Market Practices: Strong leadership and smart tools are helping teams solve alignment problems
We explore practical strategies that modern teams are adopting to solve alignment problems. From developing inspiring, customer-centric visions to fostering transparency around customer feedback, trade-offs, and risk appetites.
TLDR
Misalignment between different teams can result in significant costs, such as a negative impact on customer engagement, innovation, and trust.
Teams are using various techniques to solve alignment problems.
Successful leaders understand the importance of aligning product vision, strategy, and operations teams to achieve business objectives.
To establish alignment, trust must be fostered through open communication, sharing customer feedback, and transparency. There are various new SaaS tools available that are designed to address alignment issues from different perspectives.
Great coaches surface alignment issues underneath the surface
This blog is focused on 2 things
understanding the alignment problem
what works for teams today in solving these problems. It provides a peak into various cultures and teams around these alignment problems. It can provide helpful context if you are working on alignment problems.
What is the alignment problem?
After conducting recent customer interviews, I learned that synchronizing different teams towards a common direction has been a challenge for Heads of Product and Engineering leaders. These challenges can cause friction in day-to-day work.
Diverse stakeholders like sales, marketing, and business unit leaders have different focus areas than the product team. The directions may at worse be opposing
Interdependent product teams have varying priorities
Product teams receive different feedback from customers or technology architecture than what leaders focus on
Leadership focus may change often without feedback from product teams and/or customers
Leaders at different levels have varying motivations or concerns
Misalignment can cost organisations heavily in wasted work, unmet customer expectations, limited outcomes, and an environment of mistrust, stifling innovation, creativity, and customer focus.
Lets look at some examples in the market on how teams are dealing with this challenge.
Product Leaders are using an inspiring, customer-centric and actionable vision to align teams
In the Fearless Product Leadership podcast episodes (see note 1 after the blog) by Hope Gurion, product leaders from MyFitnessPal, Under Armour, Pluralsight, Optum and others share their experience in developing a product vision that aligns teams across manufacturing, operations and software development.
Alignment on company mission, product vision, and strategy - facilitate key decisions and team motivation. A vision prototype can be a very powerful technique to inspire and ignite teams towards a common north star. It shows what is possible for the customer and lets the team feedback on this. If teams co-author and are invested in these three components, execution becomes easier. Empathy across teams allows for co-authoring.
Teams are sharing customer feedback and trade-offs between priority choices to foster trust
In the Fearless Product Leadership podcast episodes (see notes after the blog) by Hope Gurion, product leaders from WeightWatchers and Udemy share that when they shared customer feedback across customer success, sales, and product leadership it helps in a shared understanding of problems. Some teams do this as regularly as once every 4-6 weeks.
Customer feedback loops into product strategy and helps in developing a shared appreciation of the problem. Leaders who allow product teams to test customer behaviour changes in response to features help them validate their product strategy, creating continuous alignment across different teams.
Transparency in priorities and risk appetite aids portfolio investment alignment. Teams share monthly and quarterly roadmaps with stakeholders, including recent achievements, current work and future plans, facilitating priority balancing discussions.
Leaders use portfolio buckets (incubate, invest, maintain, sunset) to denote investment directions and risk tolerance. This helps in contrasting team suggestions with the investment thresholds in each bucket and pinpointing required compromises, thereby promoting alignment.
“A great way to get them (stakeholders) aligned is to actually bring them into customer interviews.”
For key decisions, Product leaders surface competing options, acknowledge and address stakeholder challenges
In the Fearless Product Leadership podcast episodes (see note 1 after the blog) by Hope Gurion, product leaders from PagerDuty, Xero, WeightWatchers and Udemy share their experience in helping with key decisions.
Treating the needs of internal stakeholders and customers as equal aids in alignment. From personal experience as a coach, I've learned that disregarding this fact and engaging in ideological battles with stakeholders isn't productive or beneficial. Leaders understand the problems and goals of different stakeholders. They are taking the opportunity to acknowledge and address their challenges.
Leaders are highlighting alternatives, and clarifying their effects on strategic choices and team priorities. Leaders are surfacing various options, including ideas from stakeholders. This promotes open dialogue and addresses concerns. When comparing options, they are considering their impacts on the organisation's key strategies. They are helping the decision-maker by recommending the best option. They also collaboratively address concerns and outline next steps.
Organisations (e.g., Yelp) use lean Product Ops to help align teams on common goals
In the Product Thinking podcast (see note 2 after the blog) by Melissa Perri, CPO of Yelp was asked “what do you do so that teams at different levels VP, Directors and Product teams are all aligning on goals?”
