aligning 8 product teams around a single metric
Eight teams. Eight sets of priorities. One product going nowhere fast.
the situation
A product organisation with eight teams had a problem that nobody wanted to say out loud: nobody agreed on what success looked like. Every team measured something different and every roadmap meeting turned into a negotiation. Leadership, stakeholders, designers, POs - everyone had a view and no one was exactly wrong, they just weren't looking in the same direction.
The result was a product that was busy but not moving. Lots of output, not much direction.
Photo by Ricardo Rocha on Unsplash
what I was brought in to do
Over six months I worked embedded with the product, design and data teams to build a shared measurement framework.
One overarching metric that could give eight teams a common reference point, without flattening the things that made each team's work distinct.
process and approach
I started by mapping how each team actually measured success, which turned out to be everywhere from hard KPIs to gut feeling. Finding that gap was already useful in itself: it showed us where the real misalignment was coming from.
From there I ran workshops with product, engineering and data leadership to define a single metric representing long-term customer value and a two-tier model that connected that overarching metric to each team's own goal metric.
The goal was one shared compass giving everyone enough direction and flexibility that teams could still navigate their own terrain.
We piloted it, refined it and rolled it out across all eight teams within two quarters. Along the way I embedded the framework into how design work was prioritised and evaluated. Not just as a measurement tool, but as a way of making decisions.
what changed
The clearest sign it worked wasn't a number. It was that roadmap meetings stopped being negotiations. Teams had a shared language for why something mattered, which meant less time discussing priorities and more time actually building.
Design impact became visible in a way it hadn't been before and not just to designers, but to the people making product decisions.
the broader point
Alignment problems rarely look like alignment problems from the inside.
They look like slow decisions, contested roadmaps or this frustrating feeling that the team is working hard but not quite in the same direction. That's usually the moment to stop looking at how work is being done and start focusing on how success is being defined.