Combat strategic complexity by creating a one-page plan. This document connects your highest-level vision and values to tactical quarterly goals in a clear cascade (Vision -> Strategy/KPIs -> Annual Goals -> Quarterly Goals). This simple, accessible artifact ensures universal alignment and clarity on how individual work ladders up.

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.

In a multi-product company, horizontal teams naturally prioritize mature, high-impact businesses. Structuring teams vertically with P&L ownership for each product, even nascent ones, ensures dedicated focus and accountability, preventing smaller initiatives from being starved of resources.

To solve misalignment, the company cascaded OKRs from the CEO down. Critically, regional leaders were made 'champions' of key pillars like user acquisition. This gave them ownership and a direct voice in shaping product solutions, turning potentially adversarial relationships into collaborative partnerships.

To scale effectively, resist complexity by using the 'Scaling Credo' framework. It mandates radical focus: pick one target market, one product, one customer acquisition channel, and one conversion tool. Stick to this combination for one full year before adding anything new.

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.

Contrary to the popular bottoms-up startup ethos, a top-down approach is crucial for speed in a large organization. It prevents fragmentation that arises from hundreds of teams pursuing separate initiatives, aligning everyone towards unified missions for faster, more coherent progress.

True organizational buy-in isn't just a C-level activity. It's a "layer cake" where leaders at each level—from the CMO to ICs—have tailored conversations with their cross-functional partners to ensure shared understanding and commitment to the plan.

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.