The Cost of Misalignment in a Tech Company

Missing the Big Picture

Focusing solely on engineering execution can be like “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller” or “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” While it is easy to concentrate on engineering due to its visibility and impact, neglecting cross-functional alignment leads to significant costs of misalignment in a tech company.

Why It is Easy to Focus on Engineering Execution:

• Major Cost Center: Engineering teams and tech infrastructure often represent the largest expenses in a software company.
• Dependency: Other departments—Product, Sales, Marketing—rely heavily on what Engineering builds, how fast it’s built, and its quality.
• Visibility: Engineering successes or failures are highly noticeable because many groups depend on them. When engineering does not deliver, everyone feels the pain.

What is Less Noticeable:

• Cross-Departmental Misalignment
• Senior Leadership Misalignment
• Lack of Clear Company Direction

When cross-functional departments are not aligned, and everyone pursues their own agenda, the company lacks a unified direction. Without proper processes and discipline, these issues are less noticeable and easily overlooked, yet they have a significant impact on the business.

Common Problems of Organizational Misalignment

Organizational misalignment can manifest in several common and critical ways:

1. Lack of Company Vision

A company’s vision may be non-existent, poorly defined, frequently changing, or inadequately communicated. Even if some form of vision exists, there are often no mechanisms to ensure that all strategies directly support it, nor processes to guarantee that all departments’ highest priorities are aligned with it. Additionally, there may be no regular checks to ensure these alignments happen consistently rather than sporadically.

2. Disconnected Cross-Functional Strategies Aligned with the Vision

Cross-departmental strategies might exist but are often developed in silos without building interdependencies among them. Without ensuring they all directly point to the company vision, these strategies fail to support a unified direction. Teams work hard but not necessarily together, leading to fragmented efforts that do not complement each other.

3. Stakeholder Misalignment

What is important to one department may not be important to another. Heads of different departments push their individual agendas, which may not align with shared company vision and goals. Everyone is working hard and with good intentions, but the structure to align these leaders and their agendas is missing. This lack of alignment causes efforts to diverge rather than converge toward common objectives.

4. Absence of a Realistic Product and Technology Roadmap

Product and engineering teams may lack any roadmap or operate with an unrealistic one. They only know what is important to build now and have no visibility into what is coming next or the bigger picture they’re working towards. This limited foresight leads to design decisions made with minimal context, resulting in suboptimal implementations and hindering long-term success.

5. Poor Prioritization or Lack Thereof

There is often a lack of prioritization or poor prioritization where the desire to do everything leads to an unrealistic roadmap. Without the discipline to say “no” or “not yet” to certain features or functionalities, the company ends up saying “yes” to more than it can accomplish. Resources become spread too thin, and efforts are diluted.

6. Frequently Changing Priorities Based on the Latest “Shiny Thing”

In the absence of a firm company vision and cohesive product and technology strategy, organizations are easily swayed by the latest trends or demands. Whether it is a request from a large customer or a new grand idea from the founder and CEO after a big epiphany, these become perceived as the most important initiatives. Often, work in progress is dropped to pursue these new endeavors, leading to a flurry of activity without clear direction. This results in teams being very busy but lacking a strategic path forward.

7. Starting Many Initiatives but Finishing Few

The tendency to chase new priorities leads to many fresh starts but few completions. Unfinished efforts are either written off as sunk costs or shelved with the hope and self-promise of returning to them in the future—a time that rarely comes. These unfinished code branches collect dust, representing wasted effort and resources, and contribute nothing to the company’s goals.

8. Product and Engineering Misalignment

Product and Engineering teams operate as two separate silos rather than a cohesive unit. Communication is poor, direction is unclear, and the result is minimal value delivered to the end-user—the customer. Without alignment, products developed may not meet market needs or expectations, leading to lost opportunities and customer dissatisfaction.

9. Lack of Visibility into Engineering Work and Reliance on Manual Status Updates

Engineering work in progress becomes a black box, with no one really knowing the status of features or their prognosis. Without a well-organized project management system that serves as a single source of truth accessible to everyone, leaders rely on manual status updates. They spend excessive time gathering information, often relying on interpretations that have passed through several people. This leads to poorly understood statuses of engineering progress and decisions made with inaccurate or outdated information.

10. Prioritization Out of Context

When misalignment is prevalent, prioritization of engineering work happens out of context. New initiatives are added to the engineering workload without asking (or knowing) what impact they will have on work already in progress or queued to start next. There is no consideration of the broader context, and the new priorities are evaluated in isolation rather than within the roadmap and overall company priorities. This leads to resource conflicts, missed deadlines, and further misalignment.