Did your Product Transformation Stall?

The hidden operating gaps that slow decisions, weaken alignment, and keep change from sticking

By Mariana Abdala

Product transformations rarely stall because teams resist change. They stall because the operating system around the work has not changed enough to support the behaviors leaders say they want.

My first transformation was 10 years ago

In 2016, Lending Club's mission was to transform the banking system to make credit more affordable and investing more rewarding. I had joined the Product team as part of a wave of staffing and leadership changes that had resulted from a massive shakeup after the company was met with the scandalous resignation of then CEO Renaud Laplanche, following a fraud scandal. LendingClub's 2016 fraud scandal was a major fintech crisis triggered by an internal board investigation, which led to the sudden resignation of founder and CEO Renaud Laplanche. The scandal involved altered loan data, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and deceptive consumer practices, resulting in multi-million dollar settlements with federal regulators.

This is one of many ways that transformations can be kicked off. Companies undergo business model transformations because they need to shift revenue streams, cultural transformations to address the need for a more agile corporate hierarchy, DEI strategies, or to foster hybrid work environments, as we saw during the pandemic. The sexiest transformations we’re seeing emerge lately are AI transformations, which are a type of digital transformation that companies embark on to upgrade legacy technology and deploy generative AI for various and sundry reasons. 

Most recently, our clients and our colleagues at Fortune 500 and leading tech companies have needed to prioritize the deployment of generative AI to automate workflows, and shift rote tasks from humans to agents, but this is a non-trivial shift of which the implications and risks have never before been considered. In addition to the essential rollout of new operating procedures and ways of working, you have the complexity that comes with adopting new language, investing in training, introducing new roles, reconstructing operating models, and asking leaders to model different evolving dynamics and values. Tie the Change Management bow on top of all these moving parts and you’ve got a lot of change. For the first few months, there’s a lot of announcement, rollout, training and facilitation. And many people feel like real movement is starting to happen.

Then one day, you begin to realize that people on your teams show up increasingly overwhelmed, detached, and losing motivation. The progress and stacked hands that were once so exciting start to seem uneven and invoke fatigue. Teams are busy implementing the new stuff and keep asking questions, but decisions remain slow. New expectations are introduced, but old behaviors continue. Friction shows up in planning, prioritization, and execution. Leaders begin to feel that the transformation is active, but not yet producing the clarity or consistency they expected. This is the messy middle of a transformation. This is where transformations famously stall.

I remember the enthusiasm and hunger of the newer folks of the Product and Experience Design team at LC, and I remember how spectacularly it crashed with stakeholders on the Marketing and Customer Support teams. These groups weren’t being brought along in the same way. The customer-centered design principles and discovery-led requirements writing that PMs and Designers were now empowered to start doing were being interpreted by Marketing and Customer Support as a loss of control, not an optimized way of utilizing engineering resources and shipping better products faster. There was no understanding or support system in place to bring these teams together and clarify the jobs to be done by each team in order to service the customer with the best experience and deliver the best business outcomes. 

This usually is not a motivation problem. It is not a sign that teams do not care. It is not even, in most cases, a pure capability issue.

Product transformations stall when the operating environment around the work has not changed enough to support the behaviors leaders say they want.

This is the gap many organizations underestimate. Change does not stick because the system underneath it still rewards reactive work, weak tradeoff decisions, inconsistent ownership, and fragmented execution.

Ten years later, it’s been 5 years since I parted ways with LC but that certainly was not my last Transformation. Lately, we’ve been supporting a number of clients in various capacities with their own transformations, and we were inspired to document the patterns we see most often, in hopes of offering a practical diagnostic for leaders trying to understand where transformation efforts are getting stuck.

The Real Reason Change Does Not Stick

A product transformation asks an organization to do more than adopt new practices. It asks leaders and teams to make better decisions, create more clarity, and work through a more disciplined system.

That shift cannot rest on training alone. It cannot rest on good intentions. It cannot rest on a few strong individuals carrying the burden for everyone else.

Organizations make progress when the environment around the work begins to change too. That includes how priorities are set, how decisions are made, how planning happens, how roles interact, and how leadership reinforces expectations over time.

Without that shift, transformation becomes fragile.

Teams may attend workshops and leave aligned in the moment, then return to a working environment that pulls them back into the same habits. Product leaders may be asked to think more strategically, while still operating inside unclear governance and overloaded portfolios. Planning forums may be introduced, but without the inputs, decision rights, or role clarity needed for them to work well.

What emerges is a predictable pattern. Organizations begin to confuse visible activity with real operating change.

The issue is rarely that transformation work is absent. The issue is that the surrounding system is not yet strong enough to absorb and sustain it.

Seven Patterns That Quietly Stall Product Transformation

1. The transformation is framed as a capability problem only

Many organizations begin with training, which makes sense. Teams often do need stronger product skills, clearer expectations, and a more shared language.

