Case study
Refreshed rhythm of business
A 400-person organization needed clear direction to stay focused and accountable for its goals
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A little bit of background
This organization had grown rapidly from a small team to a large, cross-functional matrix that supported 250+ product lines. The informal systems that worked when the team was small simply couldn’t scale, and more growth was on the horizon.
When I joined the org, it didn’t have a dedicated function for business operations. I launched this function and started with the basics: establishing a rhythm of business that would rally everyone around a shared set of goals and hold them accountable for results.
the challenge
90 priorities, zero focus
When everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority
The organization wanted to grow to the next level but was going in 400 different directions to get there. The diffuse focus — 90 priority goals — made it challenging for a new leadership team to diagnose challenges and understand progress. Business reviews and planning processes were hit-and-miss because teams didn’t feel connected to each other and weren’t used to thinking of themselves as a cohesive organization. A lot of activity was happening, but without much structure.
the action
Back to basics. Deliberately.
The playbook was fine. The problem was no one was running it.
I snapped the organization to the company’s well-established cycle for strategic planning, annual goal-setting, and cadenced business reviews. Everyone was familiar with the cycle but were skeptical of the formal structure. Here’s how I overcame it:
- Change Management: I made the cycle lightweight to encourage adoption while still getting the benefits of rigor and inspection.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: I gathered inputs from senior managers across product, front-line, analytics, and engineering teams, and distilled a shared vision.
- Own the Pen: I wrote the necessary business documents, socialized them, and codified them into strategic initiatives.
- Conflict Resolution: I eliminated persistent ownership conflicts by designing a collaboration framework that clarified roles, rewarded partnership, and made working together easier than working around each other.
- Run the Rhythm: I led by example, establishing a framework that sub-teams could use at their level to feed the main cycle.
the result
Rowing in the same direction
Fewer priorities. Faster delivery. Cleaner data.
- Improved on-time goal completion by 40% by launching a formal system of portfolio tracking, cadenced reviews, and data-driven reporting.
- Honed the organization’s focus from 90+ priority goals to 20 — giving the leadership team a clear picture of what actually mattered.
- Uncovered a significant technical debt problem by auditing planned resource allocation against actuals, turning a hidden risk into an active conversation.
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Tools & tech
Nothing flashy. Proprietary company tools for goal-tracking, plus Microsoft Office. The collaboration framework was codified in an internal wiki so teams could reference and run it themselves.
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Where I broke the rules
I didn’t. This was a case where the team’s habit of ignoring the rules was exactly what was holding it back. My job was to make the conventional approach feel worth following, and to make it easy enough that people actually would.
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What I’d do with AI now
The hardest part of any review cadence is getting the right inputs from project owners. Today I’d build an agentic workflow to reduce that friction: structured prompts that collect inputs in a consistent format and compile them into the report template automatically.
From chaos to clarity
Before
After
No submission criteria for goal proposals. Teams spent weeks creating detailed documents that often described solutions in search of a problem.
Lightweight formula, no more than a few hours of work: Two to three sentences each to describe the problem, the solution, and success criteria.
Dozens of goals submitted and “prioritized” but almost nothing cut. Teams picked and choosed what to work on, based on their preference.
Each team surfaced only their top 5 goals. Everything else tracked informally. Formal goals were resourced before others.
Status updates were intermittent and often uninformative. Dates slipped with no accountability.
Structured formula for updates, focusing on key decisions and business impact. Date changes required documented rationale.
Monthly reviews were compiled in crowdsource fashion, resulting in lengthy activity lists that buried or skipped priority updates.
Team leaders vetted inputs for relevancy and submitted to a single report owner who enforced focus on business impact and edited out everything else.
Goals proposed without involving the teams who’d execute them.
Cross-team input required before a goal could be proposed.
Team members reported having no visibility into goal progress or other priorities.
Monthly review posted to all-team Slack after every session.