Goal Alignment Across Multiple Projects

Is everyone on the same page? Beware misalignment that could be derailing your data, analytics or AI projects. One of the first causes of misalignment happens in the project ideation phase. It's not uncommon for projects to begin with enthusiasm but suffer from vague goals, that not everyone understands or agrees on. It's easy for people to just decide they need an analytics platform like #PowerBI without any thought as to how they will use it. Then there's the matter of stakeholders. Too often, crucial players who need to be involved from the start are overlooked or identified too late in the process. This oversight leads to missed requirements and unexpected resistance later on, which can drop a bomb into an otherwise healthy project. Another misstep I think is the lack of alignment process. Without effective early alignment meetings that clearly outline the project’s drivers, impact, scope, benefits and timeline, stakeholders might not fully commit to the direction or outcomes of the project. It's easy to fall into the trap of "we need this Copilot" with no consideration of why it's important and what value it has. Finally, handling objections is a common stumbling block. Misalignment caused by the above issues leads to objections that aren't addressed effectively, causing further delays and, in some cases, jeopardizing the project's success. I think we could all do better in data and AI at anticipating and managing business stakeholder objections proactively. Some tips I've learned and observed over the years for effective project alignment in Data and AI projects: 💡 Size doesn't matter. Even small projects like a simple report can be undermined or suffer blowout due to a misalignment issue. Don't underestimate the potential impact of skipping this step. 💡 Identify your stakeholders. This could be as simple as a list of key people or as complex as a comprehensive stakeholder map that includes individuals at all levels of the organization. In Data and AI projects these are often IT, the end users, source system admins, managers and executives driving the initiative to name a few. 💡 Set up alignment workshops early on that focus on detailed discussions about project drivers like the challenges faced by the org and their impact, the scope or objectives and the new capabilities the org will receive. 💡 Use visual tools like diagrams, whiteboards, kanban and timelines to help stakeholders understand and agree on the project attributes. 💡 Proactively identify potential stakeholder objections, put yourself in their shoes and prepare clear, well thought out responses. Common objections to Data and AI projects are around cost, data privacy and security, resistance to using new tools (e.g. Excel vs Power BI), unclear benefits and doubts about data accuracy and quality to name a few. What do you think are the first steps we should take in a Data or AI project and what challenges can we expect? #Data #AI #ProjectManagement

⚠️ 𝐁𝐨𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐀𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐭 Metrics without alignment are a futile pursuit of perfection. In a major Phase III clinical trial, three teams worked with the best of intentions. ↳ The supply chain team proudly reported a cost saving of £250,000 by choosing non-priority shipping for their drugs - which included low shelf-life comparator drugs. ↳ The clinical operations team couldn’t administer treatment to patients for seven days because the shipment was delayed. ↳ The quality team had to destroy £4 million worth of comparator drugs because they expired in the queue. Each team hit its KPI perfectly. ↳ But the trial missed its alignment completely. ↳ Patients didn’t receive their comparator drugs on time. ↳ The clinical trial was disrupted for seven days - risking protocol deviations, data delays, and patient outcomes. ✔️ Cost optimization ✔️ Logistics efficiency ✔️ Quality compliance Each metric looked flawless in isolation - Yet together, they created value destruction, not value delivery. Patients waited. Data timelines slipped. Trust eroded. After this costly lesson, leadership redefined success: ↳ One patient-centered KPI framework across all functions. ↳ Shipment priorities tied to clinical urgency, not cost targets. ↳ Cross-functional review boards ensuring one truth across operations, logistics, and quality. 🎯 Lesson: ↳ When KPIs compete, trust collapses. ↳ When KPIs align, systems heal. Because in life sciences, perfection in silos may save £250,000 - but alignment across teams can save lives, protect data integrity, and enable true clinical innovation. Like, Comment, Repost and Follow Babita Evans Kumar MBA #TrustCode where alignment, trust, and human intelligence shape the metrics that truly matter.

