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We launched a major feature last quarter (Yippee!) It was something customers had been asking for, just such a clear win. It... wasn't.
When we went back through the post-mortem, the feature was fine. What had happened was that Product sent an announcement, then Marketing folded it into an existing nurture sequence with different framing, and CS mentioned it in outreach using whatever language felt right to them. Nobody coordinated or stopped to check in! A few customers came away not even realizing the feature existed and at least one told their CSM they were evaluating other tools because we "didn't have" something we'd literally just shipped. Ugh.
The frustrating part is that everyone did something. Sends were going out, and we all got to check our boxes. By every individual metric, the launch looked fine. The only signal that something had gone wrong showed up in customer conversations weeks later, and by then it was so hard to trace back.
I'm not new to this. I can get people aligned in a room. What I can't get them to do is change how they measure success, because the moment the next launch kicks off, everyone's back to optimizing for their own number. Coordinated strategy sounds great until it means someone has to slow down a campaign or share credit for a touch that's going in someone else's report.
How do you build a real cross-team communication strategy when the incentives are all pointing in different directions and the gaps only show up somewhere nobody's watching?
— Lost in Translation
Thank you for writing in. And I'm sorry you're dealing with this. It's genuinely frustrating to see the things that the people around you aren't seeing, or at least aren't seeing the same way.
What I'm reading between the lines is that your teams don't have a truly shared goal associated with this launch. Marketing is solving an awareness problem. Product is solving a feature gap. CS is solving a customer health problem. Nobody unified around the actual thing: customers aren't getting value from what we shipped, and here's the specific outcome we're all going to move together.
It ends up feeling like the Atlanta airport during a weather event. Everyone’s just trying to get somewhere, on their own timeline, blinders on, not thinking about anyone else. A lot of motion and not a lot of coordination. When the shared goal doesn't exist at the front end, everyone goes off and does their own version of "the launch," and when it's over, everyone's metrics look fine because everyone was measuring their own thing.
What I've seen actually work is starting every cross-functional initiative with one shared checkpoint before anyone goes off to execute. Not "here's what my team is going to measure", but "what is the single goal we're all moving toward, and how will we know we got there?" When I've been on launches where we started there, defined the shared success metric first and let each team figure out their role within it, the work was more collaborative and the results were more honest. When we didn't, everyone thought they won even when the launch underperformed.
That word "fine" in your letter is doing a lot of work. Fine is what we call it when our leading indicators look okay but we don't know what they're actually connected to. Going back through your last few launches and tracing those leading indicators to the lagging ones — where do they disconnect? — is a useful thing to bring to this conversation. Frame it as curiosity, not accusation, and it makes it much harder for people to stay comfortable behind "mine looked fine."
You say you can get people aligned but can't get them to change. I think the alignment is real in the room — the problem is it hasn't been made sticky enough to survive the next launch kicking off. Agreement in a meeting and behavioral change under pressure are two different things, and the gap between them is where this keeps breaking down. If you have an executive sponsor on the project, get them involved. You need someone with authority to help you call a pause when things start to drift.
The only way out of the Atlanta airport is if everybody lets go of their individual gate and starts moving toward a shared exit. Let go of who gets credit: this is a team sport. If they can’t, then all this talk about what to9 do and behavior change will be, tragically, for naught.
Be honest about what's working and what isn't. We can’t materially make moves until we share a reason, which in most case is the shared and connected goal.
You see the problem clearly: the next move is making sure the people around you are seeing the same thing, in the same terms, with the same stakes.
— Experience Etiquette's Elana
