Alignment across organisations

In large companies, organisational design rarely mirrors the product you're building. Expertise ends up distributed across teams with different priorities. Aligning across those boundaries is a critical skill.

What creates misalignment?

Misalignment is usually unintentional. Most people want to help you ship, but they have their own priorities and limited bandwidth. Common causes:

Diverging prioritisation. Teams rightly set their own priorities. Sometimes a shared project ranks differently on each team's roadmap.

Disproportionate or unilateral funding. Teams working in similar domains are often funded through different cost centres. One side gets funded, the other doesn't — or investments are unbalanced. Either way, there's an asymmetry in ability to execute.

Increase in scope given iterative discovery. New research, data, or customer insight after planning deadlines expands scope and reduces flexibility to pivot.

You can fix these tactically — persuade a partner team to reprioritise, trim scope to fit both teams' capacity. But repeated tactical fixes leave both sides feeling stuck. The root cause is usually a lack of shared understanding or disagreement on broader priorities.

Getting to a shared understanding

John Cutler has a good take on what is shared understanding. Rather than short-lived alignment on a project, shared understanding is alignment on direction. Teams that sustain it share three things:

1. Shared purpose. Don't assume you have one. Collaboration isn't always the right answer — plenty of companies tolerate duplication for speed or to avoid premature optimisation. If you do collaborate, make the purpose explicit. Write a joint vision statement or product strategy (Melissa Perri's canvas is a useful starting point). If you're stuck, have both teams abstract past and future shared projects into themes together.

2. Clear outcomes. What does success look like for the collaboration itself, not just individual projects? Do teams own different parts of the puzzle, or play a balancing act like metric/counter-metric? For example, an acquisition team and a retention team might define success as meeting revenue goals without decreasing retention by more than 2%.

3. Collaboration model. Define ways of working once so you don't renegotiate accountabilities, progress measurement, and risk handling for every project. Practices that work well:

   • Form a "virtual team" with representation from both sides and committed capacity beyond a single planning cycle. People gel over time and start acting like one team;
   • Use RACI matrixes to clarify accountabilities and prevent communication gaps;
   • Define how to measure progress together — metrics, ship goals, or decomposing unknowns. The joint team holds each other accountable;
   • Create forums for decision-making, risk discussion, and blockers so decisions and trade-offs are visible to the whole group.

When teams agree on purpose, outcomes, and ways of working, the tactical problems tend to dissolve. Prioritisation criteria are shared, funding dependencies are known, and new information triggers adaptation rather than conflict. The key insight: alignment at the project level is short-lived. Alignment at the team or organisational level endures.

Sometimes, though, genuine disagreement remains.

Framing disagreement for alignment

People avoid disagreement, and it can be uncomfortable when both sides are convinced they're right. But worse than disagreeing is never reaching a conclusion. The best approach: frame the disagreement together by agreeing on a fair representation of reality and escalating it as a traffic light decision matrix:

1. Pick criteria: define the dimensions you need a decision on;
2. Have each team define one option and its impact on each criterion;
3. Represent the trade-offs by colour-coding each cell of the Criteria x Options matrix.

The result should look like this:

Rather than spending weeks convincing each other, ask for help. A fair joint representation lets both reporting lines make the best decision — and may set precedent for similar trade-offs in the future.

This is a simplification, but the principle holds: organisational boundaries increase cohesion within teams, but the most effective leaders I've worked with do not "ship the org chart". They build cohesion beyond reporting lines.