In the relentless pursuit of growth, companies often find themselves chasing after shiny tactics and quick wins. Yet, despite pouring resources into performance marketing, product features, or viral campaigns, many growth teams hit an invisible ceiling. The culprit? The lack of internal alignment.
It doesn’t matter how great your tactics or tools are—if your team isn’t aligned, you’re leaving results on the table. In this article, I’ll share why internal alignment is the secret sauce for sustainable growth and how you can get your team pulling in the same direction.
Keep reading if you want to know:
- Why misalignment might be the biggest thing holding your growth back.
- A simple framework to organise and align your collective efforts.
- How to bring more focus to your growth efforts
Why internal alignment is your secret weapon
Imagine asking 10 random people across your organisation, “How does our business grow?” Do you think their answers align? From CEOs to marketers to finance teams, each function often has its own perspective. CEOs might focus on unit economics and investor satisfaction, while marketers push for higher brand awareness and sales teams chase more leads. These goals are valid, but if they don’t converge on a unified growth strategy, your efforts become fragmented.
The risks of misalignment
- Confused priorities: When goals aren’t aligned, teams tend to prioritise personal pain points over collective objectives.
- Inefficient execution: Misalignment leads to duplication of efforts and missed opportunities for synergy.
- Short-termism: Growth becomes a series of isolated hacks and quick wins rather than a sustainable, long-term strategy.
Your business as a race car
To achieve internal alignment, you need a structured framework. Enter the Race Car Framework*, a simple yet powerful tool to align your team around shared growth goals.
Here's how it works:
1. The Engine: Your core, sustainable growth driver.
- This could be performance marketing, content engines (see our content strategy case for Valtra), virality through product-led growth, or outbound sales operations.
- Focus here is essential—what consistently drives most of your growth?
- The engines are built to last – it's about finding what drives your business forward in a long-term
- It’s ok not to know the nature of your engine from the start. It may also vary depending on the stage of your journey. You discover it through market and customer insights, and a series of trial-and-error experimentations (see our growth cooperation with Granite)
2. The Turbo Boosts: Short-term accelerators.
- These are eg. PR stunts, seasonal campaigns, RTM, brand partnerships or event marketing that provide a temporary spike in growth (see how our team support strategic events for Nokia)
- Use these sparingly but strategically to jumpstart or complement your growth engine.
- You don’t stand a chance in a race without turbo boost. It’s what keeps you ahead of the market and your competitors
- These are the perfect accelerators for you to get first paying customers, or make the most out of seasonal opportunities
3. The Lubricants: Optimization efforts.
- These ensure your engine runs smoothly, focusing on improving conversion rates, retention, and efficiency (see our digital transformation feasibility study for Vantaan Valo)
- Be cautious not to over-optimize too early or at the expense of foundational growth activities.
- The lubricants optimize the work of your engine, but cannot replace it
4. The Fuel: Essential inputs like capital, content, and user advocacy.
- Without fuel, even the best engine won't run.
- You can’t replace fuel with the lubricants. In order to achieve ambitious goals, you need to fuel up
- High-quality content and engaged users amplify the efficiency of your growth strategy.
Internal alignment nourishes operational focus
Too often, teams focus heavily on optimisations — before they’ve even defined and validated their growth engine. While in reality, without a fully functional engine, all the tweaking and fine-tuning in the world won’t make a difference.
What’s missing is focus. If your growth engine isn’t clearly defined, it’s impossible to know which metrics matter most. That’s when frustration creeps in. The solution? Start by defining the key metrics that actually drive your business growth. Communicate these clearly across every function so everyone knows what success looks like.
From there, narrow your focus. You can’t optimise everything at once, so choose the most critical metrics and work on those. Each quarter, commit to a specific set of priorities, and don’t let shiny new ideas derail your focus. And before you add another metric to your dashboard, ask yourself: What will I actually do with this data? How will it inform my decisions?
Finally, celebrate the small wins. Whether it’s learning from a failure or hitting a key milestone, take the time to acknowledge progress. As long as you’re learning, you’re moving forward—and that’s what sustainable growth is all about.
Growth needs focus
Growth doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a clear focus, synchronised efforts, and an aligned team. By adopting a structured framework and fostering alignment, you transform growth from a chaotic scramble into a systematic, scalable process.
*The Race Car Growth Framework developed by growth experts at Reforge
