Tactics for Aligning your Strategy and Roadmap Across the Organization
A conversation with Bruce McCarthy
Hey! Nacho here. I’m continuing the podcast episodes where I interview thought leaders about hard strategy topics. In the past weeks, we released conversations with Teresa Torres, John Cutler, Jeff Gothelf, and Marty Cagan. In upcoming episodes, we will feature Martin Eriksson, April Dunford, and more!
So, if you are not a subscriber yet, this is a great time to join :)
Alignment is one of the hardest challenges of strategy. Conflictive goals, every department fighting for their priority, opposed world views and interpretations of how the future will unfold…
Luckily, Bruce McCarthy is an expert on the topic, and in this episode, he shares many tactics and tips on how to surface these conversations, use the right artifacts, and create alignment.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
Takeaways
What we try to put in a roadmap: a vision of where you want to go, objectives, and a sequence of problems to solve.
Many times, this ends up being a dump of everything you can think of.
To select and align, you need the right people in the room—the executives of all departments. Bruce suggests engaging in cross-functional prioritization, using some framework as a scoring mechanism.
The artifacts we prepare are not intended to be “precise;” they are about the conversation and decision-making they enable.
Bruce doesn’t see Strategy and Roadmap as two different things but as different representations of the same underlying ideas.
Resources
New Book: Aligned