Alignment: Overcoming internal sabotage and digital product failure

Alignment is the one thing you’ll find at the heart of every successful relationship, team, and organization in the world. When developed and leveraged, alignment can create the foundation for unparalleled product success.

As the internet continues to enable, encourage, and demand that leaders say yes to digital product transformation, now is the time for Alignment. This book provides industry insight into why alignment is so critical to the success of digital products and business transformation.

Drawn from dozens of interviews, plus thousands of hours of research and first-hand experience, author Jonathon Hensley offers a straightforward look at why so many digital products fail, shows how leadership, strategy, and team performance must align to achieve results, and delivers practical tools to help you bring alignment into your next digital transformation initiative.

The book is broken down into five parts.

• Part One focuses on what alignment is, and why it’s so critical to the success of digital product and business transformation.
• Part Two provides a straightforward, honest look at why so many digital product and transformation initiatives fail or underperform.
• Part Three explores what leading with alignment looks like today. It sheds light on the fundamental knowledge and skills necessary to build teams in order to navigate the digital product life cycle and transformation.
• Part Four reveals the baseline from which every successful digital product initiative must start, and the elements and guiding forces that make up a strategic foundation.
• Part Five explores the connection between your digital product strategy and team performance, rapidly accelerating the delivery of results.

Jonathon Hensley is co-founder and CEO of Emerge, a digital product consulting firm that works with companies to improve operational agility and customer experience. For more than two decades, Hensley has helped startups, Fortune 100 brands, technology leaders, large regional health networks, non-profit organizations and more transform their businesses by turning strategy, user needs, and new technologies into valuable digital products and services. Jonathon writes and speaks about his experiences and insights from his career, and regularly hosts in-depth interviews with business leaders and industry insiders. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two boys. Originally from Silicon Valley, Jonathon got into the digital product space inspired by the incredible people developing new technologies all around him and the possibilities they unlocked. This fueled his curiosity to understand how technology transforms the ways in which people live and work. Today that curiosity continues to drive him, as he works to help businesses harness technology. His work focuses on alignment, helping leaders define the value they want to create in a succinct and tangible way; where to focus, why, and what it will take to achieve that outcome. His favorite part is going beyond the idea but reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes so that a client can succeed.

Since 2000, Dave Jarecki has provided words in support of hundreds of businesses, non-profit organizations, leaders and entrepreneurs across dozens of industries. His work takes many forms, including brand narratives, presentations, personal narratives, articles, copy, film scripts, poetry and songs. As a ghostwriter, developmental editor, and workshop leader, he regularly supports others as they bring their personal insights and narratives to audiences and readers. He earned his BA in English from Penn State University, and MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University. He resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, daughter, and assortment of animals.