In my experience as a Product Leader the most crucial part to delivering meaningful outcomes 🙌 is ALIGNING your roadmap with the other teams 🙌 Without alignment, priorities and timelines can clash, leading to missed opportunities and inefficiencies. When goals and key milestones are aligned, every team understands how their efforts contribute to the bigger picture. This creates clarity, reduces friction, and ensures that everyone is moving toward the same outcomes. Here’s how to make it happen: 1️⃣ Define the “non-negotiables” up front Every roadmap should have a few key outcomes that are non-negotiable. Share these with other teams early to align focus. 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞: If reducing churn is a priority, customer success can align their training, while marketing focuses on re-engagement campaigns. 2️⃣ Understanding the WHY Roadmaps should always highlight strategic priorities, OKR’s and user pain points you are addressing. This helps other teams connect with the “why” behind priorities. 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞: Show how a new feature improves a specific customer pain point and how it connects to revenue growth. 3️⃣ Opportunity cost When aligning priorities, consider what’s at stake if a roadmap item isn’t completed. 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞: delaying a key feature might mean losing competitive advantage or missing out on critical user adoption. Highlight these trade-offs to create urgency and focus. 4️⃣ Run “pre-mortems” together. Before committing to a major initiative, bring cross-functional teams together to anticipate risks and potential roadblocks. 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞: you might uncover that engineering needs additional resources or marketing has dependencies on sales enablement. 5️⃣ Celebrate cross-team wins. Alignment shouldn’t feel like a chore. Highlight and celebrate when collaboration leads to success, such as a well-executed feature launch or a process improvement that benefits multiple teams. It builds goodwill and reinforces the value of staying aligned. How do you ensure your product roadmap aligns with other teams? Share your thoughts—I’d love to hear them!

In almost every health tech company I work with, I see the same pattern: The mission gets everyone inspired. But if you ask five teams how their work ties back to it, you’ll get five different answers. 🗓️ Product is planning quarterly bets. 💸 Sales is promising custom features and services. 📣 Marketing is chasing a new brand partnership. ⚙️ Clinical is trying to make it all work. 🔬 Research is running two quarters (or years) behind. ...And nobody’s quite sure how it all ties together. It’s not always strategy problem. It’s usually an alignment problem. And the fix isn’t another 80-slide strategy deck or an OKR spreadsheet. When I work with health tech leaders on this problem we start with creating simple, visual frameworks to connect the dots. There are a few tools I always come back to: Ravi Mehta’s Strategy Stack is a clear model for aligning mission to each team’s goals. Melissa Perri’s Strategy Canvas is great for surfacing assumptions and gaps. The (infamous) Amazon PRFAQ helps clarify priorities and concerns across teams before we start building anything. Simple strategy tools like like these are especially helpful for clinical and research functions. Instead of staying siloed or getting brought in too late, they help everyone connect their work to company priorities in a way that’s clear and energizing. Without a simple, shared framework, teams run parallel but not together. Each one is optimizing for different goals, timelines, and definitions of success. 📚 In my latest WELL workshop, I walked through how you can use simple tools to put the pieces together and get teams on the same page. 🎥 The replay is up for a limited time: https://lnkd.in/e52SDwXn ❓Health tech folks, what tools are you using to align across teams? Drop a link—I’d love to build a roundup.

🎛️ How we keep design decisions in sync across dozens of product teams at inDrive In previous posts, I focused on the designer’s role inside a product team. But every designer is also part of the design department, and that comes with a second set of responsibilities. ✦ Why this is so important Today, a passenger might book a taxi within the city, tomorrow ride between cities, and the next day send a parcel by courier. On the other side, a driver might switch between ride-hailing and courier jobs in the same week. For them, it’s still one product. We want them to feel at home no matter which part they use — whether it’s booking a ride or sending a package — without relearning patterns or stumbling over inconsistent flows. ✦ Product team ↔ design department As part of a product team, a designer works on that team’s specific goals, solving user problems and delivering features. As part of the design department, the same designer contributes to strategic initiatives that run in parallel to product work. These might include: ▸ Evolving the design system and shared patterns ▸ Running cross-product redesigns ▸ Improving design processes ▸ Building a stronger shared design culture This dual role ensures we don’t just hit product team goals, but also improve the overall quality and consistency of inDrive’s design long-term. ✦ Our alignment engine: design syncs The backbone of our alignment is the design sync — regular open sessions for all product designers. In these sessions: ▸ Designers share ongoing work from early sketches to final flows ▸ Peers give feedback and spot overlaps ▸ We catch cross-team dependencies early, before they create friction This keeps patterns aligned across teams and ensures similar problems get similar solutions. ✦ The role of design leads Design leads act as connectors between product teams. They: ▸ Spot when multiple teams are solving the same problem ▸ Facilitate collaboration so we reuse strong solutions instead of reinventing ▸ Coordinate quarterly cross-team initiatives using the DACI framework: — Driver: responsible for moving the initiative forward — Approver: makes final calls on key decisions — Contributors: provide input and expertise — Informed: kept in the loop on progress and decisions ✦ The design function as the glue Our design function supports this alignment by: ▸ Maintaining the design system — common components, patterns, and guidelines ▸ Running and moderating design syncs and critique sessions ▸ Facilitating DACI-based initiatives and tracking their outcomes ▸ Helping onboard new designers into our shared language and standards This layer ensures designers embedded in product teams still act as part of one design culture. ☯︎ Consistency here doesn’t mean every screen looks identical. It means the experience feels coherent — whether you’re booking a ride or sending a parcel. How do you keep your teams in sync when they’re working on very different parts of the product?

