If Everyone’s Busy, Why Are We Still Behind?
- Darren Emery
- Jul 21
- 5 min read
The Hidden Systemic Failures Blocking Focus, Speed, and Innovation
It’s the most dangerous illusion in modern product organisations:
Everyone’s busy - so we must be making progress.
Except… you’re not.
The roadmap is full, teams are maxed out, and delivery reports show motion.
But big bets keep slipping.
Market relevance is fading.
AI initiatives aren’t going anywhere.
And you're stuck explaining why, even with full teams and full roadmaps, your competitors are moving faster - and shipping smarter.
What you’re seeing isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a structural problem.
Somewhere between strategy and delivery, the system has broken down. Priorities blur, governance slows decisions, and the product org becomes a reactive service function instead of a strategic driver.
The result?
Everyone’s busy. But nothing truly moves.
When Everything’s a Priority, Nothing Gets Done
Most companies don’t lack ideas.
They lack a mechanism for choice.
There are too many inputs - sales, marketing, operations, leadership - each with legitimate needs.
So you end up with a backlog the size of a novel and a prioritisation process that feels more like triage than strategy.
Teams get whiplash from context-switching.
The roadmap becomes a political compromise.
And real value gets buried under deliverables designed to keep stakeholders quiet.
This is what I call a push system pretending to be agile.
You’re not pulling the most valuable work into focus. You’re pushing more and more through an overloaded pipe - and wondering why nothing moves faster.
The Cost of Confusion
According to McKinsey, developers in many mid-sized firms spend less than 50% of their time on actual product work.
The rest is swallowed by meetings, context-switching, and managing internal conflict about what matters most.
That’s not inefficiency - it’s organisational debt.
A hidden cost of unclear priorities, fractured ownership, and overstuffed delivery pipelines.
You’ve got smart, capable teams working at pace - but their effort is being absorbed by friction. And no matter how many retros you run or tools you buy, until you address the systemic design, the system will continue to fail by design.
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”— W. Edwards Deming
If the result is delay, dilution, and missed innovation windows, then that’s what the system was built to produce.
Three Structural Failures Slowing You Down
🔁 Compromise Is Not Strategy: Why Prioritisation Keeps Breaking Down
In theory, priority flows from strategy. In practice, it flows from influence.
Roadmaps often represent an averaging out of competing demands - not an integrated set of strategic choices.
Prioritisation becomes a negotiation between stakeholders with different goals, not a decision about where the business should go.
So we fund too many things. Everything is “business critical.”
And delivery turns into a form of backlog appeasement: a little bit for sales, something for marketing, a few scraps for ops - and something shiny to keep the board quiet.
Your delivery system becomes a conveyor belt of half-agreed ideas, filtered through fifteen lenses, diluted at every level.
And still the teams get told to "go faster."
This is how focus dies.
And with it, your speed.
👉 Fix: Move to unified prioritisation - one model across product, commercial, and technology that defines value, aligns bets, and stops local optimisation. Focus is a decision, not a consensus.
🧭 No One’s Steering: Why Product Must Lead, Not Serve
Product management is meant to be the connective tissue between business goals and customer outcomes.
But in many organisations, product has become an internal service function - chasing requests, collecting feedback, and executing other people’s ideas.
You can’t be strategic if you don’t shape the work.
You can’t shape the work if you don’t understand the bets.
And you won’t understand the bets if you’re not in the room when they’re made.
Until product is treated as a strategic discipline - one that drives value, not just velocity - you’ll keep seeing the same pattern:
Roadmaps that look full but feel empty. Work that delivers something, but achieves nothing.
A backlog that grows faster than your results.
👉 Fix: Product must lead. Give them the mandate - and the accountability - to:
Own the customer
Define the commercial opportunity
Articulate the strategic bet
Say no to noise
When product leads, delivery accelerates.
🚦 Innovation Isn’t an Idea Problem. It’s a Governance Problem
Most execs say they want innovation.
What they really want is innovation with a guaranteed ROI and no delivery risk.
But real innovation means uncertainty.
It means moving faster than the data.
It means learning instead of knowing.
The problem isn’t a shortage of ideas - it’s a lack of permission to explore them.
Teams get stuck waiting for signoff, funding, alignment, and proof.
And by the time they have all four, the opportunity has passed.
This is why innovation isn’t about creativity.
It’s about systems.
And most organisations have built systems that punish exploration.
👉 Fix: Innovation needs a system - not just inspiration.
Allocate real capacity (not leftovers)
Define thematic bets (e.g., AI, automation, adjacent markets)
Set appropriate goals (e.g., validated learning, prototype impact - not immediate revenue)
Measure progress with exploration metrics, not standard KPIs
Innovation is a different game. It needs different rules.
The Product Operating Model Is the Problem - And the Opportunity
You don’t fix this by running a better PI Planning session.
You fix this by rethinking how your product organisation is structured, funded, and governed.
The difference between shipping work and shaping markets lies in how you design your product operating model.
Here’s how high-performing orgs think differently:
Traditional Model | High-Performing Model | |
Roadmaps | List of outputs agreed by stakeholders | Options for learning, aligned to strategic bets |
Funding | Annual budgets by project or department | Quarterly funding by product area or problem space |
Governance | Gate reviews and signoff committees | Intent-based oversight and outcome checkpoints |
Metrics | Delivery speed, velocity, cost | Business impact, customer outcomes, learning pace |
Innovation | Tracked by revenue or features shipped | Tracked by validated learning and time-to-signal |
It fails because your system doesn’t make space for it.
Speed Comes from Clarity, Not Chaos
You don’t get faster by demanding speed.
You get faster by reducing noise.
By saying no to low-leverage work.
By making fewer bets - but backing them fully.
By ensuring everyone from leadership to delivery is pointing in the same direction.
By creating feedback loops that shorten time-to-learning, not just time-to-delivery.
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”— Peter Drucker
What to Do Next
If you're a COO, CIO, or CEO and you're surrounded by activity but short on impact - ask yourself:
Can I name the top 3 commercial bets we’re backing right now - and how they show up in the roadmap?
If not, your system isn’t aligned to your strategy.
Do I share the same view of priority as my peers across the exec team?
If not, delivery will default to politics, not focus.
Is product treated as a strategic partner - or just a delivery function?
If it’s the latter, you’re flying blind on customer value.
Is innovation something we manage - or something we allow?
If it’s only real when it's certain, you’ll always be late.
This isn’t about working harder. It’s about designing a system that works.
Because busy isn’t the goal.
The goal is focus that compounds, speed that scales, and innovation that doesn’t need permission.
