Deadlines slip, delivery slows, and suddenly rituals like standup meetings, retrospectives, and sprint reviews feel more like obligations than value-adding practices. Product leaders often sense the drag: these ceremonies are supposed to accelerate alignment, yet they too often devolve into status updates or box-ticking exercises.

Deadlines slip. Priorities clash. Meetings drag on without resolution. For many product leaders, it feels like their teams spend more time negotiating ownership than delivering outcomes.

It’s easy to point at technical debt or design debt as the culprits, but the real slowdown often comes from something harder to see.

Every product leader knows this feeling. New roadmapping platforms, collaboration boards, and OKR dashboards, each one promising to get everyone on the same page, finally. But a week or two after, strategic misalignment creeps back in.