The Strategy Space

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The Cost of Misalignment

Aligning everyone from the C-suite down to individual product managers on the strategy is one of the most important things you can do as a product leader.

But it’s hard.

And since it’s so hard, you’ve probably experience some of these symptoms that create friction in all stages of the product development process:

• Disconnected Feature Roadmaps: Your product backlog feels like a grab bag of “cool ideas” rather than a coherent path to solve a user’s pressing problem or drive measurable business outcomes. Executive teams wonders why product is spending time on minor improvements instead of their big growth or retention initiatives. PMs get demoralized because no one seems sure what the real priorities are.

• Perpetual Fire Drills: Feature requests come in at the last minute to “close a big deal”, or an executive demands a “must-have” feature with no warning. The product team experiences whiplash, deadlines slip, and squads become reactive rather than proactive.

• Conflicting Metrics and Goals: Marketing is aiming to double the number of free-trial signups, but the product team is focusing on existing-user engagement. Meanwhile, the CFO is pushing for cost efficiency. Everyone’s using different metrics to gauge success. You have multiple priorities that rarely align. You can cut the tension in cross-functional meetings with a knife.

• Repeated Stakeholder “Roadmap Anxiety”: C-level folks and the board keep asking, “But how does this feature help us hit revenue goals? How do we know if we’re on track for next quarter?” because they can’t see a clear, coherent connection between product work and business impact. Product managers have to justify the roadmap again and again in each stakeholder meeting. Leadership starts to doubt whether the product org truly “gets it.”

• Rising Churn or No Growth: You’re shipping new features, but adoption is low. Churn is creeping up. New customer counts are down. Revenue growth has stalled. Board members question your direction. The product org feels blindsided because they never had clarity on the how the business is doing and what levers they have to drive growth in the first place.

In contrast, strong alignment between the leadership team and individual contributors creates a virtuous cycle. Everyone sees the full picture, measures progress consistently, and have productive data-informed discussions.

Everything just feels easier.

But how do you get there?

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What You Need To Create Alignment

After working with hundreds of product teams, we can say with certainty that product teams crave alignment, but at the same time, struggle to find and maintain it.

These are the patterns and ideas that we see working - they form the foundation of how Vistaly is evolving to support product teams as they build and maintain alignment and momentum.

The rest of this guide will walk you through the steps required to get the most out of Vistaly when building and maintaining alignment across teams.

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1. A Vision For A Better Future

At their core, vision and mission statements articulate how your product or company will make a difference for customers and the world. It paints a vivid picture of a future state where your users are better off because of your product. This long-term outlook is inspiring, emotional, and persuasive – meant to rally people around a common purpose.

In essence, a good vision/mission captures the why behind your work: the ultimate purpose and impact you aspire to achieve beyond day-to-day features or quarterly targets.

Here are some common pitfalls to avoid when crafting your vision/mission statement:

• Buzzwords and Jargon - A classic mistake is crafting a vision so broad or jargon-filled that it says nothing meaningful. Statements like “be the leading provider of innovative solutions” could mean a million different things to a million different people. Use plain language that anyone – from a new hire to your customers – could understand. It should contain enough specificity to inform decisions.
• Not Customer-Centric - Your vision shouldn’t be about your revenue goals, market share, or feature set​. It should flip the perspective to the customer’s benefit (e.g. “simplify group travel” rather than “grow our platform”).
• Overly Focused On Today - Another pitfall is a mission that describes what you do today, rather than the impact you aim for tomorrow. Great visions have a “time machine” quality, transporting people 5–10 years ahead. It should feel closer to science-fiction than a business plan.
• Not Inspiring - Missions that are dry or purely intellectual often fail to stick. Emotion and boldness are not just nice-to-haves – they are essential. So to make your vision aspirational enough to be a bit scary – if no one rolls their eyes at how ambitious it sounds, maybe it’s not ambitious enough.

