Business Priority Alignment

Ideas don't just come randomly from the depths of our brain. Ideas come from the connections—conscious and unconscious—that we make from processing the challenges, problems, hopes, goals, fears, and opportunities. Ideas emerge from how we navigate the context we live in.

When everyone lives in a different context, they create radically different—and often competing—ideas for what to do next. While teams need lots of ideas to get great ideas, too many ideas pointed in too many directions creates unhealthy tension and unnecessary waste in the business, slowing growth dramatically.

We see this in conflicts that emerge between functions. Engineering wants to prioritize quality and architecture after years of rapidly adapting MVPs. Sales wants to prioritize revenue growth, while operations wants to prioritize profitability. Everyone has 100 ideas of what to do, but no one feels their needs are being met.

Business leaders need to speak with a clear and unified voice on what the business is optimizing for to eliminate this waste. Scaling startups need tools and structures that give everyone clarity—particularly new team members that are added almost daily—on what is most important for the business right now, and a way to inspect and adapt that viewpoint as the business grows.

• Unlock accountability through clarity and empowerment:
  Companies often ask employees to 'act like an owner' but rarely equip them with the context and insights owners have. With business priority alignment, everyone on the front lines has clarity on what business outcomes leadership is prioritizing and why. This framing provides a first-level filter for every idea, decision, and action taken by each person on the ground doing the work—allowing everyone to do their work faster and with greater confidence.
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• Generate more ideas that matter, and less on things that don't:
  People generate ideas from the context they see. The more context team members share, the greater alignment and synergy they will create amongst their ideas. Give your teams the gift of clarity for what's most important to the business, so their ideas all flow towards a common goal.
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• Create a venue for the entire team to feel heard and valued:
  It's impossible for any one person or team to see all the context of a scaling business. Aligning on and periodically inspecting business priorities is a way to encourage, gather, and consider unique perspectives to ensure the business is solving for the most critical problems at the right time for the right reasons.

• Identify decision makers for determining the make-up of business priorities
• Gather input from leadership and your top individual contributors
• Synthesize input for themes and evaluate areas of consensus and misalignment
• Process this feedback with contributing members
• Refine, finalize, and communicate the stated business priorities
• Identify meaningful tactics for reinforcing the prioritization, as well as a cadence for inspecting and adapting the prioritization

Assumptions:

• Blended fully-loaded salary rate for your team: $75 per hour
• Total staff: 100
• Percent of staff spending time ideating, negotiating, and debating things that are not a priority for the business: 30%
• Time spent per person per week ideating, negotiating, and debating things that are not a priority for the business: 4 hours
• Staff productivity: 70%

Benefits: $337,500 + costs avoided by increasing productivity of current staff

• Time per person per week not spent on ideas that are not a priority for the business: 3 hours
• Costs avoided by not spending time on ideas that are not a priority for the business: $337,500
• Percent improvement in productivity from higher engagement: 15%
• Costs avoided by not adding additional staff due to higher productivity of current staff: $2,250,000