Most B2B companies treat product, growth, and brand as separate departments with separate goals. Product is focused on building features. Growth is obsessed with metrics and conversion rates. Brand is off doing… whatever it is brand people do. (Just kidding. Sort of.)
But when these teams operate in silos, your marketing fractures. Your messaging gets inconsistent, your buyer journey becomes a confusing mess, and you end up with either a great product that nobody knows about or a strong brand that disappoints when people actually try the product.
Tl;DR: If your product, growth, and brand teams aren’t talking to each other, it’s not just an internal headache. It’s actively hurting your ability to win your market. So how do you break down walls and unite your team?
Sandy Mangat, Head of Marketing at Pocus (an AI-powered sales intelligence platform) has a surprisingly simple solution to this all-too-common problem. Having spent her career in startups, she’s intimately familiar with the problems that can erode companies from the inside out. And as she shared on our Best Story Wins podcast, the smartest thing to do is stop trying to coordinate three different functions with three different goals. Instead, give everyone one single unifying objective.
Why Alignment Matters More Than You Think
The intersection of product, growth, and brand is where the magic happens. Your brand narrative should inform how you build product and who you build it for. Your product needs to deliver on what your brand promises. And if you’re not thinking about growth and distribution, that incredible product isn’t getting into the right hands.
When these functions don’t communicate, you get marketing messages that don’t match product reality, products built without considering brand positioning, growth tactics that undermine brand equity, and a buyer journey full of jarring disconnects—none of which helps you win customers.
You want this cycle to work and work well, but you need buy-in and alignment from everyone involved. However, the solution isn’t more meetings or complex coordination frameworks. It’s giving everyone a single North Star to rally around.
How to Align Your Teams with One Goal
If you’ve been struggling with silos, mismatched goals, or even radio silence between departments, here are Sandy’s tips to create the kind of alignment that actually moves the needle.
1) Start with one company-wide objective.
At Pocus, Sandy and her team didn’t try to balance multiple priorities across different functions. They gave the entire company one goal for the first year.
“The entire company’s focus was: make people care about what the hell Pocus is,” Sandy says. The company’s OKR was to create a cult following—a cult following for the product, and a cult following for the brand. Sandy says that North Star vision then informed all of the KPIs associated with product growth and brand.
This approach both simplified and clarified the focus across the board. They didn’t have separate OKRs for product (e.g., ship X features), growth (e.g., achieve Y conversion rate), and brand (e.g., increase Z awareness). They had one goal that everyone could rally behind.
That single objective—to make people obsessed with Pocus—naturally cascaded into how they measured success across all three functions.
- Product could evaluate features based on whether they’d make users more obsessed.
- Growth could assess tactics based on whether they attracted the right cult members.
- Brand could create content and campaigns that deepened that obsession.
With one goal, they streamlined their entire organization.
Tip: When defining your unifying goal, make it about the outcome you want in the market, not internal metrics. “Increase brand awareness by 50%” is a metric. “Make our category synonymous with our brand name” is a North Star. The former tells you what to measure; the latter tells you what to achieve.
2) Make sure product, growth, and brand all serve that goal.
Once you have your North Star, the next step is ensuring all three functions understand how they contribute to it. This isn’t about giving teams separate objectives that theoretically align; it’s about making sure they’re actively supporting each other.
To do this well, however, everybody needs to understand the core elements of the brand story.
- What are you saying in the market?
- What is the narrative?
- What is the mission, vision, and values of the company?
“All of that informs how you think about building product and who you build product for,” Sandy says. “Of course, if you’re not thinking about growth and distribution, then that product isn’t gonna get into the hands of the right people.”
At Pocus, this meant product decisions were informed by the brand narrative (what story are we telling?), brand campaigns were built around product capabilities (can we actually deliver this?), and growth tactics were designed to attract people who’d become cult followers (not just anyone with a pulse).
The result? A cohesive brand experience where every touchpoint reinforces the same story.
Tip: When you’re assessing success, ask departments to reframe their work through the lens of your North Star. For example, “We shipped Feature X to support our positioning as Y” is way more valuable than “We shipped five features this quarter.”
3) Establish single-threaded ownership,
Here’s where a lot of companies mess up. They create alignment around a shared goal, but then they don’t clarify who owns what. Suddenly, projects get sidetracked, deadlines get pushed, and things fall through the cracks.
That’s why Sandy’s team demanded clarity on who owns what and assigned a single-threaded owner to each project for full accountability.
Even when projects are collaborative (e.g, a product launch with a ton of moving parts and people involved), you still need one owner. “Otherwise, it’s going to be chaos,” Sandy says.
Single-threaded ownership doesn’t mean working in silos. It means one person is ultimately responsible for driving a project forward, making final decisions, and coordinating with other stakeholders. Everyone else is informed or consulted, but they’re not making decisions by committee.
At Pocus, they determine ownership based on which metric a project most directly impacts. If it’s primarily about pipeline generation, marketing owns it. If it’s about post-sales expansion, the customer team owns it. Clear metrics equal clear ownership.
Tip: You don’t need a formal framework for this. Sandy notes that they keep it pretty informal at Pocus. The key is just making sure everyone knows who has final say. One simple approach: identify one person who’s responsible for driving the project, 2-3 people who should be consulted on major decisions, and everyone else just gets informed of progress.
4) Focus on awareness before optimization.
When you’re early in your company’s journey, it’s tempting to jump straight into sophisticated growth tactics. But if nobody knows who you are or what you do, those tactics won’t save you.
Sandy’s advice? Start with awareness, then layer in optimization.
In the early days, Sandy says it really comes down to: What problem are you solving? Who are you solving it for? And then how are you gonna tell the story of how you do that?
This is where product, growth, and brand alignment becomes critical. If your product team is building features for one audience, your brand team is telling stories for another audience, and your growth team is optimizing for a third audience, you’re going to waste a ton of resources.
Get clear on who you’re for and what problem you solve first. Then make sure product, brand, and growth are all pointed in the same direction. The tactical optimization can come later.
Tip: Before investing heavily in performance marketing or sophisticated growth playbooks, ask yourself: “If someone hears about us through a friend, can they quickly understand what we do and why it matters to them?” If not, focus on clarity and awareness first.
Remember: Simple Goals Beat Complex Frameworks
The biggest mistake companies make when trying to align product, growth, and brand is thinking they need elaborate frameworks, endless coordination meetings, and complex reporting structures.
But as Sandy’s experience at Pocus shows, alignment actually gets easier when you simplify. One North Star goal. Clear ownership. Regular communication in public channels. That’s it.
The hard part isn’t the process; it’s having the discipline to stick with one goal long enough to see results, and having the courage to say no to things that don’t serve that goal (even if they seem like good ideas on their own).
When product, growth, and brand are all pulling in the same direction, everything else gets easier. Your messaging becomes more consistent. Your buyer journey feels more cohesive. Your team moves faster because they’re not constantly negotiating priorities.
And, most importantly, you build a brand that people actually care about—because every touchpoint, from first impression to product experience, reinforces the same story.
Want to hear more about how Sandy and the Pocus team built alignment and created a cult following? Listen to the full episode of the Best Story Wins podcast. And if you’re struggling to get your own teams aligned around a clear strategy, check out our b2b marketing strategy toolkit to help you document and execute your vision.