The CPO responded “Every team does their best to work out their own dependencies. They work out on alignment across impacted teams with the leaders responsible for them. This gets them to 60% alignment. Product Ops team work on getting from 60% to 100% alignment across teams to iron out dependencies. Product Ops unify Product, Engineering, Sales and Marketing, Data Science and Business Operations to help align teams. Product Ops also work on the most critical projects with some coordination across teams in different stages of product maturity. An example product is multi-location ads. The teams are product and engineering working on attribution products, marketing and sales. For new products in this space that slip, Product Ops work with product, engineering, sales and marketing to streamline communications.”
Pioneering SaaS products are helping teams solve various alignment problems
DoubleLoop:
Problem Space: Teams may have differing strategic intents, uncertainty about the impact of current work, and difficulty adjusting strategies based on learnings.
Value Proposition: The platform provides templates and spaces for team collaboration. It:
Links team goals with key hypotheses and bets
Integrates with tools like Jira, maintaining the connection to impact
Reports progress through integration with data plugins like Google Cloud, Amplitude, and Snowflake, enabling teams to monitor progress.
Geekbot:
Problem Space: Teams suffer from meeting overload. They are also spread across multiple time zones. It is hard to bond and collaborate with remote team members. Leaders also find it difficult to capture useful data about individuals when they experience - ideas, blockers, opportunities to improve, provide feedback, share water cooler stories, etc.
Value Proposition: The platform is enabling asynchronous updates and catchups amongst team members. This helps them with useful context that reduces friction in daily work. It uses automated workflows for - stand-ups, team check-ins, retrospectives and many others.
Quantive:
Problem Space: Product strategy feedback loops are hard to establish and require lot of coordination. OKR programs in organisation are misaligned top to bottom.
Value Proposition: It’s positioned as a strategy execution platform. There are 2 main value propositions:
Implementing OKRs for organisations: Helping to visualise how every team and individual is contributing to one common mission. Allowing multiple teams to align to a single key result, or to share key results, and contribute together towards the outcome.
Product Strategy assessment and adjustment: Helping to pull together strategic insights from different teams. Using AI to understand gaps and opportunities in the existing strategy.
It also offers teams workflow automation, executive dashboards and progress reports.
Whimsical:
Problem Space: Product teams struggle to create clear, collaborative documents (strategy, pitches) that combine complex details (user flows, features) and get stakeholder buy-in early. They need a simple way to visualise solutions and features to gather feedback before investing heavily in design.
Value Proposition:
Document management platform. Whimsical's platform lets users integrate visual boards into documents, incorporating essential context like user flows, wireframes, and sketches into pitches.
Collaboration board for Product Teams. It's very useful for Product Teams, enabling quick transformation of concepts into polished product maps, wireframes, or diagrams. Annotations and comments facilitate stakeholder collaboration and feedback gathering.
Reclaimai:
Problem Space: Work for any individual spans multiple types - across calendars, clients, problems and teams. This leads to lots of context-switching and disruptions.
Value Proposition:
Analyses tasks and uses AI to recommend task scheduling before they are due shortly. Same scheduling helps in maintaining personal habits like slack time, exercises, meals, writing or creativity time etc.
Organises calendars across different accounts and helps rationalise the calendar. Reclaim will automatically move flexible time blocks when interruptions occur, and keep your time blocks free if you have lots of slack in your schedule.
Great coaches surface alignment issues underneath the surface
In the Fearless Product Leadership podcast episodes (see note 1 after the blog) by Hope Gurion, the authors (Bob Gower and Alexandra Jamieson) of the book “Radical Alignment” talk about key questions they ask to help teams align. They use this as a precursor to working agreements, team charters and behavioural norms. These questions are:
Setting the stage: “What we're talking about? And why? “And some rules during the workshop e.g. no talking over each other, equal speaking time, etc.
Intentions: “Why are we building this product? Why are you on this team?”
“Share your concerns”
Boundaries: “What do you need to be your best? and what do you need to feel safe?”
Share your Dreams: “If this were to go incredibly well, what would be true for you? What would be true for the other people on the team? What do you want to see happen for them? What do you want to see happen for the group, the organization, the clients?”
Notes:
1. Fearless Product Leadership Podcast Episodes that helped me in this blog: S1 Ep. 12: How Do You Craft and Communicate Product Vision?, S2 Ep. 8: Why Must You Align People on Tough Decisions?, S2 Ep. 9: How Do You Align People on Tough Decisions?, S2 Ep. 10: How Do You Achieve Radical Alignment?
2. Product Thinking Podcast Episodes that helped me in this blog: Episode 162: Product Roadmap: Building a Platform for the Next Decade with Craig Saldanha, Chief Product Officer at Yelp
