The Most Expensive Dysfunction in B2B Product Companies

And How To Force the Work Back Into Connection With Reality

Someone recently said something to me that I haven’t been able to shake. We were talking about a product team (a good one, by most measures) that had been heads-down building for months. They were shipping features, clearing the backlog, hitting their sprint goals. And yet the business wasn’t moving. Worse, the team didn’t realize that without that connection, the business would eventually stop scaling.

The phrase they used was:

“We have to force the work back into connection with reality.”

I love this phrase because of the word “force.” Not “nudge.” Not “align.” Force. It implies that the natural state of product work is disconnected from reality, that the drift happens on its own, and reconnecting requires deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable effort. And honestly? That tracks with everything I’ve seen over ~25 years of building software.

I’ve been writing about this problem, from different angles, for years now. So I want to use this post to pull those threads together into a single argu…