Signal Aligment

You turn on an old school radio. The static sizzles loudly in the air. Tuning the knob, you hear scattered sounds struggling to emerge. You keep tuning until you find it—the signal in the noise. The clarity is beautiful; the sound humming in perfect harmony in the open air.

That’s what alignment feels like. The perfect clarity when everyone is moving in the same direction. Momentum builds and compounds into an unstoppable force of forward motion.

I was added to an email thread discussing a key product change. There was a chorus of comments, opinions, and directions. Nothing about the thread was cohesive.

And then the question spawned:

When can we expect this to be done?

Ah, the age-old-and-impossible-to-answer question. It’s a trap! This is software, a type of complex work riddled with unknowns.

It’s all guesswork until you do the work.

Yet we need an answer. Something to point to; to reason with; to agree upon. We need a solution to appease stakeholders, set expectations, and feel safe—lulled into a false sense of confidence by an unreasonable timeline. Thus the date is set, despite its illusion of safety.

I managed it as best I could. I talked with the engineer, dissected the work, and walked backwards into what felt like a reasonable timeline to complete the work. But even more importantly, I reset expectations for what the engineer was currently working on. A subtle verbal confirmation to align; a slight adjustment of the dial to remove the noise.

If you don’t, what happens? The work stacks up like a pile of endless laundry. But work can’t be delivered on time without trade-offs. You can’t add scope and keep the schedule without either:

• Reducing scope: current or added scope.
• Adding resources: time, money, people.

The scope was fixed, so we increased the time on the competing project. I reminded stakeholders that, by saying yes to this work, we’re saying no to the other work (for now); an important reminder that priority is a continuously evolving current of negotiation. If everything is a priority, nothing is. It’s a sea of noise.

I sent a clear message that detailed:

• What work we’re doing.
• When we expect it to be complete.
• What second-order effects this creates.

I converted the noise into a signal to align the team and build momentum.

This idea is called Signal Alignment.

It lives in the 🐍 Clarity Current of the Claritorium.

• 🦉 Clarity Codex (Structure): The hidden structure of clarity. Models, language, and frameworks that guide intuition and decision-making.
• 🐍 Clarity Current (Motion): The invisible force of clarity. Roles, rhythms, and relationships that activate and sustain clarity.
• 🦎 Clarity Climate (Environment): The emergent environment of clarity. Behaviors, values, and patterns that make clarity natural, resilient, and scalable.

(Read more at claritorium.com.)

The three pillars of Signal Alignment:

1. Context Collection: Noise is the raw material to capture without judgment.
2. Signal Conversion: Clarity comes from converting scattered inputs into structured signals.
3. Aligned Action: Signals synchronize direction so the team moves together.

Context Collection

The saying “content is king” was popularized by Bill Gates in a 1996 essay titled, “Content is King,” predicting the immense economic importance of content on the internet. The quality of the internet product was proportional to the quality of the content.

The same is true of decisions.

The quality of your decisions are dependent on the quality of the context. Context is king.

This is the time when the noise is the highest. But it’s actually a good thing because noise, albeit overwhelming at times, is information. And before you can do anything with it, you need to capture all the raw material you can.

Don’t filter it. Just let it in.

Context is the surrounding information that gives meaning to the signal. It’s not the signal itself, but the conditions, history, and details that shape how the signal is interpreted.

Context is:

1. Relational and living between things—like an email, a screenshot, or other data point. There’s no meaning unless you understand how it relates to something.
2. Layered at different depths: from the surface (what was said) to the surrounding (who said it) to the systemic (how it connects to other elements like goals and constraints).
3. Abundant and easy to find, but also easy to drown out the signal.

Context isn’t the message. It’s what makes the message matter.

We’re working on a major new feature and the team was testing it on staging. A barrage of messages came through to report bugs. There were screenshots and videos. It was noise.

While the noise is information—the context fuel to make good decisions—it needs to be converted into something meaningful.

The team was pinging the engineers directly with every message, expecting them to parse all the data. It was distraction. It came through a single thread, carrying a high cognitive cost for engineers already burdened with the cognitive weight of doing the complex work.

So I stepped in.

Signal Conversion

I offered a suggestion:

Add the feedback in Linear to organize with the development tasks.

