The Execution Gap Lives in The Translation Layer

Your execution gap isn't about poor delivery or unclear strategy. It's about the invisible translation layer between them that nobody's managing.

Photo by Jack Hamilton on Unsplash

The Frog That Boiled

You’re three months into a retention initiative. Product shipped a redesigned dashboard. Engineering fixed some bugs. Design polished the onboarding flow. All good work. All on time. Retention moved 0.3%.

Nobody panicked on day one when product interpreted “retention” as engagement features while engineering heard “stability improvements”. Nobody raised flags in week four when design started optimising for new users instead of keeping existing ones. Nobody questioned the Slack thread in month two, where someone quietly redefined the success metric because the original target looked unreachable.

Small holes. Tiny misalignments. Each one defensible on its own.

The execution gap isn’t one big break. It’s a hundred little holes in the translation layer between “what leadership wants” and “what teams build”.

The ship drifted. Not dramatically. Not obviously. Just steadily, meeting by meeting, decision by decision, until you’re so far from the intended destination that nobody can remember what it was supposed to be.

Each hole lets a bit of intent leak out. A vague word here. An assumed context there. A priority that shifts without announcement. A metric that gets quietly swapped.

By the time the water’s boiling, the frog’s cooked.

The Holes Nobody Sees

At a B2B SaaS company, the board wanted to “expand in enterprise”. Sales heard “bigger deals” and chased Fortune 500 logos. Product heard “enterprise features” and built SSO, advanced permissions, audit logs. Engineering heard “scale” and rebuilt infrastructure. Marketing repositioned towards CIOs.

Eighteen months later: three enterprise clients, sophisticated features that small customers didn’t need, tripled infrastructure costs, and stalled mid-market revenue because nobody was watching it.

Nobody made a wrong decision. Everyone translated correctly according to their function. But the translations never aligned, and the tiny gaps between them compounded into a strategic detour that cost them a year and a half.

The holes in the translation layer come in patterns. Different organisations get different combinations, but the cascading effect is always the same.

Alignment Collapse

Product teams ship features without understanding how they connect to strategic goals. Leadership says “customer lifetime value” but doesn’t explain whether that means retention, expansion, or reducing support costs. Teams guess. They guess differently.

There’s no clear line from “here’s what I’m building this sprint” to “here’s why the board cares”. So teams fill in their own interpretation, and three teams fill it in three different ways.

I watched a company spend six months building a recommendation engine because “personalisation” was a strategic pillar. Nobody told product that the actual strategic goal was reducing churn in enterprise accounts, where personalisation doesn’t matter because they’re buying for teams, not individuals. Zero impact on the metric leadership actually cared about.

This one’s insidious because everyone’s working hard. The roadmap looks strategic. The all-hands slides mention the vision. But the connection’s missing.

Capacity Black Holes

Leadership sets ambitious goals. Product commits. Engineering’s already at 110% capacity. Something’s got to give. Usually it’s quality. Sometimes it’s the strategic work that gets bumped for urgent bugs and tech debt.

The hole here isn’t just bandwidth. It’s capability. Teams don’t have the skills for what strategy demands. You need ML expertise for the personalisation engine, but your engineers know React. You need enterprise sales experience, but your team has sold to SMBs their whole careers. Nobody admits it upfront because it sounds like failure. So you learn on the job, slowly, expensively, while the strategy timeline slips.

Ownership Ghosts

The VP announces the strategy. Nobody translates it into work. Or rather, everybody translates it differently, in their own heads, and nobody’s responsible for checking if the translations match.

“Improve developer experience” lands on three teams. Platform thinks it means better APIs. Product thinks it means better documentation. DevRel thinks it means more tutorials. Six months later, developer NPS hasn’t moved because the actual problem was confusing pricing, which none of them owned.

The ghost appears when you ask “who’s accountable for turning this strategic goal into specific work?” and get vague answers.

Measurement Drift

You start measuring monthly active users. Someone in leadership casually mentions “engaged users” in a meeting. Product ops updates the dashboard without telling anyone. Design’s still optimising for MAU. Engineering’s tracking DAU. Three different metrics, all called “active users”, none aligned.

Or worse: you’re measuring the wrong thing entirely. Leadership wants revenue impact. Product’s measuring feature adoption. Engineering’s measuring system performance. Design’s measuring user satisfaction. All good metrics. None of them prove you’re hitting the strategic goal.

Incentive Mismatches

The strategy says “long-term customer value”. Bonuses are based on quarterly revenue. Sales optimises for Q4 numbers. Product gets pressure to ship quick wins. Engineering’s rewarded for velocity, not sustainability. Everyone’s playing a different game.

This one’s brutal because individuals are making rational choices. They’re optimising for what they’re measured on. It’s just not what the strategy needs.

At a SaaS company, leadership wanted “product-led growth”. Sales was incentivised on deal size. So they kept selling to enterprise, which needed heavy customisation, which killed the product-led motion. Two years of strategic focus, zero movement on the metric, because the incentive structure was screaming “do the opposite”.

Frozen Strategy

Leadership sets the strategy in January. The market shifts in March. Competitors launch in May. Customer needs change in July. The strategy document stays the same. Teams keep executing against goals that stopped being relevant four months ago.

The annual planning cycle is designed for stability. But most markets aren’t stable anymore. You’re locked into OKRs that made sense in Q1 but are nonsense in Q3. Nobody wants to admit the strategy’s wrong. So you keep executing, dutifully, against a target that’s moved.

Or there’s no feedback loop at all. Teams ship. Users react. Data comes in. Nobody adjusts the strategy based on what’s actually happening. You discover in December that the thing you built in March didn’t work, but you only check once a quarter, so you built three more versions of it before anyone noticed.

