In Sync: "Bye Bye Bye" to Misaligned Team Goals
When teams do not speak the same language or align on the same problems, there’s a missed opportunity to guide the team’s energy to come up with impactful solutions versus conflicting solutions that fail to address the overarching issues. Imagine you're in a meeting with your product team, discussing the latest project. You ask, "What are you working on?" The responses vary widely. One team member talks about enhancing user experience, another about improving backend performance, and a third focuses on new feature development. While these tasks are all important, the different understanding of the problem leads to divergent efforts and conflicting priorities. This misalignment can become a significant roadblock.
Here are the five things we need to do immediately to ensure alignment and effective communication within your teams:
1. Establish a Clear, Unified Vision
The first step to solving the communication problem is to ensure that everyone is aligned with a clear, unified vision. This involves articulating a single, coherent problem statement that all teams can rally around. When everyone understands the primary objective, it becomes easier to coordinate efforts and prioritize tasks.
Tips
Meet with key stakeholders and customers 1-on-1 and read existing materials to help inform your own POV. Be prepared to stitch together what you hear and to do your own discovery for gaps in insights.
Write write write. Writing has been super helpful to me in amplifying my voice beyond my abilities to be in so many meetings. It also helps me clarify my thoughts on the product vision.
Share out the vision doc to get feedback and alignment. Some of the sharing is 1-on-1 or in a bigger group setting depending on how confident you are that the vision is resonating with folks.
2. Implement Regular Cross-Functional Syncs
To keep everyone aligned, regular cross-functional (XFN) meetings are essential. These syncs should involve representatives from all relevant teams, including product, catalog, business, and any other stakeholders. These meetings are to help ensure that each XFN member is contributing to solving the main user problem, whether that’s coding, coming up with training and marketing materials, or identifying users for day 1 adoption.
Tips
Set up weekly or bi-weekly XFN meetings (I prefer weekly) to keep all cylinders firing. Focus on tracking goal progress and unblocking and accelerating the team.
During or after each meeting, be diligent about documenting decisions (with reasons) and action items.
Make the agenda collaborative, everyone is empowered to propose hot topics for discussion.
3. Standardize Communication Channels and Tools
Misalignment often arises from inconsistent / decentralized communication tools and channels. By standardizing these, you can ensure that information can be easily found by any XFN member and leadership.
Tips
Repeat repeat repeat. Sometimes it takes saying things many times in different ways and different communication channels (email, Slack, meeting, doc) for it to sink in for people.
Understand your company’s norm in communicating and tools and adapt so that you’re effective.
Optimize for universal access to information. An example, some coworkers have access to Monday.com or Figma and others do not. Decide if the information is better off residing elsewhere or if the tool is worth adding friction for users to access.
4. Foster a Culture of Transparency and Feedback
Encourage an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and feedback. This openness helps identify issues early and fosters a sense of joint ownership.
Tips
Build trust with your XFN team and encourage relationship building with each other. The trust bank starts out with $0, build up your savings by investing in relationships.
Know when someone is trying to speak up. Non-verbal clues are best to detect such. Some don’t want to ruffle feathers.
Don’t ignore the quiet folks. Give them a safe place to speak. Solicit their input and help mitigate interruptions when they talk.
5. Think End-to-End to Anticipate Gotchas
No better way to anticipate corner cases than to think holistically about the user’s journey and how each XFN member plays a role in helping solve. When teams think about these scenarios and plan for them, this ensures that the product can succeed and overcome anticipated obstacles.
Tips
Don’t limit yourself to thinking I just own the requirements. You and your XFN team are responsible for the success launch and adoption of the product / feature.
Document the gotchas / risks and come up with a mitigation plan.
Wrap Up
By implementing these strategies, you can achieve a dramatic transformation in how your team communicates and collaborates. Imagine a scenario where every team member, regardless of their specific role, can articulate the same core problem and understand how their work contributes to solving it. This alignment leads to faster execution and more product quality and most importantly, “Bye Bye Bye” (N’Sync song) to misaligned team goals. Enjoy! - Sophia