Q1 Clarity: Focus on team alignment before execution.
A practical framework for finding shared purpose when the ground keeps shifting.
Today marks the Lunar New Year of the Wood Snake, and I've been sitting with an interesting parallel. In Chinese zodiac, this year represents wisdom and transformation, a time when old patterns give way to new understanding. Fitting, as I've spent the first weeks of 2025 wrestling with what actually matters for marketing and product leaders in a landscape that refuses to sit still.
The Wood Snake year combines two elements - Yi (Wood) and Si (Fire). Wood feeds Fire, creating a cycle of growth and transformation. As I watched DeepSeek's emergence send the market into a trillion-dollar spiral, I'm reminded that transformation rarely follows a neat path. However, in recent discovery calls, I’ve been impressed by a somewhat positive, hopeful, attitude emerging about what’s ahead. While AI is dominating the news cycle, most folks are head-down focusing on how to excel at both their personal ambitions and the commercial decisions they need to make to thrive in their roles.
They're wrestling with the gap between inspirational annual SKOs and monthly execution reality. They're not interested in reviewing another framework or OKR deck. They want something more fundamental, clear, transparent connections between big visions and daily action.
Getting grounded and aligned, in the midst of an ever-changing industrial revolution, is what’s top of mind for GTM leaders and their teams, today.
As startup and enterprise teams navigate shifting user behaviors, leadership styles, and work relationships, alignment has become crucial for meaningful employee and customer experiences. Team misalignment not only causes friction between individuals and teams, it actively erodes progress and overall business growth. Not to mention, when distractions are constantly packaged as "high priorities," how do we cut through the noise?
Before I share a practical exercise that's helped teams find shared understanding in about an hour, let's explore three fundamental mindset shifts I've seen in teams who saw proven results over the past 12-18 months.
1. Targeted progress over total transformation
While the rise of AI dominates headlines and conference keynotes, many of the marketing and product executives I’m speaking to are mulling on simpler internal questions during their day-to-day thinking. Questions that connect directly to their sense of value and purpose:
"How do I stay valuable when (seemingly) AI can do more of my job?"
“How do we keep up with different streams of intelligence when so much is changing so fast?”
"How do I keep my team focused when everything feels urgent?"
‘How’ questions are anxiety-inducing. They speak to process, and in this new normal, most of the hows are still in the trial and error phase. We're all experimenting with new formats, new tools, changing behaviors, and evolving regulations. So how do we tackle the long list of hows effectively?
Let me share what I've seen bring meaningful insights in the past. When I partner with product marketing leaders, we start with an impact-focused asset audit. Not just listing out content assets, but honestly assessing what drives downloads, meetings and ultimately revenue. Here's the line of questioning we start discovery with.
Understanding deal flow
Start with what's working first, assuming you have current momentum. Where's your deal velocity right now, and what's the real expectation for change in 2025? Don’t overlook existing customer behavior patterns and be sure to start with your 1P data!
Ask yourself:
Which competitor comparisons keep coming up in both sales and customer conversations?
Where do prospects consistently hesitate during demos?
What technical questions repeatedly slow down validation?
Content effectiveness
Don’t launch into frantically creating new content just yet while existing assets gather digital dust. Instead, get honest about what you have to leverage in the now:
Is your product and buyer intelligence current for top competitors?
Does your demo script match how customers actually use your product?
Can sales find what they need in under two minutes?
Do your case studies show the metrics prospects actually care about?
Team support structure: the hidden productivity lever
This is crucial, especially for understanding your bandwidth for validation and enablement. I recently worked with a team that transformed their output by simply clarifying these points:
Who owns product feature updates and persona (ICP) segmentation?
Which product manager can give us real feature context? (Pro tip: if marketing can't easily partner with a product SME, you're limiting your entire team's GTM velocity)
What's our actual turnaround time on requests?
Let’s say you’re a solo product marketer at a Series B startup (I see you), here's the reality: you can't do everything in one sprint. Start with quick wins that build Q1 momentum, then focus on creating a strong foundation of assets you can derive content from while designing what's next.
2. Flexibility needs accountability
When we talk about alignment, there's a critical element that often gets overlooked: the connection between trust and results. In the past decade of working with technology companies, I’ve noted that the most aligned teams often share the common trait of having a working balance between accountability and autonomy.
