Everything Feels Urgent
At early-stage companies, everything feels urgent: shipping product, closing customers, raising money. In that environment, planning can feel like a luxury, or even a liability.
In my experience advising founders and leading operations at startups and public companies, lack of planning creates misalignment. And misalignment kills companies. Left unchecked, misalignment breeds inefficiency, frustration, resentment, and burnout. It shows up in subtle ways. Teams repeat the same conversations. Product updates miss the mark. Ops teams keep fixing the same issues. Scope creep becomes the norm.
These problems arise when smart, capable people aren’t aligned on exactly what they should be spending their time on. Direction gets replaced with noise.
A mentor of mine used to say: “Separate the urgent from the important. Identify the most important problems you need to solve and be sure to get them right.” As a leader, your job is to align resources against those priorities, give your team the tools to succeed, and help them avoid distractions.
Misalignment Hurts More Than You Think
When teams aren’t aligned on where the business is going, they lack the context needed to make good decisions. That creates inefficiency. An engineering team might build a feature that hasn’t been sold yet. It turns out nobody wants it. We’ve all been there. A new product might be launched without agreement on what success looks like or even how it will be measured.
Frustration and resentment mount. Ops teams get stuck supporting software that breaks in the field, without enough people or the right tools to fix it. Debates arise around whether the problem is a bug or user error. Salespeople get frustrated that the features their customers have been asking about for months still haven’t been delivered. Everyone thinks they know what to do next, but the team isn’t aligned.
Burnout creeps in. Even high performers lose their edge when they’re constantly switching gears, doubling back, or reworking features that weren’t right the first time. Confidence in leadership erodes. People start to wonder if their work even matters.
If you want frameworks to protect your mental resilience as a founder, this Founders’ Mental Health Playbook is a great place to start.
When a company thinks it’s aligned but isn’t, key players can’t recite the plan. Often that’s because it isn’t written down. If everyone on the team isn’t reading from the same page, someone is going to be disappointed.
Start with the Leadership Team
Your role as a founder or exec team leader is to create clarity amid uncertainty and to help others do the same. If you don’t define what matters most and make it explicit, your team will do it for you. They’ll chase what’s loudest or most interesting instead of what’s most strategic. And because you can’t be in every room, you need teams that can make good decisions without being micromanaged. Clear priorities make that possible.
Alignment goes beyond a one-time slide buried in a board deck. It’s a habit. And it starts with the leadership team.
At the start of each quarter, or monthly if your team moves fast, ask each leader to independently answer the following questions:
- What is the company’s North Star?
- What are the three most important outcomes we must achieve this quarter?
- What are the top five risks to accomplishing them?
Once you align on company-level goals, each function can translate them into a plan with KPIs, deliverables, and clear ownership. When these roll up into company goals, teams gain clarity. Tradeoffs become visible. Cross-functional dependencies become manageable.
Here is a simple stack to get started:
- A top 5 risk list, owned by the exec team and reviewed monthly
- A functional roadmap per leader with quarterly deliverables and metrics
- A 30-day tracker per team or IC (individual contributor) showing what they’re driving, how success is measured, and where support is needed
These tools don’t need to be beautiful. They need to be functional and actually get used. They should guide check-ins, hiring decisions, and resource allocation.
I often hear objections like: “We can’t plan right now. Everything is in flux. We don’t know what matters until we close this deal or ship this release.” Or: “How can we pick three priorities? There are fifty.”
But having worked across scrappy startups and public companies, I’ve seen what happens when fear of “acting big” gets in the way of basic operating discipline. Yes, acting big can mean bloated meetings and bureaucracy. But it can also mean writing a clear brief, maintaining an updated project plan, and holding each other accountable.
Don’t avoid it. Make it work for your company and culture.
A common founder concern is around tying planning to incentives. Yes, you should connect planning to comp. But be careful. I’ve seen too many teams set bonus targets that feel rigid or unrealistic. If most scorecards land in the 30 to 60 percent range, that’s a symptom of a deeper issue. Goals are unrealistic, priorities are shifting too often, or teams are under-resourced. A tool meant to motivate and energize becomes demoralizing if incentives aren’t achieved.
Make Alignment a Habit
Getting alignment isn’t about adding process for the sake of it. It’s about making sure your momentum moves the company forward. Without it, even the most talented teams can stall out.
A few months ago, I worked with a small team. Just two co-founders and a few early hires who kept running into friction. Deadlines were missed. Conversations repeated. Expectations weren’t met. From the outside, it looked like a resource problem. But the real issue was misalignment at the top. The founders had different assumptions about the roadmap, and their teams were taking cues from both. No one was wrong, but no one was truly aligned either.
We sat down and forced the conversation: What are the three most important outcomes this quarter? Who owns what? What are the top risks? Within a week, they had a written plan, clear swim lanes, and a shared understanding of what mattered most. Progress followed quickly.
That framework works no matter the stage:
- Align on what matters most.
- Write it down.
- Define who owns what.
- Measure progress regularly.
- Hold each other accountable.
- Win together.
If you’re not doing this today, start small. Try a risk list. Share your functional priorities. Use your next leadership meeting to ask, “What are we trying to achieve this quarter, and how will we know if we’re on track?”
You don’t need more headcount or better software. You need alignment. It’s not a one-time event. It’s a habit. And the earlier you build it, the faster you can scale.
