Getting buy-in: Aligning Your Vision with What Others Value

Whether you're building an Experience Measurement program or starting any new initiative, you'll inevitably need to secure buy-in. The bigger and more innovative your project, the more support you'll need to make it a reality. Buy-in doesn't just help you get the work done—it creates advocates who help your vision spread throughout the company.

Securing support from two key stakeholder types is crucial:

Executive champions are your leadership-level sponsors who can enable your team and lend your vision credibility. They smooth the path forward by securing resources and advocating for your work at higher levels.

On-the-ground operators provide equally essential support. Top-down backing can fall flat if the people doing the daily work don't recognize your program's value. You'll need buy-in from cross-functional team members and your own team to transform vision into reality.

One major lesson I've learned throughout my career: getting buy-in isn't about me. Yes, I have my own goals and want my team to succeed. But the secret ingredient always comes down to aligning with what matters to my stakeholders. This requires genuine empathy—knowing and actually caring about their priorities, not just my own objectives.

And simply put: be nice. Even in high-performance corporate cultures, building strong relationships makes achieving goals easier and more enjoyable.

All the tactics I share below rest on this foundation.

Investing in a new program or adopting new workflows is a leap of faith. To instill that faith in others, you need to share a compelling vision of what your program can accomplish. The catch? For your vision to resonate, it must reflect what your audience cares about (remember my point about empathy?).

An ambitious vision can recruit leadership sponsors by demonstrating how your program helps them achieve their organizational goals. Just as importantly, a long-term vision helps your team connect their daily work with deeper meaning.

Evangelizing an ambitious vision is critical, but that vision quickly loses credibility without delivery. This creates a challenging balancing act, and I often find myself shifting between spokesperson and orchestrator modes. Demonstrating your vision's impact early—even in small ways—builds trust in your ability to make it reality.

Focus stakeholders who already "get it." Early in my measurement career, I advocated using experience metrics as guardrails in A/B testing, arguing that short-term conversion wins aren’t worth creating worse customer experiences long-term. This argument didn't resonate with most product managers initially. Eventually, my team partnered with a product group working to make pricing more transparent. Their experiments often decreased conversion but made the site more trustworthy by exposing hidden fees upfront. This team became an early adopter of experience measurement and helped champion it organization-wide.

This principle is straightforward but powerful: when you recruit champions to your cause, recognize and celebrate their contributions to your team's success. Recognition and appreciation can transform one-off collaborations into long-term partnerships that benefit everyone.

Work with other teams with similar goals. For instance, I've collaborated closely with Voice of Customer (VoC) leaders to build and scale experience measurement programs. There's strength in numbers—pooling resources helps work scale more quickly, while leveraging each other's stakeholder networks creates wider impact.

Building momentum for a new program requires persistence, relationship-building, and strategic thinking. Start with empathy to understand stakeholder priorities, paint a compelling vision aligned with their goals, secure early wins to demonstrate value, share credit generously, and partner with natural allies. Remember that transformative initiatives rarely succeed in isolation—they thrive through collaboration. By thoughtfully cultivating champions at both executive and operational levels, you create a foundation not just for program approval, but for lasting organizational change.