadmaps and work plans for it, checking in weekly and working together on the most pressing issues for the business.

Without Product Coach there’s no way we could have introduced OKR as quickly and painlessly as we did. They’ve been a key part of our scaling journey.

What advice would I give to executives looking to embed OKR?

There are three key ideas worth focusing on:

1. Change journey and champions. Make sure you have everyone engaged on the journey. Create clarity on how you’re applying OKR at your business and why you’re introducing it. You can’t do this on your own, so make sure each team has a champion to lead and embed the framework.
2. Set great company OKRs. As an executive team, you need to write great OKRs. Clear purpose with strong leading indicators as metrics. Keep it focused to one or two. It’s your job as a leader to prioritise well and focus attention with the right measures.
3. Review weekly. Check in on progress weekly and do a confidence score on how likely you are to achieve each Key Result. Even if your OKR isn’t great, the check-in will help you identify issues and get them right. It also allows you to course correct where traction is not being made.