Roadmap 2026 | Step 1: The Team | Issue #106 | 14 January 2026

Procurement teams should not be designed around today’s workload.
They must be designed around the organisation’s forward-looking mandate.

Before discussing skills, roles, or development plans, procurement leadership requires clarity on one foundational question:
What is the organisation aiming to achieve in 2026 and beyond?

This first deep-dive of the Procurement Roadmap 2026 series focuses on the starting point of effective procurement strategy: the team.

Core premise:
Procurement organisation design is not an HR exercise. It is a direct derivative of corporate goals.

Episode #106 examines:

Procurement cannot define its future role in isolation.
Step 1 is to reconstruct the organisation’s strategic direction for 2026.

In January, the annual report of the prior business year is often not yet published. Procurement leadership therefore typically relies on a structured combination of sources.

Primary sources

Operational “inside information” sources

The objective is not perfect information.
The objective is a directionally correct understanding of where the organisation is heading.

Once organisational goals are understood, procurement leadership translates them into functional expectations.

Typical translation questions include:

This step defines the procurement roadmap before the team discussion begins.

Only after the mandate is clear does team design become actionable.

Procurement leadership defines:

This is not about job titles.
It is about functional contribution.

The outcome at this stage is a target profile, not an action plan.

With the target profile defined, leadership assesses the current team reality.

Key questions:

This results in a target-vs-actual view that typically clusters into:

This assessment must be analytical, not emotional.

At the beginning of the year, many organisations conduct alignment interviews.
In practice, the outcome depends less on intent and more on preparation.

When interviews lack structure, three risks repeatedly emerge:

The result is rarely visible immediately.
It shows up later in extended follow-up conversations, escalations, disengagement, and avoidable internal friction. In critical cases, poorly handled alignment interviews do not only consume time and budget; they put leadership positions at risk.

Well-run alignment interviews follow a small number of principles:

Typical questions address contribution, sustainability and perspective:

The decisive factor is not the question itself, but the structure in which it is asked.

Most leaders have experienced interviews that went wrong due to missing preparation or unclear framing. Fixing the consequences later is expensive: measured in time, attention and organisational trust.

That is why we created The Alignment Interview Method™.

For USD 24.95, the guide provides a structured, research-backed framework to conduct alignment interviews without triggering negotiations, misaligned expectations or unnecessary escalation - so you stay in control of the conversation, the process and the outcome.

Compared to the cost of even one failed interview cycle, the decision is straightforward.

Following the interviews, leadership evaluates:

Not every gap can be closed.
Not every role can be accommodated in the future organisation.
This is a structural outcome of mandate alignment.

The outcome of Step 1 is not reorganisation.

It is a leadership baseline that enables controlled execution throughout the year:

This clarity is what prevents alignment interviews from turning into negotiations, escalations or time-intensive follow-up discussions later in the year.

If you want to implement Step 1 consistently and protect yourself from avoidable leadership risk, a structured approach helps ensure this baseline is built consistently.

Most professionals think faster than they type.
For roles in procurement, supply chain and leadership, the bottleneck is often not language quality, but time.

Wispr Flow is a text-to-speech app designed to work across multiple applications, allowing users to dictate instead of typing. The practical benefit: faster capture of thoughts, notes and drafts, with consistent language output and less friction in day-to-day execution.

Used selectively, this can be relevant for:

Explore Wispr Flow here:

Note: As with any productivity tool, you should independently review data handling, IP protection and compliance requirements. Testing on non-sensitive and/or private use cases may be an appropriate first step, depending on company internal policies.

ProcWee™ remains free to read.
For readers who value independent, focused procurement analysis without advertising, we offer ProcWee™ Independent Edition.

What you get:

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Procurement organisations underperform not because of weak individuals,
but because team structure and roles are misaligned with corporate direction.

Thank you for reading,

Pascal Hecker

Editor-In-Chief, ProcWee™