To ensure alignment, Matt Spielman's coaching process starts with senior leadership. When managing partners define and share their "game plans," their goals become the organization's goals. This creates a natural cascading effect, as direct reports align their own objectives to support the firm's primary mission.

When a product team is busy but their impact is minimal or hard to quantify, the root cause is often not poor execution but a lack of clarity in the overarching company strategy. Fixing the high-level strategy provides the focus necessary for product work to create meaningful value.

Most business struggles stem from a misaligned or forgotten North Star Metric (NSM). A successful framework aligns the entire company by ensuring all OKRs ladder up to a single, durable NSM, with KPIs serving as health checks for those OKRs. This creates a clear hierarchy for decision-making and resource allocation, preventing strategic drift.

Go beyond visual roadmaps. Create a monthly written document for executives that explains *why* the roadmap changed, details priorities, and includes data from recent launches. This forces intentionality, builds trust, and fosters deeper, more accountable conversations with leadership.

This framework provides a structured approach to planning by answering five questions: What's our aspiration? Where will we play (ICP)? How will we win (pillars)? What capabilities do we need? And what management systems (budget, headcount) are required?

Pursuing huge, multi-year goals creates a constant anxiety of not doing "enough." To combat this, break the grand vision into smaller, concrete milestones (e.g., "what does a win look like in 12 months?"). This makes progress measurable and shifts the guiding question from the paralyzing "Am I doing enough?" to the strategic "Is my work aligned with the long-term goal?"

The most valuable professionals are neither pure visionaries nor pure executioners; they are "step builders." This means they can understand a high-level strategic vision and then map out the granular, sequential steps required to achieve it. This skill is critical for turning ambitious goals into reality.

To prevent rigid plans that break, maintain consistency in your high-level strategic pillars for the year. However, build in flexibility by allowing the specific tactics used to achieve those pillars to change quarterly based on performance and new learnings.

Instead of relying on documents and KPIs, which can be misinterpreted, Shopify's design team creates tangible, visual 'North Stars.' This allows stakeholders across the company to have a concrete and rich debate about future direction, transforming design into a strategic alignment tool.