Deep Alignment on a Shared Vision

The road to building anything important takes time, is extremely bumpy and requires iteration. When there is weak alignment on product vision within the team it is challenging to get buy-in for the hard work ahead. At the first failed experiment or negative feedback from  leadership there will be questions on whether we should not have gone down this path in the first place.

Weak Alignment : Situation where people don’t think it is the right direction but go along with it for any number of reasons.

One of the most dangerous scenarios as a Product Manager is to have weak alignment within your team on product strategy. In my urge to Move Fast a couple of years ago, I pushed for quick alignment on a big strategy decision with my team and paid a steep price. Following that experience, I committed to seeking Deep Alignment with my teams going forward!

Here are the 5 key changes I made to get deep alignment:

1. Slow down to Speed Up Later (Mindset Shift):

   1. Shared Vision: Investing the upfront time in aligning on key strategy decisions helps the team develop a shared vision and feel ownership of the strategy. This helps the team go faster and further.

   2. Empowered Team: Since everyone is on the same page on product direction, principles, sequencing and success criteria, individual members of the team feel more empowered to lead different parts of the roadmap.

   3. Smoother Execution: People using the same terminology and frameworks helps with day to day alignment within the team and for smoother execution.

2. Safe space to share concerns:

   1. Inclusive Processes: There are two process changes I focused on (i) allow people to share their thoughts in multiple modes (async via docs or in person in meetings) (ii) ensure that everyone who wanted to, had a chance to speak up in meetings, sometimes this meant longer or follow up meetings.

   2. Psychological Safety: In order to create psychological safety I did a few things (i) set the ground rules for different types of discussion. For example, brainstorming vs decision making, so that people gave the right type of feedback to others (ii) Share when I was changing my mind on a topic to set the tone that we are here to make the right decisions and not to sell our ideas (iii) Acknowledge when I was wrong or when I made a process mistake so that people saw that we are not perfect and we learn.

3. Sufficient time for debate:

   1. Plan for more time: Everything will take more time than you think it will so plan for it as if you were planning for a product launch, break down the work that needs to be done, the decisions that need to be made, the discussions that need happen and 2x the time estimate.

   2. Different modes of collaboration: Think carefully about when you need to pull people into a meeting for discussion and when async comments on a doc/deck is needed. For example: prep for brainstorming offline, sync for collaborative brainstorming, offline prioritization and async feedback on prioritized list of product bets.

   3. List of decisions to work: Have a clear list of decisions that you want to work through as part of the strategy process. This helps to focus conversations as well as to document decisions through the process. People can also catch up on when needed.

   4. Reviews as a forcing function: To create a sense of urgency, it helps to have clearly scoped reviews as a forcing function to move towards decision making. The key here is to set the scope of the review to line up with the timeline of the team's work. Eg: Review focused on people problems and framework, Review focused on potential product bets, Review focused on a roadmap.

4. Principles and Decision Processes:

   1. Transparency: For people to commit to decisions they need to understand why and how the decisions were made. Being transparent upfront with the principles and processes for decision making helps people understand and buy-in to the final outcome.

   2. Earn Every Decision: Treat every decision as if you had to explain the rationale to a senior leader: (i)Identify decision criteria, (ii) Shortlist options (iii) Understand tradeoffs, (iv) Align or escalate the decision. Whether it is on paper or not going through this process in your head helps you have arrive at the right decision and hence get buyin.

5. Explicit Commitment:

   1. Final Concerns: At the end of this process give people a chance to look at the plan and share any last concerns that haven't been discussed. Explicitly call out that this is the last opportunity before we sign our names.

   2. Commit Aloud: Finally I ask for people to explicitly commit to the plan and say it out loud. I go around the room and check in with everyone so that they hear it in their own voice!