How Tech Leaders Use Shared Cadence to Improve Strategy Execution

This is part one of two articles on aligning business and technology through shared strategy execution frameworks.

Authors: Aaron McKenna, Alex Ballarin, Frederic Moreau, Marga Lenten – van Boxtel, and Tristan Pelloux

For many organizations, tech and strategy still move at different speeds. Management define strategic priorities and desired business outcomes, while technology teams operate through delivery cycles optimized for speed, learning, and change. When the stragic objectives are not well-aligned with the tech roadmap, when strategy and tech are not connected, they struggle to translate into tangible outcomes. What begins as a clear ambition to create value often ends in fragmented initiatives, delayed decisions, and unclear accountability.

This first part examines how shared cadence between business and technology affects strategy execution maturity across all five SEM360 dimensions, using technology planning and delivery as a concrete execution use case. Technology leadership plays a decisive role in strategy execution, not as a function to optimize, but as a system through which strategy is translated into business outcomes.

Technology is one of the core enablers through which strategy is delivered, alongside governance, operating cadence, learning loops, and team empowerment. When technology planning is disconnected from strategic priorities, execution weakens across the organization, regardless of how strong the strategy looks on paper. In SEM360 terms, this disconnect simultaneously weakens an organization’s strategy execution maturity across all dimensions: Align (clarity of intent), Execute (delivery discipline), Improve (learning loops), Scale (repeatability), and Empower (ownership).

The challenge is that most organizations still lack a shared cadence and language between business and technology. Strategy is reviewed annually, funding is locked in early, while technology delivery evolves continuously. Without an explicit strategy execution framework to connect these layers, misalignment becomes structural rather than accidental.

Why Shared Cadence Matters for Strategy Execution

The modern CTO is both strategist and operator. Beyond keeping systems secure and teams efficient, they often must ensure that every dollar spent on technology contributes to measurable business outcomes. Without strong alignment between business and technology, innovation turns experimental and fragmented. Misalignment also creates a situation where technology teams deliver work labeled as innovation, yet it does not match what the business expects in terms of value, speed, or usability, revealing that both sides often interpret the same goals differently.

The challenge is both operational and cultural. Business leaders often see technology as a cost center or delivery function, while IT teams may view business goals as abstract or shifting. This mutual misunderstanding creates naturally a cycle of misalignment. Strategy updates annually, while technology evolves continuously and can deliver at a weekly pace, even faster. Portfolio funding follows static budgets in most cases, even though market dynamics require agility. Within SEM360, this reflects low empowerement, where teams deliver work but do not own outcomes or decisions.

Alignment changes everything

When technology and business plan on the same cadence, organizations gain agility without losing direction. Product teams understand the business impact behind their priorities, while executives gain visibility into the value created by each delivery cyclce. This strengthens alignment through shared intent and execution through clearer priorities.

Tech leaders are uniquely positioned to lead this shift. In most businesses, technology is a core attribute and therefore they control the systems, data, and delivery mechanisms that turn strategy into action. Tech leaders are often part of the management team which gives them authority to drive change. By introducing shared language, planning rhythms, and governance structures, they can transform the organization’s ability to execute at speed and scale.

The Role of Technology in Strategy Execution Maturity

These tensions between tech and strategy are not accidental and not that uncommon. They are characteristic of organizations operating at lower levels of strategy execution maturity, where planning, governance, and delivery systems are not yet integrated.

These disconnects map directly to common strategy execution failure points seen in low-maturity strategy execution systems. Most organizations struggle with five recurring disconnects between business and technology. Each of these disconnects maps to breakdowns across all five SEM360 dimensions, reinforcing one another.

Five Common Disconnects That Undermine Strategy Execution

1. Different planning horizons

Strategy is often set on an annual cycle, with fixed budgets and targets. Technology teams plan with quarterly and weekly cadences, adjusting as new dependencies or discoveries arise. The mismatch creates tension when business leaders expect stability and predictability while engineers need flexibility.

OKRs are designed to bridge this gap by linking long-term strategic objectives to short-term execution, a critical mechanism in mature strategy execution systems. When business and technology co-own OKRs, they become a shared cadence rather than an additional layer of reporting.

In organizations with mature strategy execution, the Strategy Execution Leaders, this shared cadence is a prerequisite for consistently delivering above and beyond their goals.

