The Illusion of Decisiveness - by Stephanie

Product teams are not burning out because they cannot work hard - they are burning out because they are working hard on too many different truths at once. The problem is not the big initiatives like migrations or new product lines. It is the grey dots: the "just one small feature to close this deal," the "can we add AI here," the "this is not big enough for the roadmap but could you pick it up quickly." Each sounds reasonable and even strategic - protect revenue, respond to the market, do not block sales. But they rarely displace anything. The real backlog grows quietly under the table while workload stays the same on paper.

This is what the Illusion of Decisiveness looks like: 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. Sales chases must-have deals promising things that never went through portfolio discussions. Engineering digs out from years of tech debt no one wants to discuss in steering meetings. Marketing pivots for every investor narrative, pushing launches that look good externally but are not grounded in product reality. Put these groups in a room together and you realize they are pulling product in four different directions, all under the same banner of driving the strategy.

The leaders who break this pattern act as shields, not amplifiers. They force trade-offs at their level - a new request does not just get added, something else comes out visibly and explicitly in front of stakeholders. They align on problems, not pet solutions, so exec conversations revolve around which outcomes matter most now instead of which feature wins the slide war. They make invisible work visible, showing how much capacity already goes into bugs, fast-lane requests, and operational noise, so "just one more thing" becomes harder to pretend away.

The fix is not a new framework. Write down your top three business outcomes for the next two quarters and rank them. Map every major initiative and every recurring grey dot request against those outcomes, including sales asks, migrations, and investor-driven work. Decide as an exec team what you will stop, not just what you will start, and capture these stops explicitly with names and dates. 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. 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.