From Backlog to Impact: Learn to Align Your Digital Product with Business Objectives

An Everyday Example

Imagine your team receives this request from a stakeholder: “We need to include rewards for the app users”. The team gets to work, but something doesn't quite fit. Is this really the solution to the business problem? What impact do we expect to generate with this feature?

🔑 Keys for a Strategic Approach:

1. Responsibility is Shared: The product team and stakeholders and involved parties (anyone involved in the product, those making requests...) must actively collaborate to align priorities and strategic decisions.
2. A Strategic Organizational Culture: It is necessary to foster strategic conversations constantly and fluidly.
3. Comprehensive Vision: It's not just about executing tasks, but about discussing, aligning, and building from a strategic perspective.

In the daily work of product teams, it's not uncommon to face specific requests that seem like ready-to-implement solutions. However, what happens when these requests are not aligned with a clear strategy or business objectives? This article addresses how to move from executing the urgent to building the important. We will explore the barriers that hinder this change, the key elements to cultivate a strategic approach, and a practical example that demonstrates how to generate impact from the product. Additionally, we will reflect on how to turn these practices into an organizational habit.

Data underscores the importance of cultivating an organizational culture where strategy is not the exception, but the norm.

In the dynamic world of digital product development, lack of strategic alignment can have significant consequences. A recent study reveals that approximately 97% of employees believe that misalignment within a team negatively affects the outcomes of tasks or projects.

Source Adaptavist, "Rhythm and Progress: How Development Teams Can Stay Aligned,” retrieved January 21, 2025.

Additionally, it is estimated that 67% of companies fail to execute their strategic plan, often due to a lack of internal alignment where employees are unclear about their roles or do not understand the purpose of their tasks.

Source Strategic Platform, “How to Know if Your Company Has Proper Strategic Alignment,” retrieved January 21, 2025.

Initiating Strategic Conversations: The Most Common Barriers

Identifying the barriers that prevent connecting the tactical with the strategic is the first step to unlocking a team's potential. Some of the most common are:

1. Lack of Clarity in the Key Question: Teams focus on “what to do?” instead of asking “what impact do we want to achieve?”.
2. Lack of Tools and Common Language: Product teams do not always have the necessary resources to address strategic issues, and stakeholders often struggle to translate their needs into actionable terms.
3. Lack of Time to Reflect: In environments where urgent delivery prevails, quick execution is often prioritized over strategic reflection.
4. Disconnection Between Vision and Execution: Without recurring strategic conversations, solutions may be insufficient or fail to address the real problem.

How to Open the Strategic Conversation?

To foster these conversations, three key elements are necessary:

1. Autonomy to Pause and Question:
   Teams need to feel supported to request a strategic pause. This requires a trusting environment where they can question requests and decisions constructively.
   Example: During the planning of the new requested feature, the team identifies that the tasks are based on the assumption that the user wants rewards, without a clear analysis of the business problem. So they ask the stakeholder to provide more information.
2. Responsive Stakeholders:
   The openness and willingness of stakeholders to listen and actively collaborate is essential. Being responsive means not only being available but also responding with agility and clarity.
   Example: Instead of insisting on immediate implementation, the stakeholder listens to the team's concerns and organizes a meeting to share context and discuss the identified problem.
3. Tools to Guide the Dialogue:
   Having tools that structure the dialogue helps tactical and strategic roles find a common language.
   Example: The team decides to organize the session using the Lean Strategy Canvas. Instead of focusing only on “adding rewards,” they talk about strategic objectives, obstacles, and key metrics. Instead of discussing what to do, they address the why and for what.

(The Lean Strategy Canvas is a tool that aligns teams with strategy and key objectives before going into product development details. I'll give you a link shortly, but I'm interested in you continuing to read. 😜 )

At this point, everyone involved in the product has a clear and shared strategic vision of the context and objectives behind the initial request, which will allow for aligned decisions focused on real impact. This approach avoids wasting resources on solutions that do not solve the underlying problem; it saves time and effort by prioritizing actions that are truly valuable for the business.

From Analysis to Impact: The Role of the Product Team

The next step is to transform that strategy into concrete actions, aligned with a clear framework and designed to generate real impact. To do this, it is essential to provide the team with a favorable context that drives their success. In this phase of the process, continuing to equip the team with effective tools is key to ensuring results aligned with strategic objectives. One of the best resources that help achieve this is the Lean Product Canvas, by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.

(In the article 📝 "The Lean Product Canvas" you can download the latest version and discover what led them to create the Lean Strategy Canvas. If you're more into videos 📹, then I recommend watching "The Lean Strategy & Lean Product Canvases".)

Practical Example:

The team decides to use the Lean Product Canvas to move from strategic vision to impact. The first thing they do is define the Business Problem Statement: “Our app was designed to encourage repeat purchases, but currently less than 20% of active users interact with it more than once a month. This low level of interaction has contributed to a decrease of X% in purchase recurrence and a deviation of Y% from projected revenue for the last quarter. We need to identify and implement adjustments in our strategy to increase the monthly usage frequency to at least 30% of active users within the next 6 months, which would contribute to improving recurrence and revenue.”.

With this business problem in mind, the team identifies the behavior change they need to generate in users: increasing the frequency with which they access the app. Thanks to this clarity, they can get to work and step by step advance through the canvas towards decision-making:

👨🏻‍🦱 Key User Types Identified:

• Frequent buyers.
• New users who do not return.

😍 Most Important Aspects for These Users:

• Saving time on purchases.
• Receiving personalized recommendations.
• Gaining trust in the app.

💡 Proposed Solutions:

1. Personalized notifications.
2. Improving navigation to facilitate quick purchases.
3. Offering exclusive deals available only through the app.

❓ Key Questions to Resolve:

• Do users respond to personalized notifications?
• What technical or experience barriers hinder the recurring use of the app?

🛠️ Work Plan:

• Immediate improvements in app usability: Actions implementable without additional validations.
• Continuous learning: Prototype personalized notifications and obtain direct feedback from both the prototype and the current app.
• Measure and respond: Use both the prototype and the current app to gather insights and refine solutions based on the results obtained.

As we can see, the team concluded that simply adding a rewards feature would not be the most suitable solution to achieve the desired impact. After a more strategic analysis, they identified a refined version of that idea: offering exclusive deals available only from the app. This solution is not only aligned with the goal of increasing usage frequency but also better responds to user needs and allows for clear measurement of its effectiveness.

And the Urgency of Day-to-Day?

Change cannot depend on a few people; to be effective, it must be driven by the entire organization. Fostering a culture oriented towards strategic impact does not mean ignoring urgencies, but integrating them within a framework that allows for agile and purposeful progress. When this mindset spreads transversally, strategic conversations cease to be the exception and become part of the organizational DNA, accelerating the path to more effective solutions.

Building a Strategic Culture: The Next Step

Change occurs when strategy becomes a habit and not the exception. This requires collective commitment, appropriate tools, and an environment that fosters dialogue. When teams and stakeholders are aligned under a shared vision, organizations stop delivering isolated features and start building products that generate real impact, aligned with strategic objectives and focused on users.

Is your team really building products that generate strategic impact, or just fulfilling day-to-day requests?

Training for Your Team

At Runroom, we help organizations like yours bridge the gap between tactics and strategy. Through certified training in Lean Product Discovery, we empower teams to think and act strategically from day one.

Learn more: Request a personalized training for your company.