Strategy Lost in Translation: The Hierarchy Alignment Problem
The gap between strategic direction and actual execution isn't a communication problem. It's what happens when organizations optimize for consensus over clarity.
Your exec team spent three months crafting a strategy. They emerged from an offsite with slides, frameworks, and conviction. Six weeks later, your engineering lead asks what you’re actually building next quarter, and you realize you can’t quite explain how yesterday’s sprint planning connects to that confident deck from March.
Something broke in translation. Again.
What Actually Happens When Strategy Goes Missing
I’ve watched this play out enough times to spot the early signs. The leadership team announces bold direction. People nod earnestly. Then everyone returns to their desks and... continues exactly what they were doing before. Not because they’re stubborn or checked out. Because nobody quite knows what to stop doing, or what the new thing looks like at ground level.
Here’s what that gap looks like from the PM seat. You’re in a product review, walking through your roadmap. Someone from the exec team squints at your Q2 plans and says, “How does this ladder up to our platform play?” You freeze. Your roadmap predates the platform play. Or maybe it doesn’t, but nobody told you what “platform play” actually means for your domain. You mumble something about “alignment” and “exploring options” and make a note to have a conversation you should’ve had two months ago.
The real problem isn’t that strategy gets lost. It’s that strategy often arrives pre-lost. Packaged in language so polished it slides right past the messy reality of building products.
The Translation Problem Nobody Admits
Strategy documents have this weird property. They get more confident as they get more abstract. “Accelerate platform adoption across enterprise segments” sounds clear until you’re the PM who needs to decide whether that means building SSO first or fixing the onboarding flow that’s haemorrhaging users.
The McKinsey people call this the “mobilization gap.” Nice phrase. What they mean is: most companies are terrible at turning strategic choices into organizational readiness. The bit where you figure out who does what, with which resources, starting when. The unglamorous logistics that determine whether your strategy lives or dies.
I’ve seen research claiming 74% of executives admit their strategies don’t translate into concrete actions. Which means either:
26% of executives are lying, or
We’ve collectively decided this is just how strategy works
Neither answer is great.
“The biggest gap between Strategy Champions and stragglers is in mobilization, the phase of translating strategic choices into organizational readiness.”
That’s from McKinsey research, and it tracks with what I’ve seen. The companies that actually execute strategy spend absurd amounts of time on the boring stuff. Who owns what. What resources exist. What we’re explicitly choosing not to do. The stragglers write beautiful strategy docs and wonder why nothing changes.
When Everyone’s Aligned on Paper
There’s this meeting I keep attending. Different companies, same meeting. Leadership gathers to “align on priorities.” Two hours later, everyone leaves feeling aligned. But ask three different VPs what the top priority is, and you’ll get three different answers. All technically correct. All mutually exclusive in practice.
This is what misalignment actually looks like. Not open disagreement (that you could fix). But confident consensus that means different things to different people. Your CTO heard “invest in platform infrastructure.” Your CPO heard “ship revenue features.” Your CEO heard both and assumed you’d figure out the balance. Nobody did.
“Misalignment isn’t open disagreement. It’s confident consensus that means different things to different people.”
The product org inherits this mess. You’re supposed to build the roadmap that delivers the strategy, except the strategy contains built-in contradictions nobody surfaced. So you make choices. Reasonable choices, probably. But they’re your choices, not strategic choices. And when the quarterly review comes around and your roadmap doesn’t match someone’s mental model of the strategy, you’re the one who “wasn’t listening.”
Actually, you were listening. You were listening to three different versions of the same story.
The Real Dysfunction Hiding In Plain Sight
Let me tell you what I learned building products in fintech, then moving to SaaS, then dipping into Web3, then back to enterprise. The dysfunction isn’t unique to any industry. It’s not a startup problem or an enterprise problem. It’s a human systems problem dressed up in business language.
When strategy fails to translate, it’s usually because:
Someone is optimizing for consensus over clarity. Writing strategy documents that everyone can agree with requires making them vague enough that everyone sees what they want to see. This is political genius and operational suicide.
The strategy assumes resources that don’t exist. You’ve committed to four strategic bets, but you have capacity for 1.5. Leadership knows this. Product knows this. Nobody says it out loud because that would mean choosing, and choosing means disappointing someone important.
The incentive systems haven’t caught up. Your strategy says “platform thinking” but your bonus structure still rewards shipping features. Guess which one wins? Here’s a hint: people do what you pay them to do, not what you tell them to do.
Nobody wants to admit what we’re not doing. Every strategy is also a list of things you’re explicitly choosing not to pursue. Except nobody writes that list. Too risky. Too many feelings. So you end up with strategy by omission, where people discover the boundaries by running into them.
“Every strategy is a list of things you’re choosing not to pursue. Except nobody writes that list.”
I shipped a product once where the strategic direction was “become the system of record for X.” Sounds clear, right? Wrong. What nobody wanted to say was that becoming the system of record meant killing our old flagship product that still generated 40% of revenue. The strategy was real. The roadmap was fantasy.
How to Spot This Before It Kills Your Quarter
You can see strategy gaps forming before they blow up your roadmap. Here’s what to watch for.
The euphemism test. When leadership talks about the strategy, listen for words that sound specific but aren’t. “Drive adoption.” “Improve experience.” “Accelerate growth.” These are fine as outcomes, useless as direction. If you can’t describe three concrete examples of what success looks like, you don’t have strategy, you have aspiration.
