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When professional athletes set performance goals, everyone supporting them knows what those goals are, from their trainer to their head coach to their physiotherapist to their nutritionist. For the athlete to succeed, they need to keep everyone around them in alignment with their vision to ensure they stay on track to achieve their goals. One could say the same thing about product development. When executives set goals for their company, each product line and the stakeholders tied to those products must be aware of those goals to ensure the company achieves them.
With the professional athlete, all it takes is a few phone calls or emails to keep everyone aligned. In the case of multinational companies, a more robust strategy and set of tools is required. For many organizations, creating and maintaining alignment is their biggest challenge. At Gocious, our dynamic roadmapping software helps companies rise above the alignment struggle with innovative visual communication features that keep stakeholders at all levels of the company connected and informed.
How We’re Solving the Alignment Issue
Alignment is a hot topic in every organization and across departments. The pressing question is how to find solutions that work at different stakeholder levels and are scalable. While each branch of a company may have their go-to software to manage client contact information, marketing campaigns, or engineering tasks, there is a need for a central source of truth for all things product-related.
That’s where our product roadmapping platform comes into play. We’ve built an innovative roadmapping tool offering various dashboards for different audiences. From executives who only want to see progress reports to individual product managers who want to know the KPIs of their products to the developmental teams prioritizing ideas, Gocious manages all that information in easy-to-use software. Let’s explore some of the common alignment issues and how we’re helping our customers solve them.
Removing Communication Barriers
One of the obvious challenges to organizational alignment is communication barriers. Global companies have teams in different regions. This means they’re working in different time zones with vast physical distances between them. In addition to the geographical barriers, these companies also have large teams, making it impossible to get every employee in the same room at the same time.
Using the right communication tools helps break down the geographical barriers and the challenges at scale. When it comes to information about the product portfolio, Gocious dynamic product roadmap software connects everyone involved. It helps them stay connected by displaying real-time updates and customizable views for each department or role. With instant alerts and notifications for pressing information, siloed teams become a thing of the past.
Syncing Priorities
One clear sign of misalignment is when teams have too many competing priorities. Executives may have shared the company vision with their leadership, but ensuring those goals are communicated within each department is where the message usually breaks down. Leaders need a strategy and means to align their teams to the common goals.
Rather than relying on meetings and communication channels to share important information, product leaders can weave those targets into the product roadmap, keeping the goal front and center for everyone involved. Sharing a common vision and strategy helps teams waste less time on competing priorities and more time collaborating to achieve the company goals.
Improving Module Management
Resource constraints are another headache large companies face. Sometimes it’s the result of external factors while at other times, it’s due to internal redundancies. The larger the product portfolio becomes, the greater the number of modules and features created. Without clear, communication channels, this can result in duplicated work and redundant component lists.
Using Gocious to manage product portfolios allows teams to clearly see all the modules in production and where there are overlaps or gaps. Product leaders can filter their dashboard to review modules by their availability, launch times, end-of-life deadlines, and use in the portfolio. This increases efficiency and saves product leaders a ton of time they’d otherwise spend negotiating between competing teams.
Streamlining Technology
Without a centralized platform to oversee and manage product lines, teams are often faced with inefficient systems that keep them siloed. Regional teams may use different platforms or rely heavily on spreadsheets, documents, and shared drives, where version control is a headache. With a tool like Gocious, any stakeholder can have access as long as they have an internet connection. As an example, this means that a company with teams in Brazil, the United States, and Germany would all have access to the same information at the same time, regardless of their time zone.
Resolving Regulatory Differences
Operating in different markets and regions presents various challenges, including regulatory differences. These regulations may apply to facilities located in those regions or the parameters of the products being sold there. When it comes to the products designed, manufactured, and sold in different countries, product teams need to follow the regulatory standards and ensure their products meet them.
Incorporating compliance reviews as milestones in product roadmaps helps ensure that engineers, designers, and product managers understand and meet requirements during the planning and development phases. This approach guarantees alignment with regulations and fosters collaboration among stakeholders, streamlines product iterations, and enables efficient adjustments when requirements or regulations change unexpectedly.
Providing Executives with Custom Dashboards
Product managers may have confidence that their teams are aligned with company goals, but executives also need to be assured that their organizations are in alignment. They need to know the answers to questions such as:
- What is the progress toward company goals?
- What products are coming to market?
- How much R&D is required to move toward the goals?
- How much profit are the products bringing in?
With Gocious, executives have the high-level information they need at their fingertips while filtering out the noise they don’t need to see regularly. This helps them make clear decisions when product leaders ask for permission, approval, or help with stakeholder buy-in.
Build Alignment with Agile Roadmaps
Creating alignment in an organization requires careful planning, communication, and coordination to overcome the challenges. Company culture also plays a big role in motivating teams to work towards a common goal. The Gocious dynamic roadmapping platform is just one effective piece of the puzzle that helps bring alignment to large organizations. Schedule your free demo to see how.