True alignment is about creating an environment where people feel trusted to deliver their best work, whether that's from home, a coffee shop, or the office. Even with the promise of AI agents and automation, we sometimes forget that strategies and plans don't execute themselves - teams of real humans do. And those humans are navigating one of the most significant workplace shifts in recent history.
Nick Bloom's research at Stanford reveals that two to three remote days create an ideal environment for innovation and collaboration. It's one of those rare business strategies with surprisingly few downsides.
That encourages us to think about the natural rhythms of different teams: Your content writer might craft better customer stories at 6 AM, when the world is quiet. Your competitive analyst needs focused afternoon blocks for sales calls. Your designer finds flow once the daily meeting chaos ends.
Leadership shouldn’t get too hung up where and even sometimes how the work happens. Spend more time analyzing what’s taking up the most bandwidth and whether it’s moves the business forward. This applies beyond just work location. Whether it's sprint planning, feature launches, or sales enablement, clear goals paired with flexible execution consistently outperform rigid processes like five-day RTO mandates.
3. Value clarity beats competitive FOMO
Many times, when I’m onboarding a new client it goes the same way. Teams provide endless internal perspectives muddled in with competitor comparisons to provide a sense of their product’s leadership but there’s a flaw in that presentation construct.
It sheds a light on the brand’s perspective versus a reliable reflection of the market’s sentiment and product visibility to their ICP. To counter that bias, I run a quick 10-min competitive comparison using Perplexity and Claude. This gives a snapshot into what the market can readily find, what's still under wraps, and where opportunities exist for more dynamic product marketing can be explored. This shifts the focus from what your competitors are doing, and more focuses the team’s insights on how their brand is being heard and found.
Stop letting competitor moves dictate your strategy. Yes, you need to know what's happening in your market. But there's a difference between being informed and being led. Your competitors can't tell you what your customers need. Only your customers can do that (the power of 1P data!). When you build your strategy on real customer problems and validated use cases, competitor announcements become information, not direction.
How do we increase our speed to insight?
This focus on team alignment, productivity and customer truth over competitive moves leads me to that exercise I mentioned earlier. I once worked with a Series A startup's product team who felt overwhelmed by competing priorities. They worried about rushing releases and compromising quality while trying to keep pace with customer requests and GTM demands as they were in a massive growth phase.
Instead of letting these concerns simmer beneath the surface, we worked together and used a simple framework to surface fears, align on priorities, and create actionable next steps. It resulted in a restructured release schedule and new QA processes to enable ‘quick releases’ and a flagging system for releases that need multiple layers of approval. From the one-hour ideation phase to a working week after, we changed the way this team worked, and how they felt about their work for the better.
Getting started with the Conscious Clarity exercise
The Conscious Clarity exercise (though it started as the Hopes & Fears exercise in my consulting work), is a 60-minute framework that helps teams get brutally honest about what's ahead. Think of it as part pre-mortem, part hope machine. Instead of complex frameworks or lengthy workshops, teams gather around a real or virtual whiteboard and tackle two fundamental questions:
What do we hope to achieve this year?
What are we afraid might hold us back?
The breakthrough happens when leadership commits to translating these insights into actionable plans that both address concerns and amplify ambitions.
Here's how you can run this with your team or across teams, in the coming days:
Step 1: Gather everyone either team-wide and cross-functionally (in-person or virtually). This works well especially if you’re seeking more alignment within the marketing function e.g. between product marketing and demand generation.
Step 2: Give everyone 10 minutes to write down their concerns and aspirations on virtual or real stickies. With virtual you can make the contributions anonymous.
Step 3: Group similar themes together.
Step 4: Get clear on the patterns - what shows up most often?
Step 5: Create action items that directly address top fears and support the realization of key aspirations.
Here’s the Canva whiteboard template to get started. In the coming weeks, I'll be sharing more resources including facilitation guides and case studies from teams who've transformed their alignment using this method.
2025 won't be simple to categorize. Between technology market shifts and global changes, I see us entering a year that will reshape how we think about work and value creation.
This is exactly why starting with the Conscious Clarity exercise matters now. Teams who take an hour to get brutally honest about their concerns and aspirations end up with clearer direction than those who spend weeks in traditional planning sessions.
You can spend Q1 reacting to every innovation headline , or you can get your team aligned on what actually is moving your business forward. Need help running this exercise? Drop me a DM on LinkedIn.
Wishing you lots of light and prosperity this Lunar Year 🙏🏽.
Until next week ✌🏼
Chae O’Brien