Alignment: The Invisible Force That Makes Everything Work

Part 3 of 4: The Four Pillars of Progressive Delivery

Disney’s theme parks feature some of the most complex cyber-physical systems ever built. A single attraction might integrate ride vehicles, show effects, safety systems, guest tracking, mobile apps, and real-time personalization—all operating in perfect harmony to create “magic” for millions of visitors.

How do hundreds of autonomous teams across Disney Imagineering, software development, operations, and guest services coordinate to deliver seamless experiences? The answer isn’t tighter control or more meetings. It’s something far more sophisticated: alignment.

What Alignment Really Means

Alignment in Progressive Delivery isn’t about everyone agreeing on everything or following identical processes. It’s about focusing human and organizational resources to work in the same direction while maintaining the autonomy to execute in different ways.

Think of alignment like a jazz ensemble. Each musician has complete autonomy over their instrument and their interpretation of the music. But they’re all working from the same chord progression, in the same key, at the same tempo. The result is coordinated improvisation that creates something beautiful together.

In software delivery, alignment provides the shared framework that lets autonomous teams create coherent user experiences across different systems, platforms, and timelines.

The Evolution of Alignment

Software alignment has evolved dramatically over the past few decades:

Waterfall Era: Alignment through detailed specifications and rigid processes. Everyone followed the same plan because deviation was expensive and risky.

Agile Era: Alignment through shared goals and regular communication. Teams adapted their approaches but stayed coordinated through frequent check-ins.

DevOps Era: Alignment through shared tools and automated feedback loops. Systems provided continuous information about whether teams were moving in the same direction.

Progressive Delivery Era: Alignment through shared understanding of user needs and outcomes. Teams coordinate around user value rather than internal processes.

This evolution reflects a crucial insight: as systems become more complex and distributed, alignment must become more sophisticated and less prescriptive.

Alignment in Action: The GitHub Story

GitHub demonstrates sophisticated alignment across thousands of engineers who deploy code hundreds of times per day. Their secret isn’t micromanagement—it’s what they call “aligned autonomy.”

Every GitHub engineer understands the core mission: help developers build better software together. This shared purpose provides the north star that guides autonomous decision-making. When engineers are deciding between implementation approaches, they ask: “Which option better serves developers?”

But GitHub goes deeper than mission statements. They align through:

Shared metrics: Everyone can see real-time data about system performance, user satisfaction, and feature adoption. Teams self-correct when they see their changes negatively impacting shared goals.

Common platforms: Standardized deployment pipelines, monitoring systems, and development tools ensure that autonomous teams can integrate their work seamlessly.

Transparent communication: All technical discussions happen in channels visible to the entire engineering organization. Teams stay aligned by observing and participating in each other’s decision-making processes.

User feedback loops: Direct connections between engineering teams and user communities ensure that technical decisions stay grounded in real user needs.

The Three Levels of Alignment

Technical Alignment Systems must work together reliably. This includes API contracts, data formats, security standards, and deployment practices. Technical alignment ensures that autonomous teams can integrate their work without breaking each other’s systems. Amazon’s mandate that all teams communicate through APIs exemplifies technical alignment. Teams have complete autonomy over their internal implementations, but they must align on how they expose capabilities to other teams.

Process Alignment Teams need compatible ways of working. This doesn’t mean identical processes, but it does mean predictable interfaces between teams. When one team depends on another, they need to understand how to request work, what to expect, and when to expect it.

Purpose Alignment Everyone must understand and commit to the same fundamental goals. This is the deepest and most important level of alignment because it enables autonomous decision-making that naturally supports shared objectives.

Constituency vs. Stakeholder Thinking

Traditional software development focuses on “stakeholders”—people with financial or organizational power who can influence project direction. But Progressive Delivery requires thinking about “constituents”—everyone actually affected by your software.

Consider medical records software again. Stakeholders might include:

• Hospital executives who make purchasing decisions
• IT directors who manage implementations
• Department heads who control budgets

But the full constituency includes:

• Nurses accessing patient information during emergencies
• Patients using portals to view their own data
• Family members helping elderly relatives navigate health systems
• Insurance clerks processing claims
• Regulatory auditors ensuring compliance

Alignment with stakeholders ensures organizational support. Alignment with constituents ensures actual value delivery.

The Feedback Pyramid

Effective alignment requires multiple types of feedback operating simultaneously:

Explicit Feedback: What people tell you directly through surveys, interviews, and feature requests. This is the most obvious but least complete type of feedback.

Implicit Feedback: What people’s behavior tells you through usage patterns, workflow analysis, and system metrics. This often reveals gaps between what people say they want and what they actually need.

System Feedback: What your infrastructure tells you about performance, reliability, and scalability. This includes both technical metrics and business metrics like conversion rates and user retention.

Predictive Feedback: What your analysis suggests about future needs and trends. This requires combining all other feedback types with industry knowledge and strategic thinking.

Progressive Delivery organizations instrument all four levels of feedback and use them to maintain alignment as conditions change.

Alignment Without Rigidity

The biggest challenge in scaling alignment up is avoiding rigidity. As organizations grow, there’s natural pressure to create more rules, more approval processes, and more standardization. But this approach often destroys the autonomy that enables innovation.

Instead, Progressive Delivery creates alignment through what the authors call “principled flexibility”:

Clear principles, flexible implementation: Everyone understands the fundamental values and goals, but teams have autonomy in how they achieve those goals.

Strong interfaces, loose coupling: Teams align on how they communicate and integrate, but maintain independence in their internal operations.

Shared observability, distributed decision-making: Everyone has access to the same information about system performance and user needs, but decisions are made by the people closest to the impact.

Getting Started with Alignment

Begin by clarifying your current state:

Purpose and goal: Can everyone in your organization explain your core user value proposition in their own words? If not, start there.

Feedback loops: How quickly can you detect when teams are drifting out of alignment? What signals tell you when users are struggling with your software?

Communication patterns: How do teams currently coordinate? What information flows naturally, and what requires manual intervention?

Success metrics: What indicates that your alignment is working? How do you distinguish between good alignment and false consensus?

Start with small experiments in improving one aspect of alignment, then expand based on what you learn.

Alignment as Competitive Advantage

Organizations with strong alignment can move faster than their competitors because they waste less energy on coordination overhead and rework. They can scale more effectively because adding new people and teams doesn’t require exponentially more management.

Most importantly, they can adapt more quickly to changing conditions because alignment around principles and outcomes is more resilient than alignment around specific processes or technologies.

But alignment without automation remains fragile and expensive. Manual coordination doesn’t scale, and human attention is finite.

Next week: Part 4 explores Automation—how to transform aligned principles into systematic capabilities that operate reliably at scale.

This series explores concepts from the new book Progressive Delivery: Build The Right Thing For The Right People At The Right Time by James Governor, Kim Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse, and Adam Zimman (IT Revolution Press, November 2025).