Why Alignment is the New Growth Hack: The Trillion-Dollar Secret GTM Leaders Are Missing
Poor execution caused by misalignment kills more great strategies than competition ever will.
It’s not because teams don’t have smart people or clear goals. It’s because cross-functional misalignment erodes velocity, wastes resources, and creates friction that compounds over time. An incredible amount has been written about the consequences of misaligned teams.
You can read all about it: here, here, here, here, here, here, and see Melissa Perri's recent poll that calls it out here:
In response to her poll above, Melissa Perri said: “Cross-functional misalignment is the silent killer of great product strategies.”
Forrester adds weight to this by saying misalignment isn’t just an operational headache—it’s a growth killer. Teams stuck in silos bleed efficiency, burn resources, and erode customer trust. And yet, despite all our advancements in tech, despite every signal pointing in the same direction, misalignment is getting worse, not better. Here’s why:
Roles have become hyper-specialised. What was once 'Product Manager' is now at least seven different functions—Product Ops, Growth, AI, Platform, and more:
With many confusing the purpose of product management to be in just the drudgery of delivery. Instead of the beacon of commercial value and GTM execution, which Phil Hornby highlights it should be here.
SaaS has exploded. Each team now uses dozens of tools ( Forrester research, found marketing teams average 43, product teams 50). These tools solve micro-problems but create macro-fragmentation.
Brian Balfour recently described this when introducing the “Feedback Fragmentation Tax”.
This tax doesn’t just slow execution—it erodes trust in decision-making. And it’s a symptom of the larger misalignment epidemic we see across companies today.
Data is everywhere—but context is lost. Employees waste hours stitching together disconnected insights. Nearly half (46%) say fragmented systems are their top cause of disengagement ( Forrester ).
This isn’t just operational inefficiency. It’s a trillion-dollar mistake because in Gallup's 2024 Global State of the Workforce report they found that low employee engagement costs the global economy $89 trillion—roughly 9% of global GDP. If even 5% of that disengagement comes from misalignment, which the stats above say it does, it's a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity to fix (or benefit from solving!).
Gallup estimates low employee engagement costs the global economy 89 trillion US dollars, or 9% of global GDP
Aligned
In their book Aligned, Bruce McCarthy and Melissa Appel lay out one of the fundamental truths of modern product leadership: stakeholder management is everything. Without clear frameworks for who owns what, how decisions get made, and how trust is built, cross-functional teams inevitably drift into siloes. But in the age of autonomy, where data flows faster than most teams can keep up, alignment isn’t just a box to check; it’s an ongoing, codified process.
Enter Cross-Team Alignment Routines (CTARs). CTARs define and quantify the high-value interactions that happen between product, GTM, sales, customer success and any other stakeholder groups.
Where OKRs are for strategy, CTARs are for value execution.* When CTARs become part of the company DNA, the right people see the right information at the right time—so small misalignments never become major detours.
(* In a future article, we will show that the relationship between these is by way of the medium of jobs to be done (JBTD):
OKRs —> JBTDs <— CTARs)
By codifying these interactions as CTARs, we begin to create an ontology similar to that of Palantir Technologies where product leaders can harness the power of collaborative intelligence and create a flywheel of continuous alignment.
First, which data matter most in terms of solving for fragmentation:
Then, which data has the greatest impact in the context of alignment:
Now, onto which interactions are core to assuring alignment.
CTARs: The Framework for Alignment
Alignment happens at the interaction level and every CTAR has a ?? source and a ?? recipient.
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For example:
Not all CTARs are created equal. The most valuable ones share five characteristics:
A lack of effective CTARs creates chaos. For example, through a sales lens, Selling Power recently wrote about the consequences of a lack of proactive CTARs taking place:
We’ve seen product roadmaps contradict promises made by sales and marketing. And we’ve seen sales and marketing blame each other for a lack of qualified leads.
Given there are hundreds of CTARs, it is useful to create a consistent approach to calculating their value. Accordingly, we created the following formula, which includes the above elements:
With weightings included to enable localisation of these to your organisation.
