Who do you align yourself with to gain momentum in the leadership organization?

Alignment is a function of trust, respect and growth.

I do not practice aligning for the sake of gaining political clout in an organization. I often start with a well rounded set of individuals - peer leaders in the same function, cross-functional leaders in other parts of the organization, a set of mentors, and of course my team and working partners across engineering and UX and develop and invest in these relationships.

In short, I maintain an advisory group in the company, to which I can go to get feedback on my decisions and brainstorm if need be.

Finally, I work very closely with my counterparts in engineering and UX as my core triad for alignment across areas.

I usually align myself with other parts of the organization's metrics and OKRs rather than a specific person. When you are supporting others' metrics they are accountable to, you will have their attention and commitment to accomplishing a shared objective together. If I align with a single person, this often means when that person leaves I need to find a new relationship to build. Rather I tend to focus on helping the entire group accomplish what they need to get done (by supporting it with Product delivery or contributing engineering effort to specific issues).

I don’t think we should try and align with certain people. Product development is about solving customer problems. So fundamentally I think we should deeply understand our customers’ struggles and figure out how we can use technology to help them. Additionally, we need to put that in the context of company level strategy and priorities. You don’t want to work on something that the company doesn’t care about. If you can clearly articulate how you are aligned with customer needs and company priorities, you are more likely to gain momentum.

Early in your career the only person you need to influence for getting promoted is usually your manager.

As you grow and try to reach the C-Suite, there is not 1 single person to influence. What matters is the impact you are making. And in order to make impact at the company level, you need to influence and get aligned with a lot of different people from other orgs such as marketing, sales, etc. It's by influencing indirectly all those people that you will achieve impact and gain momentum.