Articles
Right, this one's going to ruffle some feathers.
Especially for those in the "just ship it" camp, who see any process as bureaucratic nonsense that slows down innovation.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: most organizations don't have a shortage of ideas. They have a shortage...
When No One Owns It, It Doesn’t Get Done
Here’s a situation I see far too often in tech and product orgs:
You’ve got a strategic priority on the roadmap - something big, important, and cross-functional. Maybe it’s improving platform performance, reducing live ops downtime, or i...
When You Can’t See Progress, You Can’t Drive It
Here’s a common scenario in product and tech orgs:
You’ve got strategic priorities. Teams are working hard. But when you ask, “How are we tracking against what matters most?”—you get silence… or scattered answers… or ten different...
One of the most costly (and invisible) execution problems in product and tech orgs is this:
Projects keep going long after their strategic value has expired.
Maybe they were launched under a previous leadership regime. Maybe they’ve become someone’s pet initiative. Maybe they j...
Let’s talk about a common trap in roadmap planning: overloaded “strategic priority” buckets.
It usually starts with good intentions. You define a few high-level priorities like:
- “Enhance Platform Stability”
- “Improve Player Experience”
- “Increase Operational Efficiency”
So...
In many dev orgs, the roadmap slowly turns into a grab bag of disconnected efforts: carryover projects, exec pet requests, “nice-to-haves,” and a few actual priorities... all jumbled together.
There’s no clear sequence and no trade-offs - just more work piling on.
The result is...
You’ve probably heard this question before:
“What’s really the top priority right now?”
When the answer differs depending on who you ask, you’ve got a bigger problem than just confusion. You’ve got misalignment at the core of your execution.
Teams pull in different directions,...
You’ve probably seen this firsthand:
A new idea comes up in a meeting—smart, thoughtful, maybe even exciting.
But instead of weighing it properly, someone says:
“We should just get started.”
And boom—it’s on the roadmap. No alignment check. No capacity check. No strategy check...
A lot of leadership teams proudly present strategic themes like “Operational Excellence” or “Innovation” or “Customer-Centricity.”
They sound great on a slide deck, and they look bold on posters in the hallway.
But the problem is they’re too vague to act on.
Teams nod along, b...
You’re in a leadership review, looking at a team’s progress, and suddenly realize… they’re working on something completely different from what you thought the priorities were.
It’s not because they’re off-track. It’s because somewhere between strategy and sprint planning, the me...
Let’s talk about how smart teams end up overwhelmed, behind, and scattered - even when everyone’s working hard.
The real culprit is a lack of decision filters.
In too many organizations, new work gets approved based on passion, politics, or gut feel. An executive casually says,...
Here’s a painful truth I’ve seen across dozens of software and game dev organizations:
If everything is a priority, nothing really is.
Teams aren’t failing because they aren’t working hard. They’re failing because they’re working on too many things at once. It’s not uncommon to...
