The Illusion of Decisiveness

Why product teams spin in chaos despite a "clear" strategy

Product teams are not burning out because they can’t work hard – they’re burning out because they’re working hard on too many different truths at once.

From a distance, it all looks impressive: a bold vision, a confident CEO, a clean strategy slide with three pillars and a North Star metric. By the time this clarity travels through the organisation, it has turned into ten competing interpretations and a roadmap that reads like a wish list.

On exec level, everyone can repeat the same strategic headline, so it feels like alignment. But underneath, functions optimise for completely different realities: Sales for short-term revenue, Engineering for stability, Marketing for narrative, Finance for predictability. Nobody is acting in bad faith; they are just solving different problems, all under the same banner of “driving the strategy”.

That’s how you end up with what I call the Illusion of Decisiveness: the company believes decisions are clear because slides exist, but the day-to-day signals teams receive are noisy, conflicting, and often higher priority than the original strategy. The result is a product organisation that is constantly busy, yet rarely feels like it is moving forward.

Alignment is an illusion

In many organisations, alignment is treated like a checkbox: we had the offsite, we agreed on priorities, we signed off the plan, we’re done. In reality, that’s where the hard work starts.

Here is the pattern I see again and again:

• Sales runs after “must-have for this quarter” deals, often promising things that never went through the portfolio discussion.

• Engineering is trying to dig out from years of tech debt and platform migrations no one wants to talk about in steering meetings.

• Marketing pivots for every investor narrative or brand moment, pushing for launches that look good externally but aren’t grounded in product reality.

If you listen to each group separately, they all sound aligned with the strategy – they can explain how their asks ladder up to the big vision. Put them in a room together, and you realise they are pulling the product in four different directions at once.

Leaders often try to fix this by tightening control: more status meetings, more steering committees, more dashboards. But more visibility on misalignment does not create alignment. What’s missing is a single, explicit, ranked list of problems the company has committed to solve now – not in theory, but in this quarter, with this capacity.

As long as every function can maintain its own invisible priority list, the illusion of alignment will stay intact, and your teams will keep spinning.

The grey dots that break teams

When we talk about burnout, we like to point at the big initiatives: the migration, the new product line, the market expansion. Those are rarely the real problem. It’s the “grey dots” that grind teams down.

You know them:

• “Can we just squeeze in this one small feature so we don’t lose the deal?”

• “Can we add AI here? Our competitor has something similar.”

• “This isn’t big enough for the roadmap, but could your team pick it up quickly?”

Individually, each of these sounds reasonable. They often even sound strategic: protect revenue, respond to the market, don’t block sales. The problem is that they rarely displace anything. Workload stays the same on paper, and yet the real backlog grows quietly under the table.

On Reddit, many PMs describe this as the real killer: they don’t burn out from clear, high-stakes work but from a constant drip of unplanned asks that fragment attention and destroy any sense of progress. They feel responsible for everything and in control of almost nothing.

When everything is a priority, nothing is. And when nothing is clearly deprioritised, the team learns a dangerous lesson: commitments are flexible, and the only safe response is to say yes to everything and work longer hours.

How strong leaders protect teams from the noise

The leaders I see breaking this pattern have one thing in common: they act as shields, not amplifiers. (Say “hi” to my team here - I introduced myself as their “sh**umbrella😅)

They don’t forward every “urgent” message to their teams; they absorb, sort, and often kill work before it ever reaches the squad. That doesn’t make them gatekeepers; it makes them responsible for the integrity of their teams’ focus.

Some concrete behaviours that show up again and again:

• They force trade-offs at their level. A new request doesn’t just get added; something else comes out, visibly and explicitly, in front of stakeholders.

• They align on problems, not pet solutions. Exec conversations revolve around which outcomes matter most now, not which feature wins the slide war.

• They make invisible work visible. They show how much capacity already goes into bugs, fast-lane requests, and operational noise, so “just one more thing” becomes harder to pretend away.

• They create protected focus blocks for their teams – discovery cycles, big-bet sprints, or “no new work” windows – and defend them ruthlessly.

This kind of protection isn’t weakness or overparenting. It is what allows teams to build momentum, learn, and actually deliver on the strategy instead of constantly reacting to its side effects.

A simple starting point for Leaders

If you recognise parts of your organisation in this, you don’t fix it with a new framework. You start by changing the type of decisions that are allowed to be “invisible”.

A practical starting point I recommend to fellow execs:

1. Write down your top three business outcomes for the next two quarters, in plain language, and rank them.

2. Map every major initiative and every recurring “grey dot” request against those outcomes – including sales asks, migrations, and investor-driven work.

3. Decide, as an exec team, what you will stop, not just what you will start. Capture these “stops” explicitly, with names and dates, and communicate them down the line.

4. Commit to a rule: nothing new enters a team’s backlog without a clear link to one of the ranked outcomes and a visible trade-off.

This sounds almost too simple. But simplicity is exactly what burned-out product teams are missing. They don’t need more slogans about focus; they need leaders who are willing to disappoint stakeholders early, so teams don’t have to disappoint everyone late.

Strategy is not the art of inventing a compelling future on a slide. Strategy is the courage to say, “Not now,” when everyone has a good reason why their request should be the exception.