Within my first 30 days, I moved the team from Jira to Linear. This isn’t the first time I’ve migrated a product team into a new tool. In fact, I’ve done it many times before. And while I’m generally tool-agnostic, I find Jira to be in active opposition to effective product development. It’s also the only software I’ve ever used that gets worse each time I use it (personal opinion), dating back to over 10 years ago when I first used it. Yet somehow it remains the preeminent choice for managing product development work. I still can’t understand why.

But I digress.

This isn’t about Jira; or Linear; or whatever tool you use. It’s about finding an appropriate place to convert the noise into a signal. When the team was adding endless messages without organization, they risked losing the rich context. The signal is embedded in there, but you can’t find it unless you organize it in a way that allows you to shape it.

This is where the magic happens.

I often describe my role as a translator. I take information in one context and translate it into another context. This is the conversion process. It’s how you shift the raw material into a clear direction that drives the team forward. Just like a real-life translator taking one language and translating it into another language, it creates shared meaning. The engineers shouldn’t have to perform the translation of feedback. They need to stay focused on solving problems, from converting the unknowns (problems) into knowns (solutions)—their own venture of translation. Defining the priority of the work is where I focus my energy. It creates clear signals for engineers to focus on.

When a bug is reported in a chat message, it starts as noise. It’s an expression of the problem in one person’s individual language. There’s no shared meaning yet. It requires translation.

The act of creating an issue in Linear requires definition:

• You create a named issue with a clear title.
• You write a clear description to describe the work.
• You add the issue in context next to the surrounding work.

The ceremony is necessary friction for thoughtful intention. A chat message is just a stream of consciousness expressed rapidly. The issue requires deliberation. You’re forced to slow down and think about how to describe the problem within the larger context of the project. You slow down to speed up.

The noise is the stream of chat messages. The signal is the conversion into a defined task.

The same thing happened when I was responding to the stakeholder email to determine the project timeline. I translated the noise—the context as raw material—into a signal, which was the parameters of the work (requirements, engineering input) expressed as scheduled work on a specific timeline.

But Signal Conversion alone doesn’t guarantee alignment.

Aligned Action

Organized clarity for one is not shared clarity for many. Clarity must scale.

In order to gain alignment, multiple people must accept and orient around the same signals. If there’s disagreement about the signals, you’re not aligned. If noise is the raw material where signals are created, then signals are the raw material where alignment is created.

And that’s what you’re after: shared clarity for everyone. True alignment. Shared alignment against agreed-upon signals creates collective motion for the team. Motion is movement that generates momentum, and momentum is the multiplier for impactful work.

When I responded to the stakeholder email with a clear plan for the work, I showed the team a map. But in order to create alignment, everyone needs to use the same map and walk the same direction. A stakeholder responded with a clarification (more context), but confirmed the map and direction. Aligned Action created.

The influx of team feedback (noise) was converted into defined issues (signals). But the alignment derives from shared meaning. When we met as a team to review the work, I shared my screen to talk through the work in Linear. Each piece of feedback was captured as a single sub-issue, nested underneath the larger scope of work. My favorite way to make sure we’re all using the same map is by looking at the same thing.

If you’re a remote team, share your screen. It’s deceptively simple, yet incredibly effective.

We looked at the same information, built a shared mental model, and defined shared meaning—the same map pointing us in the same direction. Just like the email response, we created Aligned Action to move forward together with compounding momentum.

The Force Multiplier

A team is a concentration of energy, a powerful force of shared effort, skill, and attention that generates impactful outcomes. Alignment is the force multiplier.

A team without alignment is like a flashlight: broad, diffuse, limited impact.

A team with alignment is like a laser: coherent, concentrated, capable of cutting through steel.

The energy is the same, but the alignment determines the power.

Ten people running in ten different directions generates movement, yet little progress. But a team of ten people running in the same direction creates compounding momentum. Alignment is exponential, like rowing in tight synchronization to make a boat accelerate with less perceived effort. All the energy is channeled collectively into a single force of action.

To create this force, start by collecting context. Take the raw, unfiltered noise and capture it in a single space. Use that noise to find the signal and align your team. An aligned team is an impactful team, transforming energy as activity into energy as collective impact.

It begins with Signal Alignment.