Jason M. Lemkin describes how Heroku organized three cross-functional squads around business pillars: free, self-serve, and enterprise. Each squad brought together marketing, product, and sales to set shared priorities and sync quarterly, while keeping functional teams independent. Simple recurring meetings with stakeholders became the glue that held alignment together.
Have done this at publicly traded companies. The quickest thing you can do to help get alignment is to create some kind of squad or team model around the pillars. Where typically you have kind of two in a box or representatives from different parts, functional parts of the business organized around those three pillars. So literally the way I would run my business at Heroku or at Vimeo is I had a free squad, I had a self serve squad, I had an enterprise squad. You know, it's not expl. Exclusively it, but that's in terms of the cross organizational piece. They had their own functional priorities, but they also met as a team. They aligned and synchronized their priorities as a team just on the kind of project outcome, quarterly planning basis, not at like the detail project. They still went off and did their own things. So they had some common way of fundamentally reporting on the business. So there was some even virtual or matrix function that you could say who owns this thing? Because the hardest thing in 1, 2, 3 is who is sitting atop each one of those pillars, when implicitly they're highly interdependent. So as complicated as all that sounds, a simple meeting where you have key stakeholders. So for free and team, it's typically somebody from marketing, somebody from product. For enterprise it kind of works how it does today. Typically somebody from marketing, somebody from sales. And you can get a rational shared view of what the organization is doing to drive those businesses forward. Okay.
