· 1 min read
What integration leadership actually does
Integration leadership isn't a project plan with extra meetings — it's the operating spine that lets two organizations move as one.
The first 90 days of an acquisition are won or lost in operational fundamentals: governance, decision rights, and a single source of truth for status.
The three things every IMO needs in week one
- A decision charter. Who calls what — finance, GTM, product, people — with thresholds for escalation.
- A single weekly cadence. One review, one dashboard, one set of risks. Everything else is feeder.
- A customer continuity owner. Revenue protection isn't a workstream; it's a posture the whole IMO carries.
If those three pieces are clear by the end of week one, every other workstream gets faster.
Common traps
- Treating integration as a one-time project. The operating model is what survives.
- Conflating activity with alignment. A 200-line tracker is not a plan.
- Postponing the first hard decision. The first "no" sets the tone for the entire program.
What success looks like
A clean Day-1, a quiet Day-30, and a Day-90 board update where the conversation has shifted from "is the integration on track?" to "what's the next bet?"