Skill-building matters. Lasting progress depends on more than capability alone. Teams apply what they learn through the system they work in every day. When governance is unclear, priorities are unstable, and decision-making remains inconsistent, training has nowhere solid to land.

2. Governance is too weak to support real tradeoffs

Transformation requires choices. Work must be sequenced. Capacity must be considered. Some initiatives must move faster, and others must wait.

Governance often exists in name, but not in practice. Leadership forums become update sessions rather than decision-making moments. Teams are asked to move faster without a clear mechanism for resolving tradeoffs across the portfolio.

3. Priorities exceed capacity, but no one wants to say no

Most stalled transformations show signs of overload. Too many initiatives remain active at once. Roadmaps absorb pressure from multiple directions. Leaders continue adding work without a shared view of what the system can realistically support.

This creates a version of prioritization that is mostly rhetorical. Everything sounds important. Very little gets truly sequenced.

4. Strategy, planning, and execution are not truly connected

Strategic priorities may exist at the top. Teams may be planning diligently at the delivery level. A meaningful bridge between the two is often missing.

That disconnect shows up when roadmaps become lists of activity rather than expressions of strategic choice. Teams move into planning cycles without enough business context, without enough clarity on success measures, or without enough confidence that decisions made upstream will hold.

5. Roles are named, but ownership is still muddy

Organizations frequently define roles as part of transformation. Product managers, product owners, scrum masters, delivery leads, design partners, and senior leaders are all given clearer labels.

Labels help. They do not automatically create healthy working relationships. Ownership still breaks down when decision rights are vague, collaboration norms are weak, or expectations differ across functions. Teams then spend unnecessary energy negotiating who owns what instead of moving work forward.

6. Cross-functional execution depends on heroics

Enterprise product work is deeply cross-functional. It depends on coordination across product, design, engineering, operations, business stakeholders, and often multiple adjacent teams.

Strong organizations build repeatable ways of handling that complexity. Stalled transformations often rely on informal workarounds instead. A few capable people connect the dots, chase dependencies, and hold things together. Progress continues, but it is fragile and hard to scale.

7. Leaders endorse the change, but reinforce the old system

Leadership support matters. Day-to-day reinforcement matters more.

Teams pay close attention to what leadership actually rewards. They notice whether priorities keep shifting. They notice whether decisions are revisited without discipline. They notice whether planning forums are protected, whether tradeoffs are made explicitly, and whether old behaviors still win when pressure rises.

Transformation becomes difficult to trust when leaders speak in support of change while the operating signals around the work remain unchanged.

What These Patterns Look Like in Practice

These issues rarely appear as one dramatic failure. They tend to surface as repeated friction in ordinary moments.

A roadmap review becomes a debate because strategic criteria were never made clear. A planning session loses value because the right stakeholders were not involved early enough. Teams are asked to prepare more detailed artifacts when what they really need is a decision. Product leaders are expected to own outcomes, but lack the authority, visibility, or governance support needed to make meaningful tradeoffs.

Over time, this creates a familiar experience inside the organization.

Leaders feel that teams are not operating at the level they need. Teams feel that expectations are rising faster than clarity. Product organizations introduce new forums, templates, and rituals, but continue to experience the same breakdowns in prioritization, coordination, and execution.

This is where many transformation efforts begin to stall.

The challenge is not simply better compliance with the new model. The challenge is building an operating environment where better habits become easier to sustain.

That requires leaders to look past surface signals and examine the conditions around the work itself.

What Stronger Transformations Do Differently

Organizations that make stronger progress tend to treat product transformation as an operating shift, not just a skills initiative.

They tie capability-building to real work. Training is connected to active priorities, live decisions, and the forums where teams actually need to perform differently.

They create clearer governance. Leaders know where tradeoff decisions belong and protect the integrity of those moments.

They align strategy, planning, and execution more deliberately. Teams understand not only what they are doing, but why it matters, how success will be measured, and how decisions connect across levels of the organization.

They reinforce ownership through practice, not just definitions. Roles are clarified in the work itself, especially at the points where collaboration tends to break down.

They reduce dependence on heroics. Cross-functional coordination becomes more visible, more structured, and less dependent on a handful of people rescuing the system.

They communicate consistently. Leadership signals support the new model not only in messaging, but in the choices they make under pressure.

Progress becomes more durable when the organization invests in the conditions that allow better product behavior to take hold.

Closing

Product transformations rarely stall because the aspiration is wrong. They stall because the operating system around the work has not changed enough to support the transformation in practice.

Leaders often focus on visible progress first. New language, new roles, new workshops, and new forums all matter. Real traction comes from something deeper. It comes from creating the conditions for better decisions, clearer ownership, stronger prioritization, and more consistent execution.

That is where transformation becomes real.

Organizations do not need more motion. They need more alignment between what they say they want and how the work actually runs.

PAS helps enterprise organizations close that gap through practical advisory, targeted capability-building, and context-driven support that strengthens how product work really happens.