Case study
Alignment at enterprise scale
How I built a first-of-its-kind governance program to defragment an organization’s thought leadership
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A little bit of background
This is a story about what happens when growth happens faster than operations can catch up, and what it takes to build alignment from scratch across thousands of stakeholders.
This program ran for two years. I was a one-person army initially, but quickly had justification for a team of six. Year 2 was when the global pandemic hit, and the business faced a surge in demand from customers who suddenly needed guidance on how to operate remotely. Here’s how I’d do it today with a boost from AI.
the challenge
High volume, low alignment
The organization faced a Quantity vs. Quality paradox
An annual goal incentivized 8,000+ field experts to create thought leadership content, but a lack of centralized strategy led to:
- Quality Bottlenecks: Channel managers were overwhelmed by low-quality submissions, leading to friction with contributors and delays in delivery.
- Operational Waste: High-interest (aka, “fun”) domains were flooded, while critical strategic gaps were ignored.
- Strategic Disconnect: Leadership wasn’t getting the go-to-market assets they needed to support global priorities.
the action
Building the execution engine
Balancing top-down strategy with bottom-up innovation
I led a team of Program Managers to implement an end-to-end governance system, applying the same model to each of the organization’s business domains:
- Orchestrating Alignment: I personally conducted gap analyses for the first 9 priority domains and established the initial Cross-functional Steering Committees that prioritized gaps to fill. I scaled this model to 27 verticals in Year 1 and 40+ in Year 2.
- Balancing Strategy with Innovation: Contributors valued their autonomy, so I integrated a side process for proposing ideas while maintaining guardrails through a prioritization team. To resolve technical disputes, I ensured every prioritization team included a leader with the authority to define the recommended solution.
- Resolving Systemic Friction: When a disconnect emerged between contributors and channel managers, I established a formal escalation pathway, turning a major pain point into a collaborative workflow.
the result
From fragmented to focused
Success!
- Direct Goal Achievement: Delivered on VP-level goals by publishing 3,100 high-priority assets over two years (1,000 in Year 1; 2,100 in Year 2).
- Operational Efficiency: Reduced delivery turnaround time by 50% (from 6 months to 3 months), significantly increasing contributor satisfaction.
- Strategic Coverage: Scaled governance from 9 pilot domains to 40+ global domains.
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Tools & tech
Pretty basic: Microsoft Office for presentations and reporting; and a proprietary Asana-like tool to track in-flight projects. The “shopping lists” (see workflow) were managed in a wiki. I did, however, need to quickly get familiar with technical themes in the 18 domains I was supporting.
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Where I broke the rules
Conventional wisdom is to shop around an implementation plan before herding the cats. I took a hands-on approach to execute from day one and establish a formal scale-out plan later on. This was critical in demonstrating the system worked, as many stakeholders were skeptical of governance.
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What I’d do with AI now
This would have been a game changer, but not for content creation. Rather, one of the biggest sticking points was the highly manual tracking system (see Tools & Tech). I didn’t have the benefit of a tech team to automate at the time, but today I could build it with agents myself.
The governance workflow
The key groups in this workflow were: the Strategy team (my team), the Field (comprising teams around the globe), the Steering Committees (key cross-functional leaders), the Prioritization Teams (subject matter experts in their domain), and Channel Managers (owners of blogs, microsites, etc.). My team of Program Managers set up and ran this framework in each of 40+ business verticals.
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