This is your friendly planning season reminder that if you are ONLY using some sort of effort/outcome score to prioritize your roadmap, you’re only part way there. Effort/outcome scores are a great way to identify the most efficient things to do – but they don’t account for: ❌ % of goals met ❌ Goal distribution across your portfolio ❌ Key foundational levers ❌ R&D/Innovation ❌ Run the Engine / Care and Feeding ❌ Timing factors ❌ Competitive threats ❌ Changes in the market ❌ Changes in technology Almost invariably (YMMV), your outcomes will suffer BUT it won’t be clear why since you prioritized your roadmap! Better is to: ✅ Create a goal-oriented roadmap so that every effort is aligned with a strategic goal (this is the O from your OKRs, if you use those) ✅ Develop clear success metrics and manage to those metrics, not just perception ✅ Determine what % of your team’s efforts should be applied to each objective across your portfolio, including things like Innovation (fun!) and Care and Feeding (oft forgotten) ✅ Use MOAR - Metrics Over Available Resources - as your scoring tool, as this will help you align efforts with those goals and account for outcomes in addition to monetization (I know, but leading indicators, trust me) ✅  Implement Responsive Product Portfolio Management, where you align, allocate/re-allocate, and adjust in an iterative cycle based on the metrics you’re seeing, and changes in the market/tech/competition. We all end up in annual planning, and the New Year can be a great time to kick off excellent new product habits. See if you can get your team aligned around these and watch the magic happen 🪄 ______ I’m Lisa Schneider. As a fractional CPO, I help founders and CEOs identify the right things to build to align with business goals, provide frameworks for prioritization and cross-functional alignment, build outcome-based roadmaps, and streamline teams and processes to deliver faster. Reach out any time if you’d like to learn more or just brainstorm. 🔔 Follow me and ring the bell on my profile to get notified of new posts. #startup #fractionalcpo #roadmap #productmanagement #strategicplanning

Shared goals doesn’t mean shared priorities I think we have all been there:  - The strategy slide says “Customer First”  - Product hears: “More features”  - Engineering hears: “Fewer bugs”  - Commercial hears: “Hit the numbers” Same words. Different missions. And by Q3, you’re wondering why the roadmap looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. Alignment isn’t about shared goals. It’s about shared interpretations. “We all agree” is the most dangerous phrase in the room. It hides the rot. It papers over the trade-offs. It feels good - right up until everything breaks. Here’s how to spot false alignment before it sinks the ship: [1] Ask different functions to define the goal in their own words If the answers don’t conflict, they’re not being honest. [2] Force prioritisation If everything is important, nothing is. Let teams debate where to lose, not just where to win. A “not doing list” is a great way of facilitating this. [3] Re-align often Strategies don’t drift in a day - they drift in whispers. In backlog reviews. Sales calls. Standups. Slack threads. A shared goal is easy. Shared priorities? That’s the real work.

More “alignment” meetings won’t fix teams that are rewarded for different outcomes and on different time horizons. Sales is rewarded for closing deals and hitting revenue this quarter. Customer Success for retention and customer satisfaction over 12 months. Engineering for delivering safely and maintaining uptime over the long term. Tension isn’t a risk. It’s a guarantee. If you’ve managed projects across teams, you know how maddening this gets. You’re expected to ‘drive’ collaboration across teams pulling in three different directions. The finger-pointing is predictable: Sales thinks CS is slowing things down and Engineering is overthinking it. Engineering thinks Sales ignores constraints and CS needs to manage expectations. CS thinks Sales doesn’t care about fit and Engineering is inflexible. Then, when projects stall it gets labeled a “communication” or “project management” problem. Except, it’s not. It’s organizational-design working exactly as intended. Companies need revenue growth AND technical sustainability AND customer retention. The tension is normal. The skill is in navigating it productively. Here’s how: (1): 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘇𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁. Identify who owns which risks and over what time frame. Incentives become clear when you see not just the outcome, but when it matters most. (2): 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗲-𝗼𝗳𝗳𝘀. Help teams see how their goals contribute to the bigger picture across timelines. This reframes “us vs them” into conversations about real, time-bound trade-offs. (3): 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝗼𝗿𝗯 𝗶𝘁. Bring leaders together, surface risks and timelines, and let authority decide. Your role is making tension and trade-offs visible, not making everyone agree. Don’t waste your energy on making everyone want the same thing. It's not possible.  __________ If you’re frustrated with being responsible without authority, follow me. I break down the systems, patterns, and strategies that actually get work moving.