2. Language barriers

Executives talk about customer outcomes and revenue impact. Tech developers talk about velocity, requirements, and technical debt. These languages describe different realities, and without translation, conversations stay misaligned.

In the most extreme cases, both sides seem to use the same words while describing entirely different things. The terminology looks similar, but the intent, measures, and mental models behind it diverge sharply.

3. Budget rigidity

Annual funding cycles limit adaptability. Once budgets are approved, they tend to remain fixed regardless of shifting priorities, new information, or emerging opportunities. This creates a situation where teams continue executing projects that no longer reflect strategic intent, simply because the money has already been allocated.

Meanwhile, promising initiatives are delayed until the next planning cycle, even when the market or customer needs evolve at a much faster pace. Over time, this rigidity creates a widening gap between where investments go and where value is actually created.

This rigidity prevents strategy execution from scaling. Even when teams perform well locally, the organization cannot reallocate resources dynamically across the portfolio, which is a core requirement of the Scale dimension in the SEM360 assessment.

4. Output focus

Organizations often measure success through features delivered, milestones achieved, or systems deployed, rather than through customer or business outcomes. This output bias encourages teams to prioritize activity over impact, leading to roadmaps filled with deliverables that may not meaningfully advance the strategy.

In many organizations this bias is reinforced by incentives that reward hitting scope, schedule, and budget, which strengthens the habit of valuing delivery over real outcomes.

It also reinforces a culture where delivery is perceived as the finish line, even if the delivered work does not solve the underlying problem or is used by the customer. As a result, technology investments appear productive on paper while offering limited real value in practice, masking deeper strategy execution issues.

5. Governance misfit

Portfolio management systems are usually designed for predictability and control, not for learning and adaptation. Progress is evaluated on whether predefined milestones are met, regardless of whether those milestones still represent the best route to value.

Decision gates often slow things down rather than enabling informed adjustments, creating a dynamic where teams escalate for permission instead of escalating insights. This reinforces a compliance-driven model of delivery, where the goal becomes staying on plan rather than understanding whether the plan is still the right one. In the SEM360 assessment, this constrains the ability to score high in all of the dimensions (Align, Execute, Improve, Scale, and Empower) simultaneously.

These gaps reinforce one another. The more rigid the system, the less visibility business leaders have into actual outcomes. Over time, delivery becomes a compliance exercise, and strategy becomes disconnected from the realities of execution.

At scale, governance must enable learning across teams, not enforce static control. Without this shift, execution maturity plateaus regardless of delivery capability.

Five Moves for CTOs to Bridge Strategy and Technology

Together, these moves act as execution levers that raise maturity across all SEM360 dimensions, aligning intent, strengthening delivery, accelerating learning, enabling scale, and reinforcing ownership.

Closing this gap does not require a complete transformation. CTOs can start with five practical moves that create shared rhythm and focus.

1. Use OKRs to Frame Agile Work

Objectives and Key Results translate strategy into measurable outcomes. By aligning quarterly OKRs with strategic planning or quarterly roadmap reviews, technology teams can anchor their product and sprints’ goals to clear business results. For example, a Key Result such as “Reduce onboarding time by 25%” gives delivery teams flexibility in how they achieve it while maintaining focus on impact.

2. Create a Shared Language

Start small by defining a clear glossary for cross-functional collaboration. Terms like Objective, Key Result, Outcome, and Epic should have consistent meanings across the organization. The goal is to create clarity of intent. Teams should know whether they are working toward a feature, a customer benefit, or a measurable business outcome. A shared glossary may sound simple, but it is the foundation of alignment.

3. Connect Strategic and Agile Cadences

Synchronize planning cycles so that strategy, portfolio, and delivery teams meet regularly on compatible timelines. A common pattern is annual direction, quarterly OKRs, and two-week sprints. Each level of planning informs and adjusts the next. This cadence interlock ensures that long-term strategy and short-term work inform each other. Shared cadence supports every SEM360 dimension by stabilising direction, execution, learning, scale, and decision rights.

4. Build Outcome-Based Roadmaps

Traditional roadmaps list features and milestones. Outcome-based roadmaps articulate hypotheses and expected results. They shift planning from scope management to value creation. This approach also improves prioritization, since the discussion moves from “what to build next” to “which outcomes matter most.”

