Reaching Cross-Team Alignment on Goals & Priorities

By Yael Gutman

A recurring theme during mentorship sessions has been how to reach cross-team strategic alignment on goals and priorities. There are multiple flavors for the complaint; The other team isn’t focusing on the right things, the other team doesn't know what’s important, every team has its own agenda, they won’t listen to me…?

One would think that teams working on the same project would be naturally aligned. Turns out that is not necessarily the case.?

The root cause for misalignment is often due to teams not sharing the same baseline information. Solving this is simple: share and socialize information. It’s much easier and more effective than going head to head.?

What to do:?

Formulate insights from synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data

Product managers are in a unique position to collect and synthesize qualitative and quantitative data related to user behavior. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data gives a holistic view of what and why users are doing or not doing something.

Leverage cross team knowledge

Complete insights include the institutional knowledge that other teams hold. Collect information from your counterparts and bring them into the fold: the technical teams, Customer Service, and others. Not only will this enrich your learnings and facilitate partnerships, it will also serve as a building block to reaching alignment as your cross team counterparts were already part of the process. ?

Socialize insights

Storytelling is key to establishing a narrative to be adopted within an organization. Having the data is not enough; sharing data without context is not enough.? Time spent on creating compelling and palatable stories and socializing those stories internally, will save a lot of time in reaching alignment.

• Package the insights up for your audience so that they don’t have to do mental gymnastics to reach a conclusion.? Your role is to interpret the data and contextualize it.
• Share information in a consumable digestible format.?
• Plain English, no jargon. Sometimes we forget that our day to day discipline terms are not shared with others.?
• Adjust the communication to your audience - the working teams will receive much more detailed analysis. Management and board will get higher level bite size nuggets..

Establishing yourself as an authority

By adding the socialization of insights as part of your regular product workflow, you will establish yourself as a trusted source of insights. Other teams will look to you for such information. The more you share, the easier alignment will become.?