Introduction to the Strategy Graph
Understanding Your Organisation’s Strategies in Motion
See how initiatives and metrics connect across Monoscope Canvases to form a living system.
Connect Work and OutcomesLearn how Monoscope analyses these connections to surface leverage and insight.
Reason Across the SystemDiscover how the Strategy Graph supports alignment without slowing autonomy.
Align AutonomouslyWhat Is the Strategy Graph?
The Strategy Graph is Monoscope’s system-level representation of your organisation’s and team´s strategies. It connects every initiative (output) and metric (outcome) across all Monoscope Canvases into one unified network — a living model of how your organisation learns, executes, and evolves.
Where metrics show outcomes and initiatives define planned work, Monoscope Canvases connect them — mapping how initiatives aim to drive results. The Strategy Graph unites these connections across every canvas, revealing one living system of interconnected strategies.
It’s the connective layer that transforms scattered planning and measurement into a coherent system of learning — one that evolves continuously as teams test, deliver, and measure.
Figure 1 — The Strategy Graph connects all initiatives and metrics across Monoscope Canvases into a single, living system.
Why It Exists
Most organisations suffer from strategic fragmentation:
- Teams chase their own KPIs, without knowing the long-term impact towards the organisation’s goals.
- Roadmaps drift into output factories.
- Teams keep adding tools and reports faster than they create shared understanding.
This creates what Itamar Gilad and John Cutler call the Feature Factory problem — a pattern where work outputs replace learning, and teams execute without understanding system-level impact.
The Strategy Graph is designed to break that cycle — by reconnecting how work, outcomes, and dependencies interact across the system.
It gives teams and leaders a shared view of:
- How initiatives influence outcomes
- How metrics reinforce each other
- Where strategy compounds — or conflicts
- What parts of the system are under- or over-leveraged
By connecting effort and impact through visible relationships, it replaces activity metrics with systemic insight — the same shift behind frameworks like the North Star Metric, Growth Loops, and KPI Trees.
How It Works
Every Monoscope Canvas contributes its relationships — between initiatives and metrics — to the Strategy Graph. These connections describe how work drives change, forming a network of cause and effect.
1. Relationships
Each link adds meaning:
- Initiative → Metric — what a team believes they can influence
- Metric → Metric — how system outcomes interact
- Initiative → Initiative — how initiatives enable or depend on each other
2. Aggregation
The Strategy Graph continuously aggregates these relationships from across all canvases, keeping a live map of your organisation’s strategic system.
3. System-Level Learning
Every connection strengthens the organisation’s shared understanding of how strategy actually works in practice.
Figure 2 — Example Strategy Graph for a running app. Initiatives (left) influence system metrics (center) which roll up into business outcomes (right).
“Every connection you make between a initiative and a metric teaches the graph more about how your organisation works.”
What It Enables
The Strategy Graph powers the analytical and strategic intelligence inside Monoscope.
1. Cross-Board Analyses
Because the graph unifies relationships across all canvases, Monoscope can run analyses (like Initiative Impact, Driver, or Growth Loop) that reason across domains — revealing system-wide dependencies.
2. Conflict Detection
If multiple teams push on the same metric in opposing ways, or if dependencies are missing, Monoscope surfaces those inconsistencies directly in the graph.
3. Systemic Leverage Mapping
You can see which metrics or initiatives act as hubs of influence — the connections with outsized systemic importance.
4. Strategic Coherence
The graph aligns distributed teams under a shared understanding of how their work contributes to organisational outcomes — embodying Aligned Autonomy rather than siloed execution.
Using the Strategy Graph for Alignment
Alignment is one of the hardest problems in any growing organisation. Teams need autonomy to move fast — but without a shared view of how their work connects, autonomy turns into drift.
The Strategy Graph provides that shared view. It gives everyone — from ICs to leadership — a transparent model of how the organisation’s strategies interact to create outcomes.
Instead of forcing alignment through process or hierarchy, it enables aligned autonomy — each team moves independently, but within a shared understanding of the system they’re part of.
1. A Shared Map of Strategic Intent
Every connection between a initiative and a metric expresses a belief:
“If we do this, it should move that.”
