Great products come from teams that are aligned from the top down. I consult with executive and stakeholder teams to bring them into lock-step about what they are building, for which users, and why. The results? Empowered teams, incredible products, and customers who happily do the things that make your business thrive.

I wrote two books about traditional, data-driven personas, and I haven’t followed my own advice since. That’s because I now focus on personas as a solution to a higher-level problem than data communication, and I’ve invented a new Alignment Persona process to solve it.

Bad user experiences account for 9 of the top 20 reasons startups fail. If you are a startups, or you are investing in startups, why aren’t you evaluating the UX strategy, team, process, and progress as carefully as you’re examining the code?