Value Of Vision Alignment

Aligning product features to the organizational vision helps achieve outcomes and results in win-win for everyone.

Few years back, I was responsible for the annual planning activities of all the product portfolios of a company with a budget of around $100M. The goal was to first select a tool for the planning activities. Later collaborate with all the portfolio leaders and build the roadmap. We very quickly selected a tool and scheduled roadmap planning sessions. We were all committed to the job, collaborated extremely well, and built the roadmap on time as originally planned. However, when we presented the roadmap to the executive team, it didn’t go well. There were a ton of questions that resulted into hundreds of hours of rework. Reason? We put a lot of glory details into the roadmap but the elements that would show the alignment with the overall organizational vision and strategies were missing. They were either not clear or not thought through at all while building the roadmap.

A study from PwC shows that 54% of executives struggle to align product innovation with the business strategy. Part of the reason is — not adequately socializing the importance of vision and strategy throughout the organization. This produces a lot of outputs not desired by the customer and so waste in the process.

The focus of this article is to demonstrate steps that are needed to align the product features to the organizational vision in order to achieve…