When these beliefs are captured across Monoscope Canvases, the Strategy Graph becomes a collective map of intent — showing how teams expect their work to influence company outcomes.
Figure 3 — Each Monoscope Canvas expresses a local strategy. The Strategy Graph unifies these beliefs into a shared map of organisational intent.
This shared map helps teams:
- See where their work contributes to larger goals
- Identify overlapping efforts or conflicting initiatives
- Understand how their domain connects to others
Alignment shifts from meetings and slide decks to a shared, living model that everyone can navigate.
2. Preventing Strategic Drift
As teams grow, roadmaps often evolve faster than strategy does. The Strategy Graph counteracts this drift by making relationships explicit and continuously visible.
When a team adds a new initiative, Monoscope instantly shows:
- Which metrics it aims to move
- Whether those metrics are already influenced by other initiatives
- If the initiative supports or conflicts with existing strategic directions
This continuous feedback loop keeps local decisions aligned with global intent — without slowing teams down.
3. Facilitating Cross-Team Collaboration
In many organisations, cross-team dependencies emerge too late — only after launch plans collide. By surfacing relationships early, the Strategy Graph helps teams coordinate before conflicts arise.
Figure 4 — Example of multiple dependency chains in a subscription funnel. The Strategy Graph makes system-level relationships visible across teams.
For example:
- Two product teams might discover they’re influencing the same retention metric.
- A marketing initiative may depend on a product initiative being delivered first.
- A platform improvement may unlock several downstream initiatives.
The graph makes these dependencies visible system-wide — reducing misalignment, duplicated effort, and last-minute prioritisation crises.
The Philosophy Behind It
The Strategy Graph is inspired by a lineage of strategic and product thinking that reframes execution as part of a learning system — not just a delivery pipeline.
Monoscope operationalises these philosophies — making them measurable, interactive, and continuous.
It builds on ideas from:
- Feature Factory Avoidance — shifting from shipping output to learning from outcomes (Itamar Gilad , John Cutler )
- North Star Frameworks — connecting product metrics to company value (Amplitude )
- KPI Trees — bridging the gap between customer behavior, product metrics, and company goals (Petra Wille )
- Growth Loops — recognising feedback systems that drive compounding progress (Reforge )
- Systems Thinking in Product Strategy — mapping leverage and feedback rather than arbitrary KPIs (DoubleLoop )
- Aligned Autonomy — enabling teams to move independently within shared strategic structure (Peerspective )
The Strategy Graph vs Traditional Planning
| Traditional Approach | Strategy Graph Approach |
|---|---|
| Metrics and initiatives tracked separately | Metrics and initiatives form a connected system |
| Reports and dashboards for observation | Monoscope Canvases for reasoning and connection |
| Roadmaps as static artifacts | Canvases as living models |
| Strategy reviewed quarterly | Strategy continuously learned from |
| Teams optimising locally | Organisation reasoning globally |
From Graph to Intelligence
The Strategy Graph isn’t just visual — it’s analytical.
1. Structural Analysis
Monoscope runs analyses that trace influence across relationships to find leverage points.
2. System Detection
It identifies compounding systems like Growth Loops.
3. Decision Support
It powers tools like Initiative Impact, Driver Analysis, and Marketing Mix Optimisation.
Each analysis queries the graph — translating connections into strategic signal. The richer and more accurate your relationships, the more powerful your analyses become.
A System of Continuous Strategy
Most strategy frameworks fail because they freeze in time — they rely on quarterly rituals instead of continuous learning. The Strategy Graph, by contrast, evolves continuously — as initiatives complete, metrics move, and relationships change.
1. Canvases describe intent
Teams define what they plan to achieve and how.
2. Data validates effect
Metrics reveal what truly changed.
3. Relationships bind them together
The Strategy Graph learns how your system behaves.
Over time, the Strategy Graph becomes a precise reflection of how your company grows and learns — a map not of your plans, but of your strategies in motion.
For deeper context, see Continuous Roadmapping by John Cutler.
Strategy is a system of systems. The Strategy Graph is where those systems become visible, measurable, and alive.