What are your team cadences for alignment?

Hi @scott.baldwin,

In my case, we have:

• Product Committee every two weeks, where I share updates on the vision and news, and the team shares problems to tackle or succesfull experiments.
• 1:1 with every team member where I usually ask about personal, product and team status, and we align expectations.
• We have been working on different initiatives to bring new knowledge to the team.

Every effort we undertake must be framed in its contribution to the strategy. Anything that isn’t will be rejected.

Oh, you probably meant in reality, not my dream work life …

I try to keep things as close to that as possible, realizing there are leaders in the mix that don’t share my zealous commitment to strategic decision making.

My goal is to train the leadership team to consider everything in terms of its relationship to the current strategy. If it doesn’t relate to the strategy you either have an incomplete or broken strategy or that thing doesn’t deserve resources until the strategy changes. That’s a tough position to hold, but I’ve found that it creates an environment of transparency and incredible creative problem solving.

That’s an over-arching corporate strategy. In larger orgs there will be sub-strategies that feed into the corp strategy. Same rules apply.

When leaders truly adopt that thinking, they embed it into their teams -- it becomes infectious (in a good way). The strategy is on everyone’s mind.

In practice, I’ve seen mixed adoption. Some orgs are coming out of the dead, manipulative, under-producing side of [ operations / revenue / exec opinions / whales ] run everything. They more often than not recognize the potential of strategy-first decision making and adopt it quickly (once someone can lead them to it). 

Others aren’t there yet. It makes sense to most team members, but some leaders and influencers won’t give up siloed control or self-serving incentive programs. In those cases, I just make sure we document the intended outcomes, how those diverge from the strategy, and get the CEO to approve the divergence. Then we isolate it so it doesn’t detract from strategic progress and, just like everything else, track progress toward the stated outcome. If the CEO isn’t on board, I usually move on.

Getting back to your real question …

How do we keep the strategy alive?
It never dies because we talk about it every day!

How do we keep the vision alive?
Those charged with owning the strategy talk about it at least monthly (usually multiple times a week) and make sure the strategy is getting us there.

@scott.baldwin the day-to-day conversations are what really keep strategy alive and make it part of the culture.

That said, there are requisite dedicated meetings as well. The structure they take really depends on the org and their meeting culture.

There are three key categories I focus on:

1. Leadership strategy review. This is where a small group evaluates the metrics to check progress and talk about any pivots, refinements, or concerns. Usually every 4, 6, or 12 weeks.
2. Product team strategy review. I schedule this a week or so ahead of the leadership edition to get together with product managers, analysts, and select ambassadors from the go-to-market and customer success teams.
3. Corp strategy update. This is to let everyone know how the tactics are playing out and how well we’re achieving our strategic goals. It’s high-level, makes reference to dashboards already shared across the org, and takes the opportunity to do a little public recognition of strategic heroes. Best done quarterly.

In our cycle, loosely based on OKR practices, we aim for bi quarterly team-wide alignments with everyone working on the same product line (product, development, sales, marketing, consultancy), complemented with weekly smaller check-ins within each discipline. 

However, it still can prove to be a challenge to keep everyone in the loop. Especially in a company structure where people likely participate in multiple teams (product lines).