Situation
Gatewood was growing fast. Its senior leadership team, which spanned several departments, had ambitious goals. What they didn't have was a way to break those goals into manageable tasks, coordinate across teams, track progress, or manage blockers.
Each department operated largely in its own lane. The leaders were ambitious, but didn't have visibility into who was doing what, or who was waiting on whom. This made it hard to execute plans without missing deadlines.
The leadership team was facing three compounding problems:
1. Unrealistic goal setting at the top
Senior leadership was setting quarterly and annual goals without a clear picture of capacity. Targets were aspirational rather than grounded in what the team could actually deliver.
2. Siloed execution
Departments like marketing and technology were interdependent — one team's work routinely created or blocked work for another — but there was no forum for surfacing those dependencies. Teams were getting in each other's way without realizing it.
3. No operating cadence
Without a shared rhythm for planning and accountability, blockers surfaced too late, coordination happened reactively, and no one had a clear view of overall organizational progress.
Sound familiar?
Sketch introduced a structured Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle at the senior leadership level, using two-week iterations to create the cadence of accountability the organization was missing.
Two-week sprints with OKR-based goals
Large annual and quarterly objectives were translated into sprint-sized chunks using an OKR framework.
Instead of pursuing year-long initiatives in parallel, leaders committed to specific, achievable outcomes each sprint — making it easy to check progress and course-correct.
Weekly leadership huddles on a three-question format
Team and department leaders huddled around three questions:
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What's your most critical task?
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What's in your way?
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What does the team need to know?
Meetings stay short, keep everyone informed, and surface blockers.
A Kanban board in Jira to visualize cross-team work
Sketch set up a shared Kanban board that gave leadership a single view of in-flight work across departments. For the first time, the organization could see (rather than infer) where dependencies existed, where work was piling up, and where capacity was thin.
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