5. Reinvent Governance Around Evidence

Replace annual gate reviews with quarterly evidence reviews that focus on learning and value creation. These reviews should involve Finance and Business leaders, not just IT. Decisions should consider validated outcomes rather than adherence to initial plans. This creates an adaptive funding model where investment follows impact. In SEM360, for your organization to become a Strategy Execution Leader, this is where the Improve and Scale dimensions must converge by turning learning into a portfolio-level capability while reinforcing teams’ empowerment through trust in evidence.

Five Moves for CTOs to Bridge Strategy and Technology

Even well-intentioned alignment efforts can fail if they repeat old patterns in new language. CTOs should watch for several common pitfalls.

Treating OKRs as reporting tools. When OKRs become another dashboard, they lose their power to guide focus. Teams start gaming metrics or setting easy targets. Keep OKRs ambitious and directly tied to customer or business value.

Maintaining the project mindset. Many organizations continue to manage through projects instead of products. Projects end; products evolve. Moving to a product-based operating model allows teams to iterate continuously and sustain ownership of outcomes.

Focusing on tools before meaning. Implementing new platforms or templates without clarity of purpose only adds complexity. Alignment starts with understanding, not software configuration.

Ignoring leadership continuity. Alignment depends on consistent sponsorship. When leaders change priorities mid-quarter or skip cadence reviews, teams lose trust in the process. CTOs must model the discipline they expect from others.

Underestimating cultural inertia. Shifting from delivery to outcomes challenges existing norms. Some leaders may resist transparency, and some teams may fear accountability. Change requires coaching, not just new structures.

Maintaining the feature factory team mindset. Tech teams that are used to deliver features dictated from external stakeholders find it difficult to take the ownership and accountability needed. CTOs must facilitate their transition to true product teams.

By anticipating these pitfalls, CTOs can sustain the momentum of change and prevent alignment efforts from becoming another short-lived initiative.

Proof That Shared Cadence Improves Execution

Evidence from organizations that have bridged this divide shows measurable improvement in both performance and engagement.

A global cybersecurity company implemented quarterly OKRs linked to strategic planning and product roadmaps. Each Key Result corresponded to a tangible business outcome such as customer retention or product reliability. Within six months, executive reviews focused on progress toward outcomes rather than activity completion. Delivery teams gained autonomy, and business leaders gained confidence in technology’s contribution to results.

Another example comes from a digital banking group that aligned its quarterly planning process across strategy, product, and engineering. By integrating OKRs into sprint reviews and portfolio governance, they reduced redundant initiatives by 20% and accelerated decision-making cycles by 30%.

What distinguishes these examples is not isolated success, but repeatability. The same planning logic, governance rhythm, and outcome language applied consistently across teams, products, and investment decisions. This is the practical example of scaling strategy execution best practices across an organization rather than having one-off occurrences.

Metrics that signal Execution Maturity:

• One clear North Star metric, such as customer adoption, ARR growth, or market share.
• Three to five health metrics covering team morale, system reliability, and technical debt.
• Learning velocity, tracking how quickly teams validate assumptions.

Together, these metrics provide signals across all five SEM360 dimensions. These indicators demonstrate whether alignment is improving performance, not just compliance.

The Path Forward for Leaders

When cadence, language, and evidence are shared, organizations progress well across all five SEM360 dimensions simultaneously. Bridging business and technology is not about merging functions. It is about strengthening the operating system through which strategy is executed. When technology planning is deliberately tied to strategic priorities, execution becomes faster, clearer, and more resilient.

For CTOs, this is a leadership shift. The role extends beyond delivery excellence to shaping how the organization aligns, learns, and adapts. When technology teams plan on the same cadence as strategy, use shared outcome language, and govern decisions through evidence, they become a force multiplier for execution.

This is where strategy becomes tangible. Technology is no longer an outlier topic, it is a central enabler of strategy execution maturity. As AI and automation accelerate delivery capacity, clarity of purpose and outcome focus become even more critical. Organizations that succeed will be those where strategy, product, and technology operate as one execution system, moving together from intent to impact.

Strategy translated to product and technology becomes a true enabler: That is how strategy becomes execution and technology becomes transformation.