Case Study: CharlieHR achieves faster growth and clear OKR visibility with Geckoboard

How CharlieHR took a radical approach to team structure and OKRs to accelerate growth

CharlieHR is a two-year-old London startup that built a free HR platform used by a few thousand companies and, with an 18-person team, had just launched a paid product. As they grew, being one big team caused ownership gaps, blurred priorities and slow decision-making: senior hires felt they lacked real input, people were making trade-offs to help others, and the company needed a way to scale speed and accountability without adding heavy management layers.

Their solution was to split into small cross-functional teams (5–8 people) and adopt a disciplined OKR process early, iterating until planning, measurability and buy-in were nailed down. Teams set measurable Key Results with baselines visible on a company dashboard from day one, reshuffle between cycles to match skills, and run regular check-ins and huddles — changes that sped up delivery, increased ownership and transparency, made metrics trusted and actionable, and created a repeatable model for scaling the business.

CharlieHR

Tom Carrington Smith

CPO