Where Your Product System Is Breaking
And Why Execution Feels Harder Than It Should
At a certain point in a company’s growth, product execution starts to feel different.
Not obviously broken. Just heavier.
Teams are working hard. Delivery is happening.
But roadmaps feel less stable, priorities shift more often, and confidence quietly erodes.
This is not a failure of planning or effort.
It is a predictable signal that the product system that once worked implicitly has stopped scaling.
Continue on to see where that strain is emerging and how it typically shows up as organizations grow.
Quick Diagnostic: Identify Where Strain is Showing Up
This diagnostic is designed to surface patterns, not produce a score.
For each statement, select the response that best reflects how your organization typically operates today. Go with your first reaction rather than an idealized version or a recent exception. There is no benefit to overthinking individual questions.
What matters is how responses cluster across areas, not any single answer.
Response Options
Agree
This is consistently true in practice, not just in intention.
Partially Agree
This is sometimes true, but inconsistent or dependent on context, team, or individuals.
Disagree
This is generally not true, or only happens informally or by exception.
Quick Diagnostic
20 questions. Roughly 3 minutes. Results appear immediately on this page.
Where Product Systems Typically
Strain Under Growth
As organizations grow beyond founder-led execution, strain tends to surface in a small number of predictable places.
These are not isolated problems. They are system effects.
Strategic Clarity
Strategy exists, but it is interpreted differently across teams.
Decision Discipline
Decisions rely on conversation, escalation, or memory instead of shared logic.
Prioritization & Capacity
More work enteres the system than teams can confidently sequence & finish.
Documentation & Communincation
Critical context resides in people’s heads rather than in durable artifacts. Decisions, tradeoffs, and intent are communicated inconsistently or too late to guide execution.
Alignment & Operating Rhythm
Teams lack shared definitions and stable rhythms that reinforce focus over time.
Want deeper context on what your pattern(s) usually mean?
The diagnostic shows where strain is clustering, but it cannot explain why it is happening in your organization or how it developed over time.
If you’d like, we can send a short follow-up that goes deeper into: - How this pattern typically shows up as companies scale
- What leaders often misinterpret when they first encounter it
- Why surface-level fixes rarely hold
Wonder if your team agrees? We'll include a link to share the diagnostic - we'll follow up with a summary of their input.
This is not a prescription.
It’s additional context to help you make sense of what you’re seeing.
You’ll receive one short, tailored follow-up based on your results. No spam. You can unsubscribe anytime.
Want to compare results across your team?
We'll send a share link and summarize the pattern(s) for you.
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