Aligning Leadership and Product Teams for Sustainable Growth
If you’ve ever worked somewhere that leadership and product weren’t aligned, you know how messy it gets. Leadership is out here talking big-picture, revenue, ARR, acquisition. Product is in the weeds with users, tech debt, and what can actually be built without setting the whole codebase aflame. When those worlds don’t line up, deadlines slip, priorities shuffle weekly, and everyone burns out.
Strategy is only as good as execution.
If product doesn’t buy into the vision, you’ll end up with a roadmap that looks sooo good and soooo busy, but doesn’t actually serve the business. If leadership doesn’t understand product realities, you’ll get goals that look great on a board deck but are impossible to ship. That kind of misalignment doesn’t just cause friction, it costs money. Missed deadlines. Wasted effort. Talent attrition. It’s annoying, it’s expensive, it’s…..well….
A complete dumpster fire. No one wins in this scenario: leadership’s mad at product, product’s mad at leadership, engineering’s mad at everyone. Rightfully so.
How do you fix it?
First, build a shared vision. It’s not enough for leadership to say “we want growth.” That’s obvious, capitalism exists.
Product has to understand how their daily work ties into that growth, and leadership has to actually listen when product and engineering say, “we can’t move fast on new features until we kill this tech debt.” That tension between speed and stability is normal. The work is making it transparent instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
Second, talk more than you think you need to. Quarterly check-ins aren’t cutting it. By the time you notice you’re off track at that cadence, you’re already months behind. Weekly might feel like overkill, depending on your org size, but if leadership and product only sync when there’s a fire, that’s not a fire, that’s the smoldering wreckage of your product. Find a rhythm that keeps both sides informed without creating meeting fatigue, and stick to it.
Third, balance business needs and user needs. Leadership wants growth. Product wants delight. If you over-index on one, you either get a gorgeous product nobody buys or a cash machine that users hate. Neither is sustainable. The sweet spot is asking, “What makes this valuable to the user and the business?” If you can’t answer both sides of that question, the idea isn’t ready.
Fourth, clarify who’s responsible for what. Nothing kills momentum like “I thought you had it.” Ambiguity is the enemy of execution. Write it down. Share it. Stick it on the wall. The moment everyone is “kind of responsible,” no one is accountable. SOMEONE! ALWAYS! MUST! BE! ACCOUNTABLE! This isn’t to create blame, it’s to keep the project on-track.
Fifth, use data, but don’t abuse it. Data should anchor decisions, not become a weapon in power struggles. Bad leaders use numbers to prove their biases. Good ones use numbers to ask sharper questions. Critically, everyone needs to agree on what the metrics mean. You need shared key performance indicators, shared definitions, and a very clear understanding of your reality. Write it all down, keep it safe, refer to it often.
Finally, trust is the glue. If leadership constantly changes direction, product stops investing. If product goes rogue, leadership stops trusting. And once trust is gone, no process or framework will save you. Alignment isn’t built in a meeting room, it’s built in how you show up every day. Leaders who bring humility and curiosity. Product teams who bring transparency and clarity. Both sides showing up like they’re on the same team, because they are.
The Threadsmith Group Approach
At The Threadsmith Group, we help companies get leadership and product teams working together, not against each other. Through strategic coaching, process optimization, and communication frameworks, we help teams find common ground and move toward shared success.
Because at the end of the day, a business can’t grow if its teams are pulling in different directions. Let’s fix that—together.