Strategy Spirals

As readers know, I write from time to time about why product teams spiral into strategic misalignment or get fixated on metrics over outcomes, but I think I’ve been missing one angle on why it’s so hard to change once you set a course: emotions.

Listening to a podcast recently with a leadership coach, it dawned on me that so much “digging in” around strategy and metrics from execs and teams comes down to the inability to let go of a narrative they had constructed on when, how, and to what degree they would be successful.

“I work with a lot of teams on grief - startups have this idea that they will have X users or Y revenue by a certain amount of time, and it’s a grieving process to let that go”

Multiple times in my career I’ve had to execute a shift, either at the top-level strategy, or around the tactical KPIs being tracked, and there’s always a change management cost that I’d attributed to communication / coordination tax, but the reality is there is grief in letting go of a particular…