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Example

Acme Health

We will create a world where everyone has access to personalized healthcare that prevents illness before it occurs. We will revolutionize healthcare delivery through AI-powered predictive action that enables proactive, personalized care for all.

In this example:

• The organization exists to provide personalized healthcare that knows you and is able to prevent illness before it occurs. This is the foundational purpose of this company, and it positions itself against the status quo.
• They take a stance on how they will achieve this vision through AI-powered predictive action. This acts as the guiding policy.

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How To Do This In Vistaly

Create a Vision or Mission card to represent the enduring organizational direction. They are the stable, overarching purpose that guides all work.

Popular Terms:

• Vision (Default in Vistaly)
• Mission Statement
• Strategic Pillar

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2. A Value Exchange Model

Most product managers have an intuitive—but often fuzzy—sense that if their team delivers value to customers, the business will benefit. But without a clear model, it’s easy to over-index on features, usage, or short-term metrics without understanding how those actually ladder up to outcomes like revenue, retention, or expansion.

A Value Exchange Model helps clarify these assumptions by explicitly mapping how your product creates value for users, how that value is realized through usage, and how that usage ultimately drives business performance. It turns gut feeling into a shared, visual framework that connects day-to-day work to strategic outcomes.

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Start With An Assessment Of How The Business Is Currently Doing

The reality is that your business must reach or maintain certain financial milestones to keep operating. If you’re failing to meet those milestones, it’s a sign that the problem you’re solving isn’t painful enough, not enough people experience that pain, or your product isn’t materially better than their alternative options for solving it.

A good product strategy confronts these realities head-on.

How are lagging business metrics (like revenue, retention, or profit) trending? These lagging metrics don’t change overnight, but they show your baseline reality, and that reality is the important context that will shape your near-term strategy.

If your product strategy doesn’t explicitly connect to business performance, it’s easy to see how the work product teams prioritize becomes disconnected from what matters.

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Modeling Business Metrics With A KPI Tree

The best way to communicate how the business is currently doing is with a KPI tree. Organizing metrics into a KPI tree reveals the hierarchical structure, and how one metric is influenced by others.

For example, a top-level “Annual Recurring Revenue” KPI might be broken down into:

• Newly Acquired ARR
• Net Retained ARR

Each of these “second-tier” metrics can then be further broken down to provide even more granular detail into how they all roll up to the top-level business metric.

Creating a KPI tree is simple in theory, but it’s an inherently open-ended excerise. You may have to try a few iterations before landing on the model that serves you best.

The best way to do it is to start with your company’s top-level business metric and work your way down.

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How To Do This In Vistaly

Use the KPI card type to track business or product metrics that remain relevant over extended periods of time (they are persistent).

Popular terms used to communicate this concept:

• Key Performance Indicator – KPI (Vistaly Default)
• Business Metric
• Health Metric

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Examples

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)*

• Description: Total value of recurring revenue normalized to an annual amount
• Formula: Monthly Recurring Revenue × 12
• Source: Hubspot

Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate*

• Description: The percent of trials that purchase a subscription at the end of their trial
• Formula: New Paid Subscriptions / Trials Started
• Source: Ampltitude

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Layer In The Drivers Of Business Metrics

Once you have your business metrics modeled in a KPI tree, the natural next question is “how do we actually drive these metrics?”

To understand this, we need to switch perspectives from what the business cares about (inside-out thinking) to what your customers care about (outside-in thinking).

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Inside-out vs Outside-in Thinking

I hate to break it to you, but no one wakes up in the morning and thinks “I really want to buy some enterprise software today.”

They just don’t.

People buy things to solve problems or meet needs. The thing they’re buying might just be one step in a long chain of steps that gets them to their ultimate goal. But fundamentally, they want to get something done, and they want to do it in the easiest way possible.

In other words, the business metrics you care about aren’t just numbers in isolation—they’re effectively a measure of whether your product is truly solving a painful problem for your customers.