The resource allocation test. Look at where your engineers are actually spending time. Does it match the strategy document? If your strategy says “enterprise focus” but 70% of eng is fixing consumer bugs, you’ve found the gap. Resources don’t lie. Words do.
The decision latency test. When someone asks “Should we build feature X?”, how long does it take to answer? If the answer is “Let me check with five people and get back to you,” your strategy isn’t doing its job. Strategy should make decisions faster by providing a framework. If it’s making decisions slower by adding more cooks, something’s broken.
The team confusion test. Ask three individual contributors on different teams to explain the strategy. If you get three wildly different answers, you’re not aligned, you’re all just using the same words differently. This happens more than you think.
What You Can Actually Do About It
Right. You’ve spotted the gap. Strategy exists in slide form but not in practice. What now?
Make the trade-offs explicit
Someone needs to say the quiet part out loud. You can’t do everything. So what are we not doing? I’ve started keeping a “Not Doing” list that’s as detailed as my roadmap. Features we could build but won’t. Markets we could chase but aren’t. Improvements we’re deliberately postponing. Writing this down feels dangerous. It is dangerous. It’s also clarifying.
Try this in your next planning session: For every strategic priority, list three things you’re explicitly choosing not to do. Watch how fast the fake consensus evaporates.
Create decision heuristics, not frameworks
Your team doesn’t need another prioritization matrix. They need a way to make calls when you’re not in the room. Give them principles that actually work. Not “focus on customer value” (useless). More like “B2B over B2C unless the B2C feature enables B2B workflows” (specific enough to be wrong, which means it’s specific enough to be useful).
At Quantive, we had a simple rule: any feature requiring more than two quarters of data science work needed VP approval, period. Arbitrary? Yes. Clarifying? Absolutely. It killed three months of circular debate about ML features.
Build the forcing functions
Strategy without measurement is just wishful thinking. But here’s the thing: measuring outcomes is hard and slow. You need faster feedback loops. Leading indicators that tell you if you’re on track before the quarter ends.
If your strategy is “platform first,” start tracking how many new features are built on the platform versus outside it. If you’re “enterprise focused,” measure what percentage of design reviews include enterprise-specific concerns. These aren’t perfect metrics. They’re smoke detectors, not fire extinguishers. But you want to know about the smoke.
Accept that some sacrifices are real
Here’s the uncomfortable bit. Sometimes the strategy is sound, but executing it means killing things people love. Products. Features. Markets. Teams, sometimes. You can’t translate strategy without accepting this. The companies that do strategy well aren’t avoiding hard choices. They’re making them visibly, early, and then moving on.
I’ve had to sunset products that were profitable but off-strategy. It’s miserable. The team’s upset. The customers are confused. The board wants to know why you’re killing something that makes money. You do it anyway because the alternative is spreading resources so thin that nothing works.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Strategy Execution
Most strategy execution advice treats this like a process problem. Get better at cascading goals. Use OKRs properly. Improve your communication. Fine. Do those things.
But the real issue is usually political, not procedural. Someone high up doesn’t actually want the strategy to succeed because it threatens their domain. Or multiple executives are playing chicken, waiting to see if the strategy sticks before committing resources. Or the strategy is intentionally vague because getting specific would expose disagreements nobody wants to have.
You can’t process-engineer your way out of political misalignment. At some point, someone needs to have the awkward conversation. Preferably someone with enough capital to survive it.
If you’re a senior PM or director, that someone might be you. Sorry. It’s not in your job description, but it’s in your job. You’re close enough to execution to see where the strategy breaks down, senior enough that people might listen, and dispensable enough that you can take the reputational hit if it goes wrong.
This is what “strategic thinking” actually means in practice. Not writing decks. Not facilitating workshops. But being willing to name the gap between what we say we’re doing and what we’re actually doing, and then pushing until someone either fixes it or admits we’re not going to.
What to Try Tomorrow
Enough philosophy. Here’s what you can do this week.
Run a strategy translation workshop with your immediate team. Take the company strategy and work backwards. If this strategy is true, what would we stop doing? What would we start? What would we do differently? Write it down. Compare notes. The gaps will be obvious.
Ask the “how would we know” question in your next planning meeting. Every strategic statement, follow up with: “How would we know if we’re making progress on this next quarter?” If nobody can answer, the strategy isn’t ready for execution.
Create a decision log. For two weeks, write down every time you or your team had to make a strategic choice without clear direction. What were you deciding? What information did you need? Who did you have to ask? At the end of two weeks, you’ll have a map of where your strategy has holes.
The Thing Nobody Wants to Acknowledge
Here’s what I’ve learned after doing this across multiple companies, industries, and company stages: sometimes the strategy is deliberately vague because the leadership team can’t agree. Sometimes it’s vague because they don’t actually know what to do. And sometimes it’s vague because being specific would require admitting resource constraints that everyone knows but nobody wants to say out loud.
None of these are process problems. They’re courage problems.
The gap between strategy and execution isn’t going away. It’s inherent in how organizations work. The question is whether you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist or learn to navigate it. Because your roadmap depends on it, your team’s sanity depends on it, and your ability to ship anything meaningful depends on getting good at this translation work.
Nobody taught you this in PM school. There is no PM school. But this is the job. Not the fun stuff in the blog posts about vision and innovation. The boring, political, uncomfortable work of turning vague strategic intent into specific product choices while keeping everyone roughly pointed in the same direction.
It’s not elegant. It’s not “best practice.” It’s just what works when you’ve run out of other options and someone needs to actually build something.
Anyway. Good luck with Q3 planning.