The Buy-In Trap - I Spent Six Months Begging for Buy-In

Why chasing full alignment is costing you the room

Eight months into my role as CPO at Doodle, I stood in front of the company and introduced my future vision. It even had a compelling name: “One Doodle”.

I had done everything right. Months of customer interviews. Data that backed up every direction we were taking. I had been open about the process from the start, sharing updates as the thinking evolved, bringing people along rather than surprising them. The CTO was fully with me. I think I had built real trust with the teams.

But then, whenever I presented the vision or snippets of it… The room was quiet. Not hostile. Not excited. Just quiet.

I told myself it was fine. First reactions are not always the real reaction. Give it time.

But I could not give it time. Because underneath the calm surface I was already panicking.

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What I did not let myself think about in that moment was the context I was standing in.

The team at Doodle had been through something painful before I arrived. A big decision had gone wrong. Not a small miscalculation, the kind that every company makes and recovers from quickly. A real one. The kind that leaves a mark. People were still carrying it when I joined. There was grief in the organisation, and a very understandable wariness about the next big idea from leadership.

I knew this. I had felt it since my first day there. And in my own way I had been trying to protect them from more pain, which is part of why I had been so careful, so thorough, so transparent about how the vision was built.

What I did not see until much later is that my need to protect them had quietly turned into something else. A need for them to tell me I had not made a mistake.

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So when the room stayed quiet, I did what most product leaders do.

I tried harder.

I made a Miro board with the full deep dive. I built a one-slider version for the people who wanted the short version. I created a 90-second video prototype of what the vision could look like in practice. I ran World Cafe sessions with product, tech, and design so people could ask every question they had. I gave the same story in five different formats, at five different levels of detail, over weeks.

And still the excitement I was looking for did not come.

So I made more formats. Scheduled more sessions. Found more ways to explain the same thing. Every time someone pushed back or asked a hard question, I took it as a signal that I had not explained it clearly enough yet. That if I could just find the right words, the right visual, the right moment, the room would finally feel the way I needed it to feel.

What I was doing, though I could not see it at the time, was begging.

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The moment I finally noticed was not a good moment.

I was sitting in a meeting where the vision came up again, and instead of feeling energised by it I felt a flash of irritation at the people in the room. I was tired. Tired of preparing, tired of explaining, tired of trying to engineer a reaction that kept not coming.

That irritation was useful information. Not because it was justified, but because it told me something true: I had made this about me.

I had spent eight months building the vision. I had lived inside the idea, turned it over, argued with it, tested it against data and customers and my own instincts. By the time I presented it, the vision was obvious to me. It felt inevitable. Of course this was the direction. How could anyone see the same data and feel differently?

But that was exactly the problem. They had not spent eight months inside it. They were seeing the full picture for the first time, previously they eventually just saw snippets - or to be honest - moving pieces. The asymmetry between my excitement and their reaction was not resistance. It was just the normal human response to something new. I had read it as rejection because I needed something from them that was never theirs to give.

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Around this time I gave myself a rule. Not out of wisdom, more out of exhaustion.

I called it 40/40/20.

Of forty percent of people will agree and commit, forty percent will disagree but commit anyway and twenty percent will still disagree, that is enough. That is enough motion to move a direction forward. That is what real organisational change looks like, not a unanimous standing ovation, but enough people willing to move in the same direction even if they do not all feel the same way about it.

I had been chasing 100. I had been treating everyone below 100 as a failure that needed to be fixed.

The rule did not change the room. It changed what I was looking for in the room.

I stopped trying to get everyone to the same level of excitement. I stopped treating every question as a gap in my communication. I started making clearer calls and holding them with less explanation. I stopped going back in to convince people who had already decided how they felt.

And something shifted.

Not immediately. Not dramatically. But over the following weeks, something changed in how people talked about the work. And then one day, in a meeting I was not even running, someone used the words “One Doodle” to describe what we were building.

They had started using my language. Not because I had finally explained it well enough. Because I had stopped needing them to.

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I have thought about this story many times since leaving Doodle. And I think the lesson is not really about alignment at all.

It is about what happens to a room when a leader is desperate.

Desperation is not always loud. It does not always look like pleading or over-explaining. Sometimes it looks like thoroughness. Like radical transparency. Like a leader who is so committed to bringing everyone along that they cannot stop adding one more session, one more format, one more chance to get the buy-in they need.

But the room feels it anyway. People can sense when a leader needs something from them. And when a leader needs approval to feel confident, it creates the opposite effect. The more you need the room to validate the direction, the less safe the room feels to actually follow you.

Confidence is not about having all the answers. It is not about a perfect vision deck or a 90-second video or a World Cafe session where everyone gets their questions answered.

It is about being willing to hold a direction even when not everyone is with you. Being able to say: I hear you, I disagree, we are moving. And meaning it.

Full alignment was never the destination. It was a way of managing my own fear.

Once I let go of it, the work got lighter. And so, eventually, did the room.

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I should not have expected people to feel the same emotions I felt about something I had been living with for eight months. That is not how change works inside an organisation. And it is not what leadership asks of you.

What it asks is simpler and harder than that. Hold the direction. Stay calm in the quiet room. Trust that 40/40/20 is enough to move.

The people did not change.

I did.

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This is the work I do with CPOs and VPs of Product.

If your 1:1s have started to feel more like therapy than leadership, that is usually a signal that one of the four taxes is running quietly in the background. The assessment takes five minutes and tells you which one.

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If you want to work with me, learn more about my offering here: stephanieleue.com