Sales and product spent another meeting sequencing a list that exceeds our capacity in any order. On the political comfort of never cutting anything.
Nobody at a steering committee meeting this week said the thing I know a few of us were thinking: we have too many projects, not enough people, and no one willing to cut. What we held instead was another round of the sequencing debate, in which sales and product take turns proposing orderings of a list that exceeds our capacity no matter how it’s ordered. A political impasse had dressed itself up as a sequencing problem, and sequencing problems are more comfortable to discuss, because sequencing implies everything still happens, just over a longer timeline.
My hot take was that it’s a structural issue, and I said it like this: our go-to-market team fails because they’re not telling us what they can sell… they have no autonomy to build and ship the things they know they can sell. We’ve built an arrangement where the people closest to revenue submit requests into a queue owned by people they don’t manage, then wait for an escalation to do what the queue won’t, and everyone involved calls the meeting where the escalation lands a partnership. Nobody designed this on purpose… it accreted, the way most org charts do, and now it produces steering committees where the loudest disagreement in the room is between two groups who each believe they’re the ones being reasonable.
“They have no autonomy to build and ship the things they know they can sell.”
The model I championed instead is an end-to-end go-to-market function: product, engineering, and sales in one squad, with the heads of inbound and outbound setting the push and the squad owning its own roadmap. Ownership is the operative word. A squad that owns its roadmap can cut things, because it feels the cost of not cutting, while a committee that merely sequences a shared list feels nothing but the room temperature.
The objection is predictable and worth honoring: doesn’t this fragment the strategy? It can, if the squads drift. The answer is the push, set from the top by the people accountable for inbound and outbound demand, so the squad’s autonomy operates inside a direction rather than instead of one. What the current setup protects is the comfort of never saying no, and at that altitude comfort gets expensive: every project stays alive and moves slowly, and the slowness gets rediscovered quarterly with fresh surprise. I’d rather kill three projects in one honest hour than watch nine of them starve politely across two quarters, and I suspect the sales leaders would take that trade too, if anyone offered it to them.
The teachable part
When a sequencing debate returns for the third meeting running, stop sequencing and ask what nobody is willing to cut. The answer is the actual agenda.