Hidden Assumptions About the Goals

When Unspoken priorities Derail Alignment

Most SaaS companies have learned to define company-wide goals as part of their annual planning process. As we discussed earlier, clarity of goals is a fundamental prerequisite for building a functioning Plan of Record (PoR). The PoR is your mechanism for aligning work and resources in order to achieve those goals — ideally with strong consensus and shared understanding across the leadership team.

But sometimes, the goals on paper aren’t the ones driving decisions in reality.

A common scenario goes like this: The company’s goals focus on driving new business, expanding the market, launching new products, and achieving long-term growth. The PoR is structured to support these initiatives. Yet, time and time again, your team is asked to stop what they’re doing and respond to large customer escalations, often with a directive that these must take priority — even when doing so derails your roadmap.

What’s going on?

In many cases, there is a hidden assumption operating behind the scenes. The most common one is a fear that new business growth isn’t going to be strong enough, and therefore the business cannot afford to lose any large renewals. So while the stated goals are all about expansion, the real behavior suggests that customer retention is the silent top priority. That misalignment creates friction — and chaos.

Sometimes, this fear is entirely rational based on market dynamics. In that case, the hidden assumption should be surfaced and made explicit so that everyone — from R&D to GTM — is clear that large customer retention takes precedence over new business development when trade-offs must be made.

But other times, this misalignment is cultural. In sales-driven cultures, there may be a deeply embedded bias to prioritize whatever it takes to “win the big deal” — whether it’s a competitive bid or a renewal — regardless of its alignment with long-term strategy.

What Can You Do?

Use your PoR to escalate the decision to the executive team in a constructive and non-emotional way. The act of mapping visible work against stated goals — and showing where they don’t align — creates space for important conversations.

In the best case, this process surfaces and resolves the hidden assumptions, allowing the team to move forward with shared clarity.

In the harder case, it reveals a lack of trust-based culture at the executive level, where no one feels safe enough to challenge the assumptions or open the conversation. If that’s the case, you’ll need to view this as a long game. The PoR still helps — by exposing misalignment without blame. Over time, that clarity builds pressure for deeper conversations about strategy and focus.

Up Next: Another common derailment happens when executive teams lean too hard on ROI calculations to make prioritization decisions — often at the expense of foundational platform investments. Let’s take a closer look at that next.