Company Alignment

Every business, including ours, must navigate the ever-changing market and uncertain world (VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). It’s not enough to react; we need a shared understanding of our objectives (where we want to go as a business and organization) and the path to achieve them. Alignment provides an internal compass in this volatile landscape. It anchors our self-managing teams to our overarching purpose and vision, preventing fragmentation and self-directed divergence. It ensures every team and every VSHNeer understands their role in achieving our vision.

In a small startup, daily conversations might suffice for alignment, but with 50+ people, we need a more systematic approach. We avoid rigid frameworks and classic command-and-control styles, but we prioritize clarity in creating alignment to ensure unified efforts towards our goals.

At VSHN, alignment consists of two tracks: the Aligned Organizational Structure and the Agile Goal Setting track.

Aligned Organizational Structure

An Aligned Organizational Structure ensures that teams and roles serve a higher purpose (the company purpose). At VSHN, this is achieved through self-organization (bottom-up) or Delegation facilitated by the Organizational Development and Product Management roles, in collaboration with affected teams and other roles. This guarantees that each team has a long-term identity and purpose aligned with the organization.

We organize our teams around business areas, products, and value streams, considering technical factors, product or service-specific knowledge, etc. A team should align as directly as possible to a value stream, meaning they are responsible for and capable of delivering services or products end-to-end (from producing assets and customer onboarding to continuous support and operations) with minimal dependencies beyond the team. Supporting teams and roles, like sales, marketing, customer account management, and internal operations (like HR and Corporate IT), complement these efforts.

The "long-term identity" of each Team and Role is documented using the Domain Description Format, focusing on delegated responsibilities and deliverables for specific stakeholders.

Within teams, implicit and explicit roles further clarify responsibilities, enabling teams to fulfill their purpose effectively.

See Organizational Structure and VSHNeer Roles for details.

Agile Goal Setting

While in the past it was enough to focus on providing value to customers through individual, customer-driven projects, VSHN’s shift to a combined project and product business (see VSHN’s Identity) necessitates setting clear goals. These goals guide us, track progress, and make our development visible.

By combining structural alignment with forms of agile goal setting, we ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of priorities and can balance daily operational tasks with strategic development. In the end, roadmaps, OKRs, or other formats are just tools.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

The Board and the Product Management define strategic, usually yearly, company-level objectives in collaboration with relevant roles and subject-matter experts. These objectives align with higher-level strategic goals and consider the current business and market context.

Product Management collaborates with teams (in tech teams, this is usually facilitated via their Product Owners) and other roles to establish more specific, tactical, short-term objectives, often referred to as "Team Level OKRs."

For some teams, a Product Roadmap might already provide sufficient clarity, making additional objectives unnecessary, or tactical OKRs may only be relevant within Product Management. This flexibility ensures that teams adopt the tools and practices that best create clarity, drive motivation, and enable tracking of progress and success.

See Tracking OKRs.

Product Roadmap

We maintain customer-centric roadmaps for each defined product or product group. A roadmap lists the products, variants, or features to be developed next. The Product Manager and Product Owner maintain this roadmap with input from stakeholders like Customer Account Management and Sales.

For teams owning a product or product group, the roadmap is usually more specific than OKRs. OKRs focus on broader, higher-level goals, while the roadmap details specific features and initiatives contributing to those goals. These tools are complementary, not mutually exclusive; teams should use whichever provides the best orientation and alignment.

See Product Roadmap.

Objectives and Roadmap in Scrum

A good practice is for Scrum Sprint Goals to align with either the product roadmap or Team OKRs, alongside operational work (like customer projects). The roadmap aligns with Team or Company-Level OKRs while focusing on customer value. The Product Owner’s challenge is to balance these elements with stakeholder input.

If team members cannot see this connection, it indicates a lack of common alignment—meaning we are no longer working towards shared objectives.

Where is the Strategy?

The idea of a single, overarching strategy for the entire company is misleading. In reality, strategy exists on multiple levels, either explicitly (through objectives, roadmaps, initiatives, plans, or projects) or implicitly:

Shareholder strategy (what they want from the company): Board
Company-level strategy (highest organizational level): Board with Product Management
Business area strategy: Product Management
Product strategy: Product Management and Product Owner
Customer strategy: Customer (Key) Account Manager
Personnel strategy: People (Overview and Governance)
Team strategy (fulfilling team purpose and goals)
Role strategy (fulfilling individual or shared role responsibilities)

In its simplest form, a strategy might consist of a wiki page pointing to a goal or issue and a few bullet points outlining how to address it.