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 …