Cultural Antibodies

The strategy says “move faster, experiment more”. The culture says “don’t ship broken things”. Engineering wants perfect code. Design wants pixel-perfect interfaces. Legal wants three rounds of review. You’ve announced a strategy that your culture is designed to reject.

Or it’s silos. Strategy requires product, engineering, and data to collaborate. But product doesn’t trust engineering’s estimates. Engineering doesn’t respect product’s priorities. Data doesn’t have access to the systems they need. Everyone’s protecting their territory. The strategic initiative dies in cross-functional warfare that nobody admits is happening.

The Cascading Landslide

These holes don’t stay isolated. They compound. They cascade. They create chain reactions that turn small problems into strategic failures.

Alignment collapse means teams build the wrong things. Building the wrong things wastes capacity. Wasted capacity means the right things don’t get built. Missing the right things means metrics don’t move. Metrics not moving triggers leadership panic. Panic creates new priorities. New priorities without clear ownership create more alignment collapse.

Round and round.

At a healthtech company, leadership wanted to “improve patient outcomes”. Nobody defined what that meant (alignment hole). Product built engagement features while clinical wanted diagnostic tools. Engineering was underwater (capacity issues). Nobody was accountable for the translation (ownership ghost). They measured feature adoption instead of health outcomes (measurement drift). Sales was incentivised on new logos, not patient results (incentive mismatch). The market shifted but the annual plan stayed the same (frozen strategy). Clinical staff resisted because they weren’t trained (cultural antibodies).

Eighteen months. Millions spent. Zero impact on patient outcomes.

Not because anyone was incompetent. Because seven small holes cascaded into strategic failure.

Why You Don’t Catch It

The hard part? You often sense something’s off.

Product’s talking about user engagement while leadership’s asking about revenue. Engineering’s excited about the refactor while sales is wondering where the promised features are. You’re in a meeting where everyone’s nodding but you can tell they’re all thinking different things.

You feel the drift. But you can’t always name it. And even when you can, you might not have the authority to fix it. Alignment collapse? That’s a leadership problem. Capacity issues? That’s a headcount problem. Incentive mismatches? That’s above your pay grade. Cultural antibodies? Good luck changing that.

The frog doesn’t jump out because the temperature rises slowly enough that each moment feels survivable. By the time it’s obviously wrong, you’re too invested to stop.

So you let it slide. Just this once. Just this meeting. Just this sprint.

I’ve been the PM who sensed the strategy wasn’t translating but didn’t have the evidence to prove it. Who saw the alignment issues but couldn’t get leadership to sit down and clarify. Who knew the metrics were wrong but couldn’t change them mid-quarter. Who watched the cultural resistance kill the initiative but couldn’t force change management.

Sometimes you don’t catch it because you can’t. You lack authority. You lack evidence. You lack the political capital to fight that battle when you’re already fighting three others.

Making the Holes Visible

You can’t plug every hole. But you can catch them faster and shrink the cascade.

On alignment: When someone uses an outcome word, stop. Translate it immediately. “Improve activation” becomes “what’s the activation event, what’s our current rate, what’s the target, who are we measuring, and how does this connect to the revenue goal leadership cares about”. Write it down. Check if everyone wrote the same thing. They won’t have. Fix that now, not in month three.

On capacity: Before committing to strategy, do a brutal capacity audit. What’s already committed? What’s the actual available hours? What skills do we have versus need? If the gap’s too wide, say it. Loudly. Don’t quietly agree to do six months of work in three with skills you don’t have.

On ownership: Draw the accountability map. Who translates this strategic goal into specific work? Who decides when interpretations conflict? Who checks if we’re still aligned? Get names. Get explicit agreement. Make it someone’s job.

On measurement: Define success before you write code. What are we tracking? What’s the target? When are we checking? How does this metric prove we hit the strategic goal? If you can’t draw a straight line from your metric to the board’s goal, pick a different metric.

On incentives: Look at what people are actually rewarded for. If it doesn’t match what strategy demands, flag it. You might not fix it, but at least you’ve named the mismatch. Sometimes that’s enough to get it changed. Sometimes you just work around it.

On adaptability: Build review cadences that can actually change things. Monthly strategy check-ins where you can kill work that’s not landing. Quarterly recalibrations where you can shift priorities based on what’s happening. Don’t lock the plan in January and ignore reality for eleven months.

On culture: Spot the antibodies early. Is this strategy asking people to work in ways that conflict with how they’re trained, rewarded, or structured? If yes, either change the strategy or invest in change management. Don’t just announce transformation and hope culture magically shifts.

The best teams I’ve seen do this relentlessly. They’re annoying about it. They catch vague language and force specificity. Not in formal ceremonies. Just in how they work.

Not because they’re pedantic. Because they’ve been the frog before. They know what boiling feels like.

Where This Goes Next

I’m building a series on the translation layer components that break most often. How alignment collapses and how to catch it. How capacity constraints silently kill strategy. How ownership ghosts create chaos. How measurement drifts off target. How incentives sabotage execution. How frozen strategies become irrelevant. How cultural antibodies reject change.

Each piece will show you where the holes typically form, how to spot them early, and what you can do tomorrow to plug them. No frameworks. Just patterns from teams that stopped boiling frogs.

Because the truth is: you’re not failing at execution. You’re failing at translation. The gap between “what the board wants” and “what teams build” is filled with small, compounding holes that nobody’s managing.

Fix the translation layer. Make the holes visible. Stop the drift early.

Or keep boiling. Your choice.