What is Growth Management Software?
Growth management software provides an operating framework for implementing best practices around strategic planning, organizational communication and company-wide execution against key business priorities.
Align provides the workspace to adopt and manage the right set of business habits that are consistently used by high-growth companies. Daily Huddles, One Page Plan Tools, Priorities, KPIs and Critical Numbers help you maintain focus on the things that matter most to moving your business forward.
How Align Works…
Align works best when the company makes a full commitment to the change in the business outcomes you seek. The software focuses on forming habits around three key aspects for businesses.
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Plan: It all starts with a plan. Most businesses go through the process of creating a plan, but often there is no follow through because things get lost in the day to day shuffle. Align gives you a structure for organizing your planning sessions, sharing the outputs of the session throughout the company and turning them into action items.
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Communicate: Clear and efficient communication is essential for any successful team. Daily and weekly communication rhythms ensure important info is being shared across teams. Not only are teams interacting in person, but through Align’s dashboards you can see what is going well and where people need help. This gives you the opportunity to problem solve before things become unmanageable.
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Execute: Your plan is only as good as your ability to execute. Map out and assign key business priorities that directly contribute to your company goals. Measure each priority with assigned KPIs and have employees update the KPI measurement on a daily or weekly basis to see how you’re performing against the goals you set out to achieve.
What we’re not
Unlike task or project management software, Align is specifically built for managing the business at the strategic level, above the day-to-day details — not just for your daily tasks or project specific workflows and schedules. Align is not meant to replace a project management, task management or customer relationship management platforms, but rather work in tandem with them. Align will keep you focused on the strategic business priorities that will help you achieve your long-term goals.
Is growth management similar to OKR software?
Yes. If you’ve read John Doerr’s book, and are looking to implement OKRs in your business, you can use Align to do that. Our tools allow you to outline individual objectives (we call them priorities) that ladder up to organization objectives and measure performance against those.
Setting objectives and measuring key results is the equivalent of identifying goals, developing aligned business priorities and implementing KPIs to measure progress as you execute.
How does Align fit into my workflow?
There’s no single answer to this, as every company is different. But typically, people use Align for the following ways:
Long-Term Planning
- Identifying the long-term strategic plan and mapping out your BHAG (big hairy audacious goal)
- Determining what your 3-5 year outlook and goals are
Annual
- Developing an annual plan that is achievable over 4 quarterly periods
Quarterly
- Managing quarterly strategic planning sessions
- Identifying Critical Number ranges and targets for key business metrics
- Evaluating performance data from the previous period before moving on to the next quarterly planning session
Weekly
- Updating KPIs and Priorities to reflect weekly progress
- Managing Weekly Huddle updates to share with your core team to review status and objectives for the coming week
Daily
- Updating KPIs and Priorities to reflect daily progress
- Writing in Daily Huddle updates to share with your team and outline your top priority for the day
- Reviewing Critical Numbers and performance metrics