What are some tried and true strategies to drive alignment cross-functionally for a remote team?

Reality these days is that we mostly work in remote settings, and even when we do go to the office, some people will be dialing in. As a result, I believe 80% of the strategies have to do with focusing on the fact that we are all people, 20% are tactics and adjustments for remote settings.

General alignment strategies:

• Build trust ahead of time. This is fundamental and driving collaboration without it is hard
• Focus on common goals. There’s typically a higher goal that teams can easily align on (e.g. Revenue, Engagement, Better experience), and the differences show up as you start double clicking into the “how”. Starting the discussion with a longer term view can also help in skipping tactical disagreements and alignments
• Frame, rather than take a position. With common goals in mind, center the discussion on what the characteristics of a good solution are, rather than starting with comparing options. This helps setting a more objective ground before jumping into the solutions
• Call out your biases (easier to do when you have trust). In an environment where there is trust, I expect my teams to be able to call out other considerations that may cause them to pull in a certain direction, those can be different stakeholders that push in other directions, past experience and others. Some of those reasons may be valid, some may not be valid. Calling them out can help the entire team work through them.

A few remote specific tactics:

• Set the right structure, if possible. This includes minimizing the number of time zones each team has to work across (In my organization we are trying to limit ourselves to 2 time zones per team, when possible). If you can, hire senior enough people in the right locations to be able to run autonomously.
• Invest in getting to a clear strategic direction. Having an upfront debate on the direction is time consuming, but can then help in setting the guardrails for autonomous decisions that can happen within the teams, locally.
• If you do have the opportunity to meet in person, do so. Especially when working across time zones with little overlap, a good relationship would allow you to accomplish more offline, and can dedicate the overlapping time for working more effectively through the tougher topics. While I still mostly work from home I prioritize going to the office when team members from other offices are coming to town (and I am writing this note from the airport, while waiting for a flight - going to visit my team in Austin!)

I've tried to drive a writing culture in every team I've been on—with varying degrees of success. I don't think there's a more effective way to drive alignment, especially for remote teams.

I'm a big fan of providing pre-reads for meetings, so that everyone comes in to the meeting with the same context. Meetings are slow when each person involved is figuring out what the meeting is truly about at a different pace. Anchoring around a written document helps keep everyone focued.

Writing tends to spur more discussion, too. If a detail is left out in a verbal discussion, it can seem like an oversight. If it's left out of a written doc, people take notice.

Admittedly, this is diffcult to practice consistently. It requires more up-front time, and it forces you to commit to an expression of an idea because it's right there on the page. I still don't do it as often as I should, and I've seen firsthand how valuable it can be. 

First, get good at written communications -- both as a writer and a reader. One of the most impactful lessons that I took away from the Amazon Working Backwards book by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar is how much they focus on crafting and refining written narratives like the six-pager or the PR/FAQ. Not only is the information density per hour higher for someone who is reading it (i.e., you can convey more information in a shorter period of time using the written word), but it also ensures that poor reasoning can't hide behind flashy PowerPoint. Written communications also level the playing field to ensure that ideas are what is being debated, not how good of a presenter a person is.

Second, have a good object hierarchy for how you will plan, track, and report on work in flight. Having an agreed-upon meaning for "initiative", for example, and criteria that must be satisfied before engineering (not discovery) work commences is critical for ensuring stakeholders are read in. Once you are in operational/execution mode on initiatives, have a set cadence (we call it "rhythm of the business") at which your management team will walk the work in-flight and discuss any issues is a key synchronous meeting to surface and address obstacles head-on.

Third, and this relates to the first item -- regularly publish and evangelize the product vision and strategy and how the department or company's current work connects to it. This should be a low lift if you've already written it down (see item 1) but admittedly, some people will not want to read lengthy OKR or business plan documents. Use synchronous time to unleash the passion you have for your area and get the team excited about what they're doing.

