At the beginning of Q3, colleagues' Telegram channels are buzzing with talk about strategy sessions. For example, Pasha Gabedava is lamenting about his own issues, and judging by the problems, he now works not only for himself but also for me. That is, to the best of his ability, he ensures that everything conceived at strategy sessions comes to life, whether by hook or by crook.

It was precisely this endless nudging of leaders of all stripes that I had to do for all four happy years at my previous job, packaging toxic thinking into coaching services. And surprisingly, even though Gigachat Max Ultra Plus is winking its green eye from every socket, and efficiency has increased by 30% due to last year's layoffs, and if any product leaders remain, they are top-notch professionals, the problems with strategic consistency in product development are still the same.

Pavel complains that the stickers with key result formulations agreed upon at the event are about one thing, but the sprint backlog takes something completely different. And if you ask the team how and why a particular task is related, you'll be met by a chorus of deaf-mutes, blinking with pairs of eyes staring into the void.

It seems that the problem of linking epics to key results can be solved by creating a set of special issues—key results—in a separate Jira project after the strategy session. These are then linked to programs and funding portfolios, so it's immediately clear not only why something is being done but also where the money comes from, and most importantly, who is paying! Moreover, you don't even need to invest in formulations and detailed descriptions of DoR, DoD, AC, and other fields to fill in.

The word "seems" is unnecessary. For some reason, at my current place, with simpler budgets and fewer resources, product managers calmly maintain focus and work with incoming tasks exactly like this.

Such a culture of work management in the Atlassian task tracker is enough to build any samples, organize them into structures, and during regular team meetings, have business analysts clarify with the product owner about any of their "guess what I'm throwing in"—how this input relates to the strategy and what to drop. After that, document the agreements in minutes and escalate to the next level in cases of addiction attacks from the aforementioned product manager.

I seem to have explained everything well, but I forgot something... oh, right, I need to plug AI in somewhere. Well, that's easy: we write a script for regular CSV exports from Jira, vibe-code a dashboard to play nicely with filters, charts, and fonts, and add an LLM bot to the local chat to report the situation on Monday mornings and give valuable neural-sludge recommendations.

Now, as they say, you're in the dance.

P.S.
I must have suffered some kind of psychological trauma from working for the best employer in the country (in the past), because even 9 months after being laid off, and while visiting the brotherly Vietnamese people on the other side of the world, I get fired up instantly reading about the powerlessness of a huge organization with endless resources and the ability to change the laws of the universe, in the face of the indifference and incompetence of its own product leaders. Though, maybe it's not about them.