Why Product Teams Get Stuck

Nov 19, 2024

The Slowdown Problem

We've all felt it. You have a clear strategy, a capable team, and important problems to solve for your customers. Yet, actually getting valuable product updates out the door feels slower than it should. Features get stuck, decisions linger, and the momentum stalls. This is especially frustrating in complex domains, where the technical challenges are already high.

Why does this happen? Often, it's not a single big issue, but a collection of smaller, everyday patterns and habits that accumulate friction and slow things down. Recognizing these patterns is the first step to breaking free. Here are a few common ones I've seen crop up repeatedly.

The Handoff Chain Reaction

In many organizations, getting something shipped involves a series of handoffs: Product defines it, Design mocks it up, Engineering builds it, QA tests it, maybe Ops deploys it. Each handoff point is a potential delay.

  • Waiting in Line: Work queues up waiting for the next team's availability.
  • Lost Context: Nuance gets lost at each step, requiring clarification cycles.
  • Approval Gates: Formal sign-offs add process overhead and waiting time.

In B2B, the need for careful checks is real. But when the process relies too heavily on sequential handoffs between siloed teams, latency builds up fast. A small delay waiting for feedback, plus another waiting for resources, plus another for a final review, can turn a week's worth of work into a month's wait.

Information Silos and Meeting Bottlenecks

How does information flow in your team? How are decisions made?

  • Waiting for the 1:1: Problems often sit unsolved until the next scheduled meeting with a manager or stakeholder.
  • Keeping People in the Loop: Time gets spent manually pushing updates to specific people, rather than having information openly accessible.
  • Decision by Committee: Key decisions stall because the process isn't clear, requires a specific meeting that keeps getting rescheduled, or relies on one overloaded person.

When communication defaults to synchronous meetings or requires actively pushing status reports, it creates bottlenecks. People wait for information or decisions, and the cost of keeping everyone "aligned" through meetings and updates eats into actual building time.

Fuzzy Ownership and Stuck Teams

Who actually owns solving a specific customer problem or improving a key metric? What happens when that problem crosses team boundaries?

  • Not My Area: Problems languish because they fall between the cracks of established team responsibilities.
  • Team Bottlenecks: One team becomes a blocker for others because they own a critical component or service, but fixing it isn't their top priority.
  • Difficulty Reorganizing: Forming a temporary squad or shifting ownership to tackle an urgent issue is seen as too disruptive or politically complex.

Without clear, accountable owners for specific outcomes, and the flexibility to adjust team structures as needed, important work gets stuck behind organizational lines.

Sales Promises vs. Roadmap Reality

This is a classic B2B tension. Sales teams are closing vital deals, often involving specific feature requests or customization commitments.

  • Roadmap Whiplash: Engineering teams get pulled off strategic work to fulfill urgent requirements for specific deals.
  • One-Off Solutions: Time is spent building custom features that are hard to maintain and don't benefit the broader customer base.
  • Unrealistic Timelines: Commitments are made without a full understanding of the engineering effort involved.

While serving customers is critical, letting individual sales deals consistently dictate the product roadmap leads to a reactive development cycle, technical debt, and slows down progress on core platform improvements that benefit everyone.

The "Perfect Polish" Trap

In B2B, quality, reliability, and security are non-negotiable. No one wants to ship a buggy or half-baked feature to an enterprise client. But this can sometimes morph into a fear of shipping anything that isn't "perfect."

  • Endless Refinement: Features stay in development or testing for extended periods, chasing minor edge cases or pixel-perfect UI while delaying core value delivery.
  • Avoiding Feedback: The desire for a flawless v1 means teams delay getting crucial real-world feedback from actual users.
  • Risk Aversion: The perceived risk of shipping something slightly imperfect outweighs the risk of competitors moving faster or learning more quickly.

Striving for excellence is good, but waiting for perfection is often a hidden form of delay. Finding the right balance between quality standards and the speed needed to learn and iterate is crucial, but difficult.

Breaking Through

There's no magic bullet, but counteracting these slowdowns often involves shifting towards principles like:

  • Clear Ownership & Autonomy: Empowering smaller, cross-functional teams with clear ownership over specific customer problems or metrics, reducing handoffs.
  • Transparency by Default: Making work, progress, and decisions visible and accessible, allowing people to pull information rather than relying on pushes and meetings.
  • Async Communication: Prioritizing written, asynchronous communication for updates and discussions to reduce meeting dependency.
  • Direct Feedback & Iteration: Creating safe ways to get feedback earlier, even if it's through internal releases, or feature flags, rather than waiting for perfection.
  • Strategic Alignment: Having a clear, well-communicated product strategy that helps guide decisions and manage the tension between roadmap goals and specific customer requests.

Conclusion

Speed isn't about cutting corners, especially in B2B. It's about relentlessly identifying and removing the friction that slows down the delivery of real value to customers. These patterns – handoff chains, information silos, fuzzy ownership, roadmap conflicts, and perfectionism paralysis – are common because they often emerge organically as companies grow. Actively recognizing them and consciously working to counteract them is key to building and maintaining momentum. It requires deliberate effort and a willingness to change how teams work together.