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Product Metrics As Proxies For Value

Measuring customer value directly is challenging for a few reasons:

• Complex Journeys & Multiple Steps: Your user’s success in reaching their end goal (like increase sales, improve productivity) might depend on multiple tools, business processes, or broader market conditions. You can’t isolate your product’s contribution in a clean vacuum.
• Data Access: Capturing “true ROI” may require data from the user’s internal systems (billing, analytics, etc.), which they’re unlikely to share with you.
• Lag Time: The best indicators of success (e.g., annual cost savings or increased sales) might only become clear months or even years down the road—too slow for modern product teams searching for quicker feedback loops.

Instead, we use proxy metrics that approximate whether the product is delivering value. For example, you might:

• Measure the time it takes to complete a specific task
• Ask users to rate how easy it was to complete a task
• Track how often users return to the product after their first use

To extend the “chain reaction” metaphor, using the product comes even before experiencing the value. How could they possibly be getting the value if they’re not even using the product?

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Proxy Metrics Don’t Have A 1-to-1 Relationship With Business Metrics

There is a difference in how two business metrics relate to one another and how business metrics and product metrics relate to one another.

The “business metrics” portion of your KPI tree will have more of an “algebraic” relationship. You can usually add, multiply, or divide the child KPIs get the value of the parent.

New Customers x New Customer ACV = New ARR

But relationship between product metrics and business metrics in your KPI tree is more “correlative”. The product metrics are influencing the business metric, but they aren’t the same thing.

For example, doubling the rate at which new trials complete onboarding will likely improve conversion rate, but it’s unlikely to exactly double it (correlation vs causation).

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Strategies For Picking The Best Proxy Metrics

The best strategy for identifying the right proxy metrics will depend on the level of data sophistication in place - but each strategy contains similar threads.

It comes down to understanding your users, empathizing with their reality (putting yourself in their shoes), and understanding what motivates them in their journey from before they interact with your product, until after they reach their goal.

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Low Data Sophistication - Describe In Words A Seamless User Journey

If you are pre-product, or if your team hasn’t invested in proper instrumentation, you can still use qualitative directional descriptions of the key steps that need to be taken in order for a user to realize the value of your product.

To use Vistaly as an example, this would be things like:

• On the onboarding side:
  • Users are able to easily map their strategy space
  • Users invite their team to collaborate
  • Users import product feedback and customer interviews to understand the problem space
• On the retention side:
  • Customers use Vistaly to communicate product decisions with their team
  • Customers use Vistaly to consolidate product feedback from sales/support/success teams
  • Customer use Vistaly to communicate with leadership about how they’re progressing on their goals/OKRs

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Medium Data Sophistication - Product Metrics That Line Up With The User Journey

Having a baseline ideal user journey is a great start, but the team might have differing opinions on how accurate each step in the journey translates to user value when there is no way to measure them.

The next step is to identify actions that are measurable in-product. This will help to quantify how true accurate each of those steps are when it comes to capturing user value.

To continue the Vistaly example, this could look like:

• On the onboarding side:
  • Users are able to easily map their strategy space
    • Metric: percent of new signups that create 30+ cards
  • Users invite their team to collaborate
    • Metric: percent of accounts with 3+ team members
  • Users import product feedback and customer interviews to understand the problem space
    • Metric: percent of new signups that import 20+ feedback
    • Metric: percent of new signups that add 5+ interviews in the first 7 days
• On the retention side:
  • Customers use Vistaly to communicate product decisions with their team
    • Metric: monthly unique Roadmap viewers per paid customer
  • Customers use Vistaly to consolidate product feedback from sales/support/success teams
    • Metric: percent of paid customers that have feedback created by 5+ users
  • Customer use Vistaly to communicate with leadership about how they’re progressing on their OKRs
    • Metric: percent of paid customers with 3+ Report viewers per month

You’ll likely need to align with your team on the best way to measure each step of the process. Is engaging with “Feature A” the best way to measure if users truly experience the value? “Feature B”? Many both? Do they need to use it 5 times during their trial period? 10? 20?

