Product Teams Don’t Usually Have a Skills Problem. They Have an Alignment Problem.

By Mariana Abdala

Strategy is often clear at the top but interpreted differently across teams. Alignment is what turns individual capability into coordinated execution.

It was a very difficult decision for me to decide to leave Williams-Sonoma’s e-commerce team back in early 2024. Although the budgets were ruthlessly tight and the culture could be reactive at times, there was strong leadership, disciplined execution, frequently recurring prioritization discussions, and well communicated alignment across the portfolio. Strong cross-product alignment was something I hadn’t seen at previous employers, and when it’s there, it makes the future seem brighter, those H2 horizons are suddenly clearer and your team operates with more confidence.

Smart, experienced product teams can still produce fragmented execution, reactive roadmaps, and inconsistent prioritization inside environments that lack operational alignment. 

This pattern shows up everywhere in enterprise product organizations. Teams have an understood operating model and ways of working. Product managers can speak fluently about customer value, prioritization, experimentation, and in cases where you have highly mature, invested PMs, they can define results in terms of outcomes. Leaders invest heavily in training, tooling, operating models, and transformation efforts. Hiring standards rise. Certifications accumulate. New frameworks enter the organization every quarter.

And yet, there are mid-quarter surprises and suddenly execution feels harder than it should: roadmaps drift away from strategy, priorities change faster than planning systems can absorb, cross-functional coordination becomes increasingly difficult, teams optimize for local success while the broader portfolio loses coherence, escalations replace decision frameworks, and product managers spend more time navigating organizational complexity than shaping product direction. Why does this happen, even with the most high-functioning exceptional teams?

What I’ve learned in my years on different product teams across different industries, is that these challenges stop reflecting individual capability gaps and start revealing structural misalignment across the organization itself.

The friction builds up within the very system in which we operate.

Enterprise product environments naturally accumulate complexity over time. Product work intersects with funding structures, governance layers, compliance and regulatory requirements, platform dependencies, operational constraints, leadership incentives, and competing business priorities. Each additional layer introduces new interpretation points between strategy and execution.

What begins as a coherent strategic direction at the executive level often becomes increasingly fragmented as work moves through planning cycles, stakeholder negotiations, cross-team dependencies, and delivery pressures.

A team may be told to prioritize customer outcomes and to prioritize discovery cycles, but meanwhile, the senior leadership discussions within closed offsite and conference rooms continue to be about incentivizing teams to deliver with more predictability more economically, delivery predictability. Product leaders in middle management roles especially are expected to think strategically while carrying tactical coordination burdens.

Highly capable people adapt to the environment around them. That adaptation is where alignment problems begin to compound.

One of the experiences that stood out to me the most during my time at LendingClub (now Happen Bank) is that the Business Operations, Loan Servicing, and Payment Solutions teams optimized for speed and efficiency, above all,  while Legal and Compliance optimizes for risk reduction. One team could not exist with the other, and both relied heavily on my team, which was Core Services Platform. Platform often solves for stability and customer risk reduction. The layer that sat on top of all these organizations were  the customer-facing teams, which were prioritizing rapid iteration and tight test-and-learn cycles to solve for customer satisfaction and revenue. These different groups had established different definitions of value, urgency, and success long before the Core Services teams began furnishing them with an intake process to better understand their own respective pain points. I needed that intake from them; they were my customers, internal customers whose success criteria and priorities needed to matter to me in order for my team to ultimately succeed. In this case, the intake process my team introduced was to better understand their needs and dependencies from Core Services, because dependency management becomes negotiation-heavy especially once you realize and accept that prioritization your company has groups who use different prioritization frameworks, and those frameworks are inconsistently applied. That is how we inadvertently erode alignment.

None of this produces immediate collapse. In fact, the organization often appears busy and functional from the outside:

• Meetings continue

• Delivery moves forward 

• Planning artifacts exist

• Teams remain productive

Underneath the surface, however, operational fragmentation starts accumulating quietly across the system. Strategic intent weakens as work flows through multiple layers of interpretation and competing incentives. Teams spend increasing amounts of energy managing internal coordination rather than improving customer outcomes.

This is where product organizations frequently misdiagnose the problem.

Then, third party management consulting firms get hired and invited to join meetings. Additional training gets introduced. Teams attend workshops. New processes appear. Operating models are redesigned. Entire reorganizations occur in pursuit of better execution.

It’s not to say that consulting organizations and training and coaching can’t help achieve better organizational alignment. These are all good and healthy things to do for your teams. Strong product organizations absolutely require skilled teams. However, these things strengthen capability development. And capability alone does not create coordinated execution.

Operational alignment determines whether product capability compounds or dissipates.

The strongest product organizations create systems that reinforce clarity consistently across teams, functions, and leadership layers. Prioritization frameworks are understood broadly across the organization rather than interpreted differently by every group. Decision ownership is explicit. Portfolio tradeoffs happen transparently. Planning cadences support coordination rather than creating additional fragmentation. Leadership teams reinforce the same strategic principles operationally, not just rhetorically.

That consistency creates leverage.

Teams move faster because they spend less time interpreting priorities, negotiating ownership, or resolving preventable ambiguity. Cross-functional collaboration improves because expectations and decision criteria are clearer. Product managers regain space for strategic thinking because organizational systems reduce unnecessary coordination burden.

Alignment also increases autonomy.

Teams with strong strategic context and clear decision boundaries require fewer escalations and less centralized oversight. Product organizations often associate alignment with process heaviness or consensus-driven decision-making when the opposite is usually true. Operational clarity allows teams to operate independently without drifting incoherently from broader portfolio direction.

This becomes increasingly important as organizations scale.

Growth naturally expands dependencies, stakeholder surfaces, and operational complexity. Without intentional alignment mechanisms, execution friction compounds faster than leadership teams expect. Product organizations slowly become coordination systems instead of value-creation systems.

The highest-performing product organizations that I’ve had the honor to work with understand that execution quality emerges from both capability and coherence. Talent matters. Training matters. Strong product thinking matters. But sustainable execution at scale depends on something broader than individual skill.

I would love to learn more about how your organizations are approaching alignment and consistent ways of working to accelerate your growth, productivity, and customer outcomes.