Here at Rentouch we stay focused on our mission ‘to align organizations through the simplicity of a sticky note’, because it is both ambitious and profound. The impact we can have by creating alignment across teams, programs, solutions and portfolios in the discovery, planning, and development phases of product development is profound because it is alignment that is the ‘magic’ to better predictability, quality, innovation and the end products/services delivered to market.  

Here is something to think about: What if you have high performing and predictable Teams (i.e. Flow metrics all exemplar), how do you know if they [these Teams] are aligned? Furthermore what happens when there is a lack of alignment? I think this question keeps us, the SAFe community and the lean-agile community at large, all innovating and improving. From my experience the answer to that question, though, is ‘You will experience [lack of alignment] when everyone is  busy. Busy, but nothing gets done without an escalation, or fire drill. Effortlessly getting to a state of Done Done, with quality, predictability, and innovation, then you must know alignment is fundamentally part of that equation.

See, as something Jean-Michel Lemieux taught us: ‘[Achieving] Alignment is so much harder than achieving Autonomy and decentralized decision-making’.

We know closed feedback loops plus collaboration drive alignment. We are hinting at something that we are excited to announce, which is an initiative to drive more customer alignment through a Customer Success initiative. Christopher Pola joins to spearhead and collaborate on activities that create more alignment with your business objectives and outcomes when using piplanning.io. We know piplanning.io is an important economic asset and investment, and we stay committed to ensuring everyone, including leadership, recognises this about the platform too.

Chris is aligned and focused on enabling any stakeholder in your company on the technology, the practices, and the people that piplanning.io supports. Teams, ARTs, Solution, Portfolio and leadership teams are in his purview, and in his skills range.  You may have met Chris at our recent RTE Circle event, on the piplanning.io Slack Community, or via email. Look out for announcements in these channels about Customer Success activities that we will launch in the coming weeks/months.  

These activities will be cross-cutting collaboration across teams in our entire value stream including product, marketing and engineering. An end-to-end view of the customer journey is imperative as we don’t want Customer Success to be a proxy for hand-offs. Through collective decision making, continuous discovery interviews, and radical transparency we want to create what is next together. As a teaser of what to expect, we are collaborating on an enhanced Feedback/Request portal and bringing more transparency to our product objectives through a lean roadmap portal of what’s happening Now, Next, and Later.

Here’s to your success, and staying sticky together,

-Rentouch Team

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