Until you have the next level of data sophistication, you’ll need to rely on your team’s collective experience and intuition to make these decisions. These are your data assumptions.

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High Data Sophistication - Linear Regression And Correlation Analysis

The holy grail of getting alignment on the best measures of customers easily and repeatedly realizing the value of your product is to use linear regression and correlation analysis.

Correlation measures the strength and direction of a relationship between two variables, yielding a coefficient between -1 and 1. A value close to 1 indicates a strong positive relationship, -1 a strong negative relationship, and 0 no relationship. This analysis helps identify which features or user actions are associated with key outcomes, such as retention or conversion.

Linear regression goes a step further by modeling the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables—e.g. Percent of Trialers That Use Feature A and Trial Conversion Rate—allowing for predictions and understanding of how changes in inputs affect outputs. This method is necessary for going from “everyone’s best guess” about which leading indicators to track, to forecasting exactly how changes to a given factor will impact business metrics.

While correlation is useful for initial exploration to spot potential relationships, regression analysis provides deeper insights into causality and the magnitude of effects.

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How To Do This In Vistaly

Use the KPI card type to track business or product metrics that remain relevant over extended periods of time (they are persistent).

Popular terms used to communicate this concept:

• Key Performance Indicator – KPI (Vistaly Default)
• Business Metric
• Health Metric

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3. Pairing The Value Exchange Model With Near-term Focus

The Value Exchange Model connects business and product metrics and answers the question “How are we performing today?” How far are we on this journey to achieve our Vision?

Your Near-term Focus answers the question “What are the most important areas of this to improve in the next one to two quarters?”

When a clear near-term focus is missing, product teams easily get distracted by the latest shiny object or last-minute requests from sales or executives.

Many teams use “Goals” to measure how well they are performing on their Near-term focus.

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What Makes For A Good Goal

Ideally, the goals you set for teams have three qualities:

• Specific & Measurable - Clearly define exactly what the criteria are for hitting the goal. As Jeff Gothelf puts it, a good goal answers the question “Who, does what, by how much?”
• Time-bound - Work expands to fill the time alotted. So while you don’t have to have a hard cut-off date, a target deadline helps create urgency and focus.
• Never About Shipping Something - Goals to “ship” encourages feature factory thinking. The reality is, you could ship all the new features in the world, but if no one uses them, it doesn’t matter. Instead, focus on the outcomes you want to achieve.

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Don’t overload teams with goals

The point of setting goals is to create alignment and focus. As the saying goes, when everything is a priority, nothing is.

We see this all the time with teams that are starting to adopt OKRs. Product squads will get assigned 5-6 key results and the dilution of focus means no single initiative gets sufficient attention to succeed.

When working on too many goals in parallel, there’s a lot of activity but not much progress. Teams feel busy, but are spending too much time ramping up and down between goals (context switching).

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Working with Unmeasurable Goals

While measurable goals are ideal, you’ll often encounter situations where the metrics you want to track aren’t immediately available. This could be because:

• The necessary data collection isn’t yet instrumented in your systems
• You’re exploring an entirely new product area with no existing measurement framework
• The goal involves qualitative changes that are difficult to quantify
• The real impact might only be visible over a longer timeframe than your planning horizon

In these cases, it’s better to move forward with a directional goal and NOT focus only on what’s easily measurable.

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Starting With Directional Goals

Directional goals describe the change you want to see, even when precise measurement isn’t yet possible. They:

• Create alignment on intent and direction
• Acknowledge measurement challenges transparently
• Include plans for establishing measurement capability

Example:

Make it easier for customers integrate our product with their other tools:

• Initial proxy: Reduction in support tickets related to integrations
• Development of direct measurement: Implement tracking what percent of customers setup 1+ of our integrations
• Long-term goal: Quantify how much time teams save by integrating our product with their other tools

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Moving from Directional to Measurable

Here are some general tips for setting up a directional goal and moving to a measurable one.