Using this formula, and to help organisations understand all of the different CTARs between each of the different stakeholders, we have documented and calculated the value (within our own weightings) of over 200 of them.
Because 200 is a big number we've grouped into those which come from one team to another. E.g. one group is all the CTARs from GTM to Sales. These groupings enable one to aggregate the value of the CTARs between each group. Doing so we have created a heat map that looks as follows:
*You can access the above heatmap which is a Claude Artifact to remix here.
We can see that the highest-value CTARs happen between:
?? Execs ? Sales ?? Product ? Sales ?? GTM ? Product
And yet, most companies don’t actively track, measure, or automate these interactions.
That’s an execution gap worth billions alone.
From Chaos to Unified Value Execution
To move fast, companies need structured, repeatable CTARs—and a way to automate them.
That’s why we're building The Prestige - the world’s first Autonomous Value Execution platform focused on autonomously assuring alignment:
?? AI-powered agents automate the right CTARs at the right time.
?? Cross-functional misalignment disappears.
?? Teams execute with clarity, not chaos.
If alignment is worth trillions, why leave it to chance?
The Prestige is launching in 2025, is the first in a new category of business product. It is designed to enable the automation of many CTARs without causing an impact on existing ways of working by leveraging a team of AI Agents.
Our website, much more info, and the wait list is coming March 2025.
Experienced product leader for your product transformation | Consulting | Coaching | Interim | Advisory
1 个月I agree that cross-functional alignment between product and commercial teams is crucial. This is a team sport and we can only win together.
AI Educator | Director of Product Management, B2B and B2C, SAAS and On-Prem
1 个月Great job John McMahon. Some observations. ? Alignment problems generally start at the top and work their way down. If there is no strategy and goals are unclear, alignment problems will cascade throughout the business ? Cultural alignment is also important. If people aren't aligned around values then alignment problems will cascade ? Alignment and discipline go hand in hand. A business needs discipline to execute what has aligned around. ? The human element. As individuals, we all have our own personal priorities. Sometimes an alignment problem can be a reflection of this. ? I have a "thing" about stakeholder management. We collaborate with our stakeholders on shared/aligned goals. If we are managing our stakeholders it suggests we don't have shared/aligned goals.
Scaling businesses and creating profitable products that customers love | Executive product leadership | Chief Product Officer & Advisor
1 个月Love this John McMahon The best businesses I ever worked for had one thing in common. Everyone rowing towards the same goal, aligned on that outcome and aware of what each other were doing. Even in smaller scrappy startups this is fiendishly hard and relies on amazing people glueing stuff together and bridging gaps and overlaps. Finding a way to improve this in a systematic way and identify the key priority areas feels like a massive win. So definitely keen to see more of what you have planned. Question for you - on the formula; how do you determine the weightings across orgs? Is it an input or something that's derived form analysis / something else?
1 exit | Product x GTM x RevOps leader
1 个月Hey Karen Gallantry , I’m pleased you both enjoyed it and that it resonates based upon your experience. My own view is strategy is normally focused on the top down have OKRs and everything will just align perspective. But there’s no thread to value execution. The analogy I’ve recently created so your take on it is also appreciated is that: Strategy and OKRs are like the composer and conductor who define the vision (the symphony) and set the goals (the score). CTARs (Cross-Team Alignment Routines) and Value Execution are like the musicians and rehearsals—ensuring every section (teams) plays in sync, aligns with the overall composition, and adapts dynamically as needed. Without CTARs, each musician might play their own interpretation, creating dissonance instead of harmony. Without Value Execution, the symphony remains theoretical, never performed at its full potential. ??
Problem Solver | GTM Leader
1 个月This is a spot on problem - I spoke with dozens of GTM leaders in the autumn (CRO, CMO, CCO, Leaders of sales, success enablement, ops etc etc) and there’s just more fragmentation … OKRs are not the tool that will magically solve the issue… is a multithreading one as the matrix above demonstrates. I’d love to see how you are approaching this in more detail!