A cross-functional alignment exercise Julia Barham recommends running with peer leaders (product, business, design, data) — not solo — to explicitly agree on three things:
The exercise exists because these assumptions are usually implicit and diverge silently across functions as a team scales.
Related: "Don't Scale Chaos" (Leader-as-Bottleneck Mistake), Stakeholder Canvas, Laddering (Strategy-Alignment Diagnostic).
Barham stresses this exercise only works as a joint exercise across the full set of cross-functional leaders (product, engineering, design, and whichever commercial partners are relevant) — not something a single leader fills out alone and hands down. It's the exercise she reaches for specifically when scaling a team or stepping into one where roles and ownership have gone unclear, which is also when the temptation to just decide it yourself is highest. Her line on this: "You cannot do it by yourself. It will never work if you try something like that without your partners."