1. Define success criteria - What would “better” look like, even if you can’t measure it yet?
2. Identify proxy metrics - What existing data might indicate progress?
3. Create measurement plan - What instrumentation needs to be built?
4. Establish baseline - Once measurement is possible, what’s the starting point?
5. Set targets - With a baseline established, what’s an appropriate goal?

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How To Add a Near-term Strategy In Vistaly

Vistaly supports two card types for communicating a Near-term Strategy. A qualitative card type, and a quantitative card type.

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With Qualitative Cards That Describe The Progress You Want To Make

Qualitatitive near-term goal cards, like an Objective, help bridge the gap between long-term vision and actual execution work by describing in words the focus areas your team is pursuing in the current time period (typically quarterly or bi-annually).

Popular Terms:

• Objective (Default in Vistaly)
• Initiative
• Narrative
• Strategy

If you utilize a goal setting framework like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), the Near-term strategic context in that framework is the Objective component.

Considerations when Crafting

Crafting clear objectives gives teams the necessary context to execute effectively.

• Specific Challenge Diagnosis: Understanding of the specific challenge at hand and a compelling “why” teams can rally around.
• Clear Directional Approach: Establishes boundaries for acceptable solutions and builds on existing organizational strengths.
• Focused Action Areas: Concentrates resources where they’ll have maximum impact

Example

Compare these examples while referencing the considerations above.

Weak Objective

Enhance our customer experience platform to drive growth and satisfaction

Strong Objective

Challenge: Mid-market SaaS customers experience a 32% drop-off during onboarding due to integration complexity, which competitors are exploiting with simpler alternatives.

Approach: Design an onboarding flow with a “15-minute to value” guarantee, simplifying the user interface while leveraging our advanced configuration engine.

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With Quantitative Cards That Measure If You’re Making Progress

Outcome (or “Goal”) cards measure success for specific objectives within a defined timeframe. They have clear start and end dates with target values to achieve.

Popular terms used to communicate this concept:

• Outcome (Vistaly Default)
• Key Result
• Goal
• Rock

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4. A Shared Workspace For That Connects The Dots

A single workspace (one that visually connects your business KPIs and product metrics) is transformative, and supports your teams when solving a few key challenges:

• Clarity for the Board and Execs: Leadership wants to see exactly how you plan to move top-level metrics like ARR, net retention, or gross margin. By presenting a living, visual model (like a KPI Tree), they can quickly see how the connection between the product work you’re doing and the metrics that matter most. They can see that you’re not just delivering outputs at random, but methodically pulling the known product levers that drive business impact.

• Direction for Product Squads: Meanwhile, product teams need tangible guidance on which metrics around user value—things like onboarding success or deeper product usage—will actually push those business KPIs up? By focusing on leading indicators that reflect how easily customers can access the product’s value, squads know where to concentrate their effort and can measure progress more quickly than waiting for quarter-end revenue reports.

• A Shared Language for Alignment: Without a unifying framework, you’ll spend too much time reconciling top-down demands (“We need another $5M in ARR this quarter!”) against bottom-up realities (“Our product usage data shows we must improve repeat engagement to reduce churn”). A shared workspace that explicitly links business metrics to user-value metrics helps everyone see how product improvements lead up to broader revenue goals.

• A Living Document: Planning cycles shouldn’t take weeks (or longer!) When your medium for communicating strategy and progress is a one-off slide deck, never to be used again, you have to start from scratch ever time. You need a workspace that already has up-to-date data for this strategic context so you can spend less time planning and doing status updates, and more time actually doing the work.

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Additional Resources

• KPI Trees & Time-bound Goals
• Defining Product Outcomes
• Outcomes Are Hard