Why Product, Marketing, and HR Aren’t Aligned
The Problem:
The larger the organization the more disjointed the REASON for decisions becomes. The product team builds features. Marketing folks write messages. HR is busy designing programs. And the C-Suite focuses on strategy and rules.
And they're all guessing about different things.
That's because most organizations look at the people they are making decisions about using nothing more than surface traits. Demographics. Channels. Job titles. Geographies. Shallow stuff, really, although it looks clean in a spreadsheet. But it doesn't actually give you the power to make the right decisions – decisions that will impact outcomes – across all departments.
Harvard Business Review addressed this in "Psychographics Are Just as Important for Marketers as Demographics" by Alexandra Samuel (2016). The article explains that psychographic segmentation bundles personality traits, lifestyle, and values together. But here's the problem the article inadvertently reveals: treating values as just one factor among many dilutes their predictive power. Demographics tell you who your customers are. Psychographics try to tell you why they buy. But when you bury values inside a catch-all category, you miss what actually drives decisions. That's why Valuegraphics was created as a standalone framework – because values are too important to be just another data point.
The Hack:
Run a cross-team values workshop. Pick one team outside your own. Sales, HR, product, operations. Doesn't matter. Get everyone in a room and ask: "What matters most to our audience? What do they value?" Then compare answers, and watch how wildly they diverge.
That divergence is where misalignment lives. That's where messages contradict each other. It's why product priorities often clash with sales promises. It's how HR programs end up feeling disconnected from what actually motivates people. But if you fix that misalignment, work gets easier everywhere:
Product & UX: Journeys feel intuitive because they reflect what people expect and trust.
Marketing & Sales: Messages resonate because they "just make sense" to people, and avoid demographic stereotypes.
HR & Leadership: Onboarding, feedback, and recognition all work better when they match the shared values of your workforce.
Public Policy & Social Impact: Communities feel ownership in changes that need to take place.
Change & Innovation: Buy-in comes faster because plans speak to what influences people and what drives them.
Here's what most people don't know: For centuries, anyone could pick a word and call it a "value." Now we have data. There are exactly 56 statistically verified human values that drive all behavior. Not 55. Not 100. Fifty-six. And demographics don't predict which ones matter most to any given group. Valuegraphics do.
Ready to turn that values workshop into a system-wide playbook backed by real data? Talk to The Valuegraphics Research Company. We have the world's only accurate database of what engages and influences any group of people anywhere on earth. We'll show you what matters most.
Values are the answer. Let’s put them to work.