Product Silos, Broken Marriages, and the Real Job of a Product Leader

If your executives are celebrating 26 percent growth while your teams celebrate tickets closed, you are not speaking the same love language.

The broken marriage inside your organization

Major silos in an organization feel a lot like a broken marriage. One side is convinced they are right. The other side is just as convinced they are right. Nobody is actually hearing the other person.

On the business side, you hear things like we grew 26 percent last year, we hit our revenue target, we expanded margin. It is all about outcomes and financial performance.

Meanwhile, product and engineering are talking about execution. Sprints. Velocity. Technical debt. Dependencies. Deep architecture details they did not even understand a few weeks ago but are now arguing about in great detail.

These are different love languages. Same company, same products, same customers, but two groups living in parallel realities.

What is really happening under the surface

When I talk with product and strategy leaders, this is the pattern that shows up again and again. The business is optimized around financial outcomes. Product and engineering are optimized around work getting done.

Both sides are technically correct. Financial outcomes matter. Execution quality matters. But because they report on different things, they drift into different worlds. That drift is how silos harden.

Research on cross-silo leadership backs this up. Most executives know they need better collaboration across functions, but they struggle to make it real because no one is doing the translation work. Everyone keeps speaking their own language and then wonders why alignment never sticks.

In your world, that shows up as strategy decks that talk about growth and profitability, and execution dashboards that talk about story points and incident counts. No clean line between the two. No shared scoreboard. No shared narrative.

The uncomfortable truth about product leadership

Here is the hard part that many product leaders do not want to hear: they are not going to come to you. Your CFO is not going to dive into your backlog. Your CEO is not going to study your architecture diagrams. Your head of sales is not going to read a PRD.

They will keep talking about growth, retention, margin, expansion, and risk. That is their job.

So if anyone is going to bridge this gap, it has to be you. That bridge is not a new framework or another quarterly planning ritual. The bridge is empathy plus translation.

This is the same point I make when I talk about shifting from velocity to value. Task completion is not leadership. Translation is leadership. Connecting the work to the outcome is leadership.

Step one: stop hiding in deep technical detail

If you find yourself going deeper and deeper into architecture arguments you barely understood a few weeks ago, that is usually a signal. It often means you are drifting away from the language of the business and into the safety of technical detail.

I am not saying architecture is unimportant. I am saying it is not the native language of your executive team.

Your job is to understand that technical world well enough to be credible with engineers, and then translate it into the language of growth, cost, risk, and differentiation for the rest of the company.

A simple test: if you cannot explain a major technical decision in terms of its impact on revenue, margin, risk, or customer value, you have more translation work to do.

Step two: learn how the business actually measures success

When leaders say they want growth, that is not specific enough for you to lead against. You need to ask how they want to achieve that growth and how they are measuring it.

Are they focused on net revenue retention or new logo acquisition. Are they managing to gross margin, contribution margin, or cash. Do they care more about land and expand or about multi year contracts.

This is where your curiosity needs to shift from user stories to financial stories. Read the dashboards your executives read. Ask how the board looks at the business. Learn what moves those numbers.

If you are serious about product leadership, this is not extra credit. This is the work. It is the same mindset shift I get into when I talk about whether we are really tracking outcomes instead of just tracking motion.

Step three: connect execution to outcomes in plain language

Once you understand how the business measures success, you can start rewiring how you talk about product and engineering work.

Instead of we shipped feature X, talk about how feature X is expected to increase self serve adoption by a certain percent, which drives a modeled impact on revenue or support costs.

Instead of we are doing a platform rewrite, explain that this work should cut infrastructure costs per customer, unlock faster experimentation, or reduce incident risk for your largest accounts.

Tools and rituals that make this connection visible help a lot. Think shared goal frameworks, not team specific ones. Think a single source of truth for goals and work, like the approaches summarized in Asana's overview of organizational silos, rather than a maze of disconnected spreadsheets and slide decks.

When you connect execution to outcomes in this way, roadmaps stop being lists of features and start becoming investment theses for the business.

Five practical moves you can start this quarter

If you want to start breaking the marriage style stalemate between business and product, here are concrete moves that work inside mid market and enterprise environments.

None of this requires a reorg or a new tool. It requires a decision that you will be the person who learns to speak both languages and chooses to translate.

This is your responsibility as a product leader

When you strip away the noise, product leadership is not about owning a backlog or running planning sessions. It is about empathy for the other silo and the willingness to connect your world to theirs.

That is the spirit behind how we think about work at Iteright and how we design solutions that keep execution attached to real outcomes. But you do not need any specific platform to start behaving like this kind of leader.

You can choose to step into their world. You can choose to listen for what growth actually means to them. You can choose to translate architecture and features into dollars, risk, and customer value.

If you do that consistently, you will not just reduce friction between product and the rest of the business. You will become the person executives call when they want to understand how strategy turns into results.

That is the job. That is the opportunity. Go make it happen.