Joint vision as a shared anchor
Creating a shared vision that aligned teams across the value chain and customer journey in an international premium consumer goods company.
Context
Multiple teams shape the customer journey end to end: Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Customer Care, and Technology.
Each area plays a critical role in how customers experience the brand. Yet while collaboration existed in practice, a shared direction across the full journey had never been consciously created.
Starting point
The question wasn’t about the next feature to build – it was about orientation.
In a joint workshop, teams initially discussed concrete use cases. Then the perspective shifted with one guiding question:
Where would we take the customer journey if time, money, and resources were not a constraint?
That moment opened a different conversation. People stopped optimising individual needs and started thinking about a shared future.
This led to a conscious decision: before defining a strategy, the group would create a joint vision – owned by everyone and used as a shared anchor for what followed.
What changed first
A cross-functional team was formed, bringing all business and service owners into one space – with equal voice, independent of hierarchy.
Not everyone felt comfortable at first. The ambition and scale of the vision felt too big for some.
Over time, a subtle but important shift happened:
people began to listen more openly to other perspectives
assumptions about “the other side” softened
conversations became more direct and less formal
Collaboration no longer relied on escalation or large alignment meetings. People reached out directly to understand each other and work things through together.
What became possible
The first real impact was clarity – and with it, mutual understanding.
The vision work took time and didn’t immediately increase speed. But it created a shared reference for decisions.
This made it possible to:
define clearer goals
agree on shared priorities
discuss trade-offs with a common understanding
When quick solutions weren’t possible, teams looked for alternatives. Workarounds. Small improvements. Movement over stagnation. Progress over perfection.
Collaboration became solution-oriented rather than request-driven – grounded in a vision everyone had helped create.
Why this is relevant
A shared vision creates orientation before action.
When teams align first on where they want to go together, decisions become easier, trade-offs clearer, and collaboration more resilient – even in complex environments.
