Strategy Execution in Agile Organizations

Today, we want to help you address a challenge that many organizations struggle with: bridging the gap between strategy and execution. Together with my colleague Jose Molina, we’ve put together this article with the hope that it helps you move from planning to action, without losing focus or control.

Let’s dive in.

The Strategy - Execution Gap

"Of course we’re Agile! We run Sprints, hold Retrospectives, and run Reviews!"

Over the past few years, hundreds of organizations have invested heavily in Agile transformations. Yet many of them failed, or barely scratched the surface.

Why? Because they made being Agile the goal itself, forgetting the most important thing: creating real impact.

The problem is clear: teams were applying Agile practices, but without any clear connection to strategic business goals.

Some of the common symptoms of this gap include:

• Disconnected objectives across levels: Without a clear chain linking the vision to product-level goals, teams lose sight of the purpose behind their work.
• Too many priorities at once: When everything is urgent, nothing truly is. Focus is lost, and teams scatter their efforts.
• Contradictory objectives across departments: Without a shared vision, each unit optimizes for itself, rather than contributing to collective outcomes.

Building a Strategy Execution System That Connects Vision, Initiatives, and Teams

Strategy must be present at every level of the organization, whether you’re using OKRs, Flight Levels, GIST, or another framework.

It’s not about having the “right tool”: it’s a mindset where teams explore, deliver, and learn within a clear strategic context.

Having a strategy without operational connection is pointless, just as having a backlog with no strategic direction turns it into a scattered list of improvements without a real purpose.

What’s needed is a structured system of connected layers that links:

Vision → Strategy → Initiatives → Epics / Features → Stories.

This layered alignment is possible with tools like Businessmap.

Visualizing the connection between high-level projects and strategic initiatives in Businessmap

Visualizing Strategy to Align All Levels of the Organization

If we want strategy to be truly connected to operations at every level, it cannot be hidden like a secret plan or the Coca-Cola formula.

It must be visible across the entire organization, and one of the best tools to achieve this is the use of visual boards.

Scaled flow connected to business

Depending on the size of your organization, you’ll likely need more than one board to represent how work flows from strategy to delivery across different levels:

• Team level: to manage execution and delivery.
• Coordination level: to manage alignment and interdependencies.
• Strategic level: to manage direction and organizational priorities.

You might have more than one board per level, but they should always be connected through a shared flow of work, even if each one is managed independently.

Visualized scaled flow from strategy to day by day

A good visualization system should help you:

• Provide clarity to all teams on what they are working toward.
• Quickly identify efforts that are not contributing to any objective.
• Facilitate better prioritization, focus, and adaptation to strategic shifts.
• Detect, reduce, or ideally eliminate unnecessary dependencies.

In an Agile organization, strategy is a living system. It must be connected operationally at every level through visual boards reflecting the actual flow of work, strategic alignment, and continuous learning.

Keeping Strategy Alive: The Power of Feedback and Alignment

As we mentioned earlier, strategy is a living system, and like any living system, it needs to be nourished.

And what does it feed on? Feedback.

Without frequent feedback loops across all levels (team, coordination, strategy), the system will inevitably fall out of alignment.

There’s no universal formula for which events or rituals you “must” have. But your strategy review system should absolutely include moments to:

• Reassess whether the current strategy is still valid and flowing toward execution.
• Maintain a review cadence focused on outcomes, not just deliverables.
• Evaluate actual results and adjust hypotheses or plans based on learnings.

Some recommended practices include:

• Quarterly reviews or ad-hoc reviews triggered by significant market or contextual shifts to validate or adapt strategic goals.
• Ongoing roadmap reviews to ensure delivery plans are still aligned with strategic priorities and haven’t drifted toward irrelevant features.

But this isn’t just about scheduled events:

True strategic execution doesn’t depend on calendar rituals - it depends on ongoing conversations that keep purpose alive in every decision and every team.

Measuring Progress and Results Without Losing Focus: Balancing Outcomes and Outputs

"If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it." - Peter Drucker

Measuring strategic execution isn’t just about tracking how much work we deliver - it’s about assessing whether we’re creating real impact.

Deliverables alone aren’t enough. We need to measure results.

We must keep a clear focus: outcomes over outputs.

As a nod to the Agile Manifesto, we might say:

“While we value tracking execution (such as completed tasks or stories), we value measuring real impact even more.”

An effective measurement system should balance two dimensions:

Measuring Strategic Results (Outcomes)

We need to verify whether we’re achieving the changes we want to see in the business, the market, or with our users.

How to do it:

1. Define key results or impact metrics that are aligned with each strategic objective.

2. Track relevant outcome indicators, such as:

• Growth in active users, lifetime value, churn rate.
• Improvements in customer satisfaction (NPS, revenue, ARPU...).
• Increases in market share, revenue, or efficiency gains.

3. Continuously assess whether the assumptions behind your strategy are being validated or need to be revisited.

Success isn’t defined by how many features we ship - it’s measured by the business and customer impact those features create.

Measuring Operational Execution (Outputs)

Monitoring our operational flow is essential if we want to improve it. While we shouldn’t focus exclusively on outputs, ignoring them entirely is also dangerous.

Key metrics to observe:

• Strategic Lead Time: How long does it take for a business need to become delivered value?
• Aging Work in Progress: Which initiatives or epics have been open for too long? This helps with surface-stalled work that blocks progress.
• Strategic Throughput: How frequently are initiatives aligned with strategic goals being completed?
• Blockers and Dependencies: Where is the flow getting stuck? What handoffs or dependencies are slowing us down?

Focusing only on flow metrics can make us highly efficient at building the wrong thing.

Focusing only on outcomes can blind us to the systemic issues that delay delivery.

True progress requires attention to both.

Real Example: How Visualizing the System Helped an Organization Align Strategy and Execution

At one organization we worked with, teams used Scrum and delivered iteratively. Success was measured at the team level through metrics like throughput and story points. However, leadership increasingly noticed that strategic outcomes were arriving late, and as each quarter drew to a close, pressure spiked to meet the Key Results.

After observing the organization’s workflow for some time, we identified two core issues:

• First, there was excessive lead time at the strategic level, where initiatives took months to turn into meaningful value.
• Second, results were reviewed too late - if at all - usually just before the end of the quarter. For weeks, teams worked on low-priority or disconnected tasks.

To address this, we drove organizational changes to improve flow between levels: establishing shared prioritization agreements, clarifying dependencies, and implementing continuous review policies.

This was reinforced by using visual boards connected across strategic, coordination, and delivery levels.

We also introduced structured, recurring feedback cycles - not just to track delivery, but to continuously validate whether the work was actually driving the desired results. This fostered incremental adjustments instead of last-minute rushes. Strategic focus became part of daily conversations, and the flow of value became more visible and aligned with business goals.

Actionable Ways to Link Strategy and Execution

• Make your strategy visible: use boards accessible across the organization. Don’t hide what you want everyone to focus on.
• Ask these three questions constantly at every level:
• What is most important right now?
• What are we doing right now to move toward it?
• What are we actually doing?

If this article resonated with you, we’d love to continue the conversation.

Strategy and execution are essential challenges in any Agile organization, and there’s always value in exchanging ideas and perspectives.

You can follow and connect with us to learn more about our approach:

Youssef Oufaska, Co-founder at Lean Improvements
Jose Molina, Delivery Management Expert