Persistence is key when it comes to OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). For years, the team over at Rebill struggled to get any benefits out of their OKRs.

“We had different attempts to start using OKRs, but we failed quite a lot. The main reason behind that is that we didn't understand the framework very well at first…So I would say, like the first year, we were not very organised.”
— Nahuel Candia, CEO

Three years is a long time, but OKRs were helping them make sense of strategy across the company. They understood that OKRs weren’t the problem, they needed to organise their workflows and get the right tooling to help connect all the dots.

To better understand their OKR journey, we reached out to Nahuel Candia, co-founder and CEO. In this case study, we’ll learn how Nahuel and Ariel worked together to combine strategy and execution to grow Rebill into a LATAM fintech powerhouse.

About Rebill

Based in Buenos Aires, Rebill is the premier payment gateway for digital businesses expanding across Latin America. Tailored for companies scaling in the region, their platform and API seamlessly integrate with over 100 local payment methods, including cards, bank transfers, cash, and digital wallets. Their commitment to offering transparent, fair pricing and personalised human support, has helped businesses accelerate growth up to 10 times faster across the LATAM region.

Nahuel and his co-founder Ariel Díaz Ailán, Chief Operating Officer, have built this company from just an idea to being the industry standard in Latin America. The two founders come from different expertise; Nahuel brings engineering and product expertise, while Ariel handles the commercial and growth strategy. “So he's the guy that brought the tool to the table and how we started using Tability. He's also a great fan of OKRs,” Nahuel explained, “so it was a perfect fit from his perspective, but I'm more about using Jira for almost everything.”

For Nahuel, the natural way of work was using Jira for everything combined with, what he describes as, “a bit of Notion, and then probably just notes everywhere.” This is a sentiment many developers probably would relate with. But the two would soon realise that growing the business meant finding a way to scale strategy and execution together; allowing those core processes to continue and thrive while staying aligned to the core mission of the company at large.

Before Tability: Unorganised spreadsheets and Jira tickets

Rebill started their OKR journey with spreadsheets combined with Jira to run weekly sprint meetings. “We would use Jira for sprint planning, which was the standard when we got into Y combinator.” The processes were disjointed, the tooling was not integrated, and the team lacked alignment because of it. “So I would say, like the first year, we were not very organised.”

Nahuel explained, “We tried using just a spreadsheet, but what we were actually trying to do was to have the whole team very aligned on the objectives we have for the company. We realised that spreadsheets were falling short.” The tooling didn’t support the type of alignment they needed to stay organised and focused on their company-level objectives. There was a clear gap between what was talked about within leadership, and what was talked about in the sprint meetings with their developers.

Despite the growing pains, they remained bullish on the framework, knowing that strategic alignment was a must. They had buy-in from the team, and Ariel had good experience and an understanding of how to run the framework—it’s just that the tools were getting in the way of them seeing the benefits.

“I mean, you can use a spreadsheet if you are 2-4 people. If you have 4, even 3 or more people, Tability is a much more comfortable way of working.” 
—Nahuel Candia, CEO

With Tability: organised strategy, aligned execution

Every quarter, the Rebill team meets and develops a plan for the quarter ahead. Although it often consists of a few meetings, they can get together in the same room, pull up Tability’s plan editor, and plan their goals for the next OKR cycle together.

With Tability, they can plan out their objectives, key results, and tasks all in one place, allowing them to have both a high-level overview and a granular execution plan for their quarter's goals.

OKR execution: Jira + Tability

To implement their quarterly plan, the tasks they’ve added to their OKRs in Tability will help guide what needs to be done next. While Tability has tasks and project management features built in, Rebill has always worked heavily in Jira. So, for Nahuel and the technical team, having an integration with Jira was vital.

Before Tability, everything was pretty much planned and executed through Jira. Because of how seamlessly Tability integrates with Jira, bringing their Jira tickets into Tability and their OKRs into Jira was seamless. Nahuel says, “It was a perfect fit to drop into the technical team to start using. It allows you to  track how far you are from the goal that you proposed at the very beginning of the quarter.”

Jira is still the main tool to track initiatives across their development team but adding Tability helped them contextualise the tickets and connect them to the related Key Results they were working towards. By using the native integration in Tability, the Rebill team can simply copy the ticket over and have its statuses sync automatically. “We have more visibility on what's going on for each department; more visibility into what’s happening in relation to the tasks in Jira, so you can understand how things are moving forward,” Nahuel explained. This way leadership has an understanding of what tickets are involved in what KR, and the dev team doesn’t even have to open Tability. They continue updating their Jira tickets as usual, and everyone gets visibility without going into Jira.

Frequent check-ins and daily standups

The key to success with OKRs comes with consistency and frequency. If you’re not doing regular check-ins, not only will you likely fail, but you will be missing out on many of the benefits it provides in the first place. By checking in frequently, you maintain focus on the things that matter most, while also getting a chance to reflect and learn from the work you’re doing on a more frequent basis.

Rebill has a clear understanding of the rituals they need in place to keep things moving:

“We do check-ins every Monday at 10 am. Each owner of each key result receives an email reminder and updates the team on their progress. This is important because it allows us to detect blockers and deviations early to correct them and provides the necessary context for our dailies. Our dailies are at 12 pm, and we expect what each person shares to be linked to a quantitative key result, which in turn relates to a qualitative objective.”
— Ariel Díaz Ailán, Chief Operating Officer

Not only do they run weekly check-ins, but Rebill’s team also has daily standups which they run using Tability’s standup feature. In their ‘dailies', as Ariel calls it, each team member talks about what they do that day to move along a task or a key result. This allows them to have a more granular conversation throughout the week and use their weekly check-in as a way to reflect and summarise the week as a whole:

“The check-ins are a great compliment to your daily standups because the stand up is ‘what you're working on’ in a very broad way. It's hard to track most of your daily tasks to the key result or your objective. In these check-ins, which we do every week, you correlate how far you are moving towards that goal.”

Using Tability’s standups also allows you to update your team quickly and asynchronously, so that you can get quickly back to the task at hand. The standup view allows you to scan over the latest standups from the team, without having a full meeting about it, and comment in context if there are any questions or concerns.

Conclusion

Rebill went from having Jira, spreadsheets, and a bunch of 'notes everywhere' to having a consistent link from top to bottom using Tability. Tability gave them the single source of truth when it came to the goals and initiatives at work. Their team is now more organized and efficient and has constant visibility into the work and progress being done across their team.

With Tability, Rebill is now equipped and has all the processes in place to scale their org, continue to expand, and scale their strategy efficiently while they do so.