How do you stay aligned while agile?

Trusting the team and tracking key results and progress versus tracking what people are working on. Tracking what they are working on ends up being micromanagement. Things can change fast, especially if you're in a startup. 

Stay agile, get disciplined about the key results you feel support the objective, and have your team share their progress on those. Be sure to assign ownership to those objectives. The classic V2MOM that Sales force defined had the O has Obstacles. Our CMO modified that to Ownership. If someone doesn't own a method no one owns it. Ownership drives a culture of results, and motivates the owner. 

This approach allows for agility and alignment because the owners can report on the progress they are making on their initiatives.

I stay aligned with my leadership by building in public. I share our on-going updates on Slack to ensure teams know what's on our plate, along with performance stats and learnigns. I also utilize all hands and MBRs to share what's working, what's not, and plans for executing against goals. Agility comes from staying centered on the north stars. As long as I'm working on the business priorities, I'm able to take on tasks that help us perform against goals (or remove what isn't) to stay focused, aligned, and agile.

It's important to make a plan but plans should change when presented with new information. 

PMMs on my team are aligned to sprint teams within our organization so that we have a small team of PMM, PM, Engineering, Design, and Data. They have their own rituals and practices that allow them to discuss tradeoffs, reprioritize, and plan their roadmaps. How do they stay agile?

• They typically have goals/KPIs that they're aiming to hit together as a team. They look at this data regularly and assess if they need to shift priorities.
• They bring new insights to the table - whether it's customer feedback, Sales challenges, or tech challenges that can also help them change the course of the roadmap. 

Be transparent with your team. I share notes from almost every meeting I'm in throughout the day. I've never gotten feedback about oversharing so my disposition is to take the team along as we make changes. No surprises. My experience is people are always open to roll with changes if they understand when and why they are happening.

I think the key here is understanding what alignment actually is (in any given situation.) Often I've seen different orgs have their own set up of KPI's or business metrics that may/may not align to other orgs or even the company as a whole! So one org might be doing really well relative to THEIR set of business goals but overall it's in contrast to the rest of the business...which obviously isn't great. Most of the reason for this happening is poor communication and (early) alignment activities. I've always like to insert myself (or team) into cross functional planning meetings, especially yearly planning meetings! These groups might be marketing, sales, strategy groups, sales engineering, product and so on. The more you can be part of the early planning meetings the more likely it is that you'll have alignment on 'a plan' and from there it's a case of setting up a cadence of 'check ins' to ensure you're on track! I don't think agility should be hampered by the need to check in with teams on alignment and to ensure you are course correcting as needed. Again, ensure you're starting from the right place of alignment and then make sure you're doing quick check ins on progress and you should be able to move at a pace!