How can projects succeed in time and budget but still miss the mark on delivering the organization's desired outcomes? Consider the distinction: Project outputs are the tangible deliverables – reports, software features, built structures. They signify completion. Desired outcomes are the resulting benefits – increased efficiency, customer satisfaction, market share. They represent impact. Without connecting outputs to outcomes, even successful projects will most likely not achieve outcomes. Make your projects count. These 4 strategic connections are non-negotiable: 1️⃣ Strategic Alignment of Projects: Align projects (actions) with strategic priorities (viewpoints/goals) to ensure efforts contribute to the overall strategic direction and outputs achieve desired outcomes. This is where strategy sets the course, and projects provide the means to get there, ensuring every action has a purpose. 2️⃣ Strategic Resource Allocation: Prioritize projects based on strategic impact. This ensures that the most important initiatives get the resources they need to succeed, maximizing the organization's investment. 3️⃣ Outcome Translation: Link project outcomes to strategic results (KPIs). This establishes a clear line of sight between project deliverables and the metrics that matter most to the organization's overall success. 4️⃣ Strategic Adaptability: Adapt project portfolio to evolving strategy. This enables the organization to remain agile and responsive to changing market conditions and strategic shifts, ensuring that project investments remain aligned with current priorities. In conclusion, while project management delivers outputs within constraints, strategy management provides the crucial framework to ensure those outputs drive organizational success and achieve Desired Outcomes. Effective strategy management prioritizes resources, guides project selection, and directly links project outcomes to strategic objectives. Therefore, integrating both project and strategy management is indispensable for sustained success. How do you make these connections? Send me a note to dive into this! #StrategicThinking #StrategicPlanning #ProjectManagement

Used right, OKRs can be the most powerful product process. But most orgs completely mess them up. From driving empowerment to becoming tools for control… Here’s what you need to know about when to add or remove OKRs: — 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝗯𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗢𝗞𝗥𝘀: 𝗔 𝗗𝗲𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 The conversation around OKRs reveals a fundamental truth: Alignment mechanisms aren’t one-size-fits-all. Take Ramp, for example. They built a $10B company without OKRs. Their secret? → Exceptional product sense. → Metrics so clear that every team understood what success looked like without needing a formal framework. Now look at Google. They lean heavily on OKRs to manage their complex operations across multiple stakeholders. Without OKRs, their vast ecosystem would fall out of sync. — 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 The best OKRs are built on three simple principles: Measurable → Clear metrics that actually track progress. If you can’t measure it, it’s not a key result. Aligned → Tied directly to company goals. Teams rowing in different directions only create chaos. Ambitious → Stretch goals that inspire action, not just check-the-box deliverables. Now let’s unwind it all with an example: — 𝗔 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗘𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲 Objective: Establish our product as the go-to solution for enterprise customers. Key Results: → Expand the enterprise customer base by 50%. → Attain a 95% satisfaction rating from enterprise users. → Roll out 3 enterprise-specific features with an adoption rate of at least 80%. — 𝗧𝗶𝗽𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗢𝗞𝗥𝘀 To make OKRs work for your team, focus on execution, clarity, and simplicity. Here’s how: → Review and adapt regularly OKRs aren’t “set it and forget it.” Treat them like a product roadmap. Revisit them often to ensure relevance and make adjustments as priorities evolve. → Keep objectives aspirational but grounded Objectives should inspire, but don’t make them so lofty they feel unattainable. Balance ambition with realism to keep teams motivated and focused. → Make key results measurable and meaningful A good key result isn’t just measurable; it’s directly tied to your objective’s success. Avoid vanity metrics and focus on outcomes that genuinely reflect progress. → Tie OKRs to the bigger picture Ensure every team’s OKRs are aligned with company-wide goals. Without alignment, you’ll have teams running in different directions. — 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗢𝗞𝗥𝘀 → Quarterly OKRs Create a cadence that fits your team’s execution cycle and allows for focus. → Monthly Check-ins Use these to measure progress, uncover blockers, and course-correct as needed. → End-of-Quarter Retrospectives Reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve OKRs for the next cycle. — Want to learn how OKRs work and uncover the 11 other most important product processes from three product leaders... Go here: https://lnkd.in/e9f-mDzr