Team alignment is critical to maximizing impact within the organization, but there are so many barriers to alignment, even with in-person environments. These can often be compounded by remote teams, company culture, communication channels, ceremonies, transparency or absence of, psychological safety, and more.

To address alignment I first work to determine where the misalignment is: 

• Vision (what the future looks like)
• Strategy (approach to achieving the vision)
• Tactic (specific actions to deliver on the strategy)
• Process (steps, sequencing, prioritization, too much, not enough, etc)
• Stakeholder Engagement (DACI/RACI or other frameworks)
• Execution (approach, team size, timing, etc)
• Completion (what it looks like, when we are there, how we know we are there)
• Rollout (slow roll, full blast, or anything in between)
• Go to market (channel, content, who is responsible, etc)
• + More

Once I understand where the disconnect is, I start working to close the alignment gap at that level with one or many of the following tactics, which you can deploy depending on your team’s constraints:

• Communication & Over Communication: Many times people hear a small part of a vision or strategy or even tactic and tell themselves a story about it that may or may not be true. One quick way to resolve some of these misunderstandings is to set up a session with the team you are trying to align to walk them through the details of the vision, strategy, or tactic, and give the team a peek behind the scenes so to speak for how you got there. Ask for feedback and either address it or incorporate it into your work. These tactics will help resolve alignment issues due to misunderstandings.

• Use Data to Support Your Alignment Efforts - There have been very few and far between scenarios where disagreements happened and data didn’t help resolve some or all of the tension around a particular topic. To the extent that the supporting data exists, feel free to deploy it in the name of alignment and shared understanding.

• Brainstorming & Alignment Sessions - for tricky situations, bring the team together, have them brainstorm potential solutions together, bucket, and prioritize them. When team members co-create the output, their feedback and point of view are incorporated and therefore there is less to be misaligned with.

• Build Empathy - One of the most powerful mind-changing tools out there has been building empathy. Approximating the experience of a customer, team member, project leader, etc. would open eyes, minds, and hearts. Many times, things look easy, or unimportant from the outside, until you try to do them. That’s when perspective comes, then understanding, and finally alignment.

There are many I'm sure I’m missing, but these are the highlights I’d focus on.

GitLab is a fully remote company, we don't have any offices and have team members spread out throughout the world. The projects that my team work on are highly cross-functional. Here is what I've found to help with cross-functional alignment.

1. Regular 1-1 check-ins with key stakeholders from other functions. I have monthly 1-1 (one to one) check-ins with key leaders from other functions that I often collaborate with. In our case as a Fulfillment team, that includes leaders between IT, Billing, Revenue, etc. These are Zoom calls, with a shared Google Doc where we take notes to ensure that we can reference our discussions for continuity.

2. Establish channels for asynchronous discussion for prioritization. As my team puts together the quarterly plan, I make sure to give updates to the leaders in other functions. I do this in Slack, using a public channel where all the leads collaborate on topics that impact our functions. I tag the leaders in updates that are relevant to them, and let them know early if some priorities will change that may impact their areas. Similarly as the quarter goes on and new initiatives come up, we start threads in our public/shared channels discussing the prioritization changes or challenges so that all of those involved, especially those responsible (see #3), can be aware of the rationale of the change and discuss it.

3. Assign clear responsibilities to individuals for cross-functional projects. Every cross-functional project at GitLab has a clear DRI (or Directly Responsible Individual) from each function involved in the project. These DRIs are committed to ensuring that the project will be successful. It is critical to have a DRI from each major function, but only one, so that you have a small group of individuals that are highly plugged into the initiative and can ensure that their functional work will happen. In addition to having functional DRIs, we make sure to have an overall DRI for the initiative. This is the person who will make sure that decisions are made, plans are clear, and each function knows what is expected from them.

Having regular 1-1s check-ins, using asynchronous and public channels for prioritization discussions, and assigning clear DRIs / responsible individuals from each function to projects have truly served us well in the many cross-functional, remote projects that I've been involved in so far. I hope this helps you too.