Giving teams relative autonomy by operating a system using subtle control means we have to devise ways of creating alignment within our organization. If our team is to be successful, it has to understand its purpose and how it fits with the rest of the group. 

The following diagram shows a typical organizational hierarchy of strategic intent:

An organization's mission or purpose is the reason it exists. It rarely changes and is often defined in a single sentence. We mentioned a few prominent companies and their purpose in Chapter 5, Bootstrap Teams with Liftoffs; here are those examples again:

• Google: To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
• Tesla: To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy
• Kickstarter: To help bring creative projects to life

An organization's vision is a short statement indicating how it intends to realize its purpose or mission. A vision statement is usually relevant for several years and defines the current organizational strategy for carrying out its mission.

The strategic goals are often set annually, activities that will likely tie into the beginning of the financial year as it will usually involve a funding round. The annual goals should answer the question: How are we going to enact our strategy this year?

Objectives are quarterly milestones on our strategic roadmap, which we send to our teams to align them with our strategic intent. 

Jason Yip, an Agile Coach at Spotify, defines alignment as Intent + Rationale + Constraints (https://www.slideshare.net/jchyip/enabling-autonomy-at-spotify).

The following diagram gives an example of alignment for an online retail company:

In this section, we'll look at how we can set objectives for creating alignment and get feedback on our success by tracking our progress against meaningful measurements.