But everybody did their job...
Companies are organized into departments. Customers aren’t. The most expensive problems live in the seams between them.
When growth slows, we go looking for the department responsible. Pipeline’s weak, that’s a marketing problem. Deals won’t close, sales problem. Customers don’t stick, product problem. Delivery’s slow, engineering problem. It’s a reasonable way to think, and I’ve watched it be wrong more often than right. Myself included.
The problem is often upstream of where the bad number appears, in the seam, or one floor up from where everyone’s staring.
I’ve spent most of my career moving between engineering, product, marketing, operations, and the leadership seat above all of them. The expensive problems, the ones that actually cost you a year, live in the gaps between the boxes. A marketing problem that’s really a product problem. A product problem that started in a sales call. A retention problem that was set in motion before the customer ever paid you.
Every department can be doing a perfectly reasonable job while the company as a whole produces a bad result.
Everybody did their job
At a travel SaaS company I worked with, we kept hearing a version of the same thing from sales: nobody will buy this without AI. So we did the logical thing. We invested in AI. We built recommendation technology and put real engineering effort behind it.
Nobody bought it anyway.
We had accepted a sales diagnosis as a product requirement without getting far enough underneath it. Engineering delivered what was asked for. Product could point to the new capability. Sales had the feature it said it needed. Everybody did their job, and we had solved the wrong problem.
Put a problem like that in a room with five executives and you get five completely reasonable diagnoses. Marketing needs better campaigns. Sales needs better leads. Product needs better positioning. Engineering needs clearer requirements. Customer success needs a better product. And everyone in the room is right. Each one is describing a real thing they can see through their own window. None of them is describing the whole.
Marketing might still be fishing for the buyer that worked eighteen months ago while sales has quietly figured out a different buyer is the one signing. Customer success might know precisely why people leave, and that knowledge might never once touch the other three. That distance is the thing nobody owns.
AI drops a room full of interns under every department
That was already hard. AI makes it harder, in a way that’s easy to miss.
The way I picture it: AI puts a room full of fast, cheap, eager interns underneath almost every department. They produce a massive amount of work. And they don’t know what’s true this quarter.
A marketing team has years of strategy docs, personas, decks and old content sitting in its systems. Ask an AI to build a new campaign and it’ll synthesize all of that history, beautifully. It feels like magic. Which is the problem. The product moved. The buyer moved. But the model doesn’t know which parts of the company’s own history are dead unless somebody told it. So the brand-new plan comes out looking a lot like last year’s. Nobody copied it. The machine reconstructed it from the past and handed it back looking new.
The obvious mistakes get caught. It’s the plausible ones that get through. The slightly stale positioning. The customer profile that drifted a few degrees. And then those outputs become inputs, summarized, rewritten, fed into the next model. We used to worry about alignment drift as a slow, human thing. Now we can automate it. Drift on steroids.
“Pretty good” ships
When making something was expensive, we inspected it. When it takes thirty seconds, the pull is to fire and forget. Terrible output gets rejected at the door. Pretty-good output ships, because it’s good enough that nobody stops.
None of this started with AI. I once looked at an agency’s dashboard reporting 11.7x return on ad spend. Pretty good. Actually, a banger. Nobody upstairs was questioning it, because why would you question a number that good. When I traced that 11.7x back to the actual orders, the campaign had produced $918 in real sales. The multiple was counting conversions the ads had touched but not caused. Everyone had been reading it for months.
AI changes the scale. The same thing is now happening across engineering, marketing, sales ops and support at once. Generation gets cheap. Judgment gets expensive. And quality stops being something each department does to its own output and becomes a problem for the whole company, which means it belongs to nobody yet.
Be suspicious when every dashboard is green
One of the stranger things you can walk into is a company where every department can prove it’s winning and the company is still missing the number.
Marketing hit its lead target. Sales hit its activity target. Engineering’s velocity is up. Product shipped the roadmap. Revenue hasn’t moved. Wild, and more common than you’d think.
Arguing harder about any one of those numbers won’t help, because none of them is lying. The question is whether they connect. Are we marketing to the people sales can actually close? Are they using what we built? Does using it produce the outcome sales promised? Are we even tracking the same customer as they move across the company, or do they get a new identity every time they cross a border?
The interesting questions are all about the seams. Where does the work leave someone’s hands? Where does a number quietly change its definition? Where does something get summarized instead of passed on? That’s where companies lose information, and time, and money, without anyone posting a bad number.
Somebody has to hold the loop
Who owns a problem that needs marketing, product, engineering and sales to all change something at once?
I don’t think there’s a universal title for it. Sometimes it’s revenue operations. Sometimes the CRO, sometimes the CEO. And honestly, sometimes it’s just the one person who noticed and refused to let go. Somebody has to own the problem from the moment it’s spotted to the moment the company can show it’s resolved, across every department it touches.
Without that, the problem gets passed around the building, and every ticket is closed while the customer still has the same problem.
Sometimes marketing really does just need better marketing. Sometimes engineering really does just need to ship faster. But when every team looks like it’s doing its job and the company still isn’t getting the result it wants, I’ve learned to stop staring at the departments.
I look at the space between them.
Know where this has to go, and not how?
Twenty minutes. Tell me where you want this company to be in two years and I’ll tell you what I’d go look at first.