Align Evolves with Your Business to Create Focus on What Matters While Working From Anywhere

As your business changes to meet new challenges, it’s important that your technology adapts to meet your changing needs. Understanding trends and pursuing new opportunities requires technology that helps your business stay agile and react thoughtfully and swiftly. Whether you’re staying the course or pivoting rapidly, transparency into plans and progress remains critical for execution.

This past year, Align has invested in making it easier to gain insight into your business’s performance and execution of strategic priorities. Since last June, our development team has released monthly updates and new features to improve the platform’s ease of use and value to your organization.

With your feedback in mind, we decided to focus on the areas most important to your business: faster relevant insights, transparency and recognition for contributions, and integrations with existing tools for execution. Let’s take a look at the key product changes in Align that enable the success of your business.

Customizable Filters for Insights and Transparency

Your organization can better create focus on what matters with Team and Project specific views in Align. The views of your organization’s overall performance can now be filtered by Team or Project to quickly gain insight into team performance or project progress.

1. Teams

Newly configurable Teams help contributors in your organization understand how their individual and team efforts contribute to overall company strategy. Team’s within your organization can now create their own Team One Page Strategic plans and Team specific Critical Numbers. This added visibility plays an important role in team engagement.

Example Use Case: Create Marketing and Sales Teams with their own OPSPs and Critical Number dashboards. Your team directors can quickly assess team performance by filtering priorities.

2. Security

You can now limit visibility into sensitive information with new security preferences. Tasks, Priorities, and One Page Plans can now be restricted to certain individuals or specific team as your organization requires.

Example Use Case: Our CEO used these settings to secure tasks related to surprise fun events to a cross-functional team focused on improving eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score).

3. Project Tags

Your team can now tag priorities related to specific tasks for easier visibility into project specific progress.

Example use case: An organization created a project related to COVID response efforts and created a project tag for associated priorities.

More Insightful Summary Metrics for Admins

As leaders in your business, understanding performance in real-time is critical for informing decisions and strategy. The Critical Number Dashboard is the central place for monitoring your business’s vital signs, and we’ve worked to improve the dashboard’s design and utility. These improved insights make it simple to view where leading indicators are lagging and why.

See at a glance how metrics are performing against your goals.

Track trends over time with historical values and identify potential strategic shifts
Update previous date’s values for your team’s critical numbers. This allows revisions of partial data, helpful if Critical Number owners are out of office or data is unavailable.

Add Notes for a day that a Critical Number was updated, providing added insight to the rest of your team on why the number changed.

You can now update today’s Critical Numbers directly from the Align Mobile App. Useful for working remotely or on the go.

Integrations with Your Communication and Execution Tools

Your organization uses many tools to execute in your business. To help you gain better real-time visibility into the work being done in your business, Align is evolving to seamlessly integrate with these tools you already use.

Now, in addition to existing integration with Microsoft and Google Tasks, Align can connect to the popular communication tool Slack and CRM Salesforce.

With these integrations you can now:

Use slash commands in Slack to check and update your Align Huddle content, and to check your Top Priority status for the day. You can directly edit your Align Huddle info in Slack.

Set up a Slack channel to automatically post team updates, help motivate your team to accomplish their goals and celebrate wins. These updates include when a Priority is updated and when a Task is completed. This increased visibility provides opportunities for recognition of team member contributions and encourages keeping priorities and critical numbers up to date with real time data. As an executive, you can also easily monitor the feed to see the velocity of progress inside your organization. This is especially helpful when managing remote teams. When you see lots of updates in your dedicated channel, you know that progress is happening on important work throughout your organization.

Set scheduled reminders to update your progress in Align, and have them sent to you in Slack.

Sync any Critical Number to any Salesforce report metric. Keep your dashboard metrics automatically updated and transparent for your team.

Continue to use Microsoft Outlook and Tasks or Google Tasks to manage your to-do list with easy connection to Align.

We look forward to bringing integrations with Quickbooks and a host of other tools using Zapier in the coming weeks. If you have questions about our timeline for integration with a particular tool, contact our product team.

Update All Your Daily Huddles Quickly

Easily enter your daily updates into multiple Huddles with the “Copy” feature. Simply enter the day’s information in one huddle and “Link” to share the same update across all your huddles saving time.

Learning Good Business Habits Together

In addition to product improvements that support the introduction of good habits in your business, this past year we launched multiple channels for easy continuing development for all team members on Align. The cornerstone of these is our learning center, the Align Academy. The Academy compiles best practices for strategic planning, effective communication, and execution learned from our experience helping thousands of teams implement better habits. The academy will continue to expand to help you and your teams better utilize Align to support your business’s operations.