Five Tensions Every Product Team Feels (and How I've Actually Solved Each)
Between my own in-house roles and through dozens of conversations since launching OutSight, what’s become really clear to me is that in product driven companies, everything is in a swirl. The last 5 years have brought so much chaos from supply chain disruptions, inflation, tariffs, more inflation, brands getting gobbled up by private equity and oh, the whole AI thing!
Where “Product” sits and who “owns” it can be a hot potato within companies and unclear at best. Months back in a conversation with my good friend John Gleason, I was shocked by the statistics in the proprietary research conducted by his firm, A Better View , to just how many design teams report into another function. Per the study, 86% of the 239 organizations researched have design organizations reporting into non-design functions: Engineering, Innovation/R&D, Product, etc. Design departments that were already outcasts in many companies now report into groups that don’t know how to lead them let alone collaborate to bring the roadmap and products they’re all responsible for to market successfully. I was fortunate to have led Design and Product Development teams where I reported directly to the CEO, but many of the issues I faced are echoed in tons of companies regardless of where they sit in an org chart.
There are 5 particularly common issues I keep hearing about from company leaders and though they feel insurmountable, they are absolutely solvable. Here are the issues, how they manifest in the workplace and some suggestions on how I’ve tackled each in my experience.
1 | Revenue pressure means new products keep launching, but nobody can really say whether they're moving the needle, let alone whether they're building the brand or slowly watering it down.
The Problem
There is an inevitable inertia that occurs in companies – regardless of public or private ownership – that creates a natural cadence of launches based on a roadmap that has financials attached to it, revenue expectations, etc. That’s great when you have tailwinds, but here’s what usually happens…. The year starts out with a solid plan and a roadmap that seems achievable and everyone’s bought in. Then things start to play out. One product gets delayed, one gets killed, sales asks for 3 more that weren’t on the roadmap for this year (or at all) and all of a sudden everyone is in scramble mode. These “gap fill” products get briefed in and hope of hitting plan resumes. But in all the focus on potential top and bottom line contribution, the consumer and brand plot was lost. Do people want what you’re planning? Does this line extension or adjacency make sense for the brand or are we selling our souls a bit to skid to the finish line battered but not beaten?
The Solution
I’ve seen this more times than I can count and it requires confident leadership, data and ideas. First off, someone needs to be bold enough to voice their dissenting view, then have data to make their case. Once the case is made (BTW, not doing it isn’t an option), you have to have a “you can’t have that but you could do this…”. You still have a problem to address through product but what’s the best way to solve it. Maybe it’s not a new product, maybe it’s new colorways of a strong seller? Maybe it’s a better story-telling opportunity on your DTC channels to drive volume? Maybe it’s actually fewer but better products instead of more (see the Paradox of Choice and the backlash that can cause). Generally speaking, product roadmap solves have to be driven by equal parts revenue, ebitda and brand. If any one of these is left out of the equation, you’ll just be dealing with more of the same problems a quarter later.
The Takeaway:
Launching products is time consuming and hard. Problems arise and roadmap shifts are inevitable. But the solution to revenue problems is not to blindly throw more products at it. The consumer and their expectation of your brand comes first, everything else follows. Lose the brand and who cares how many products you launch.
2 | Every new product seems to start from a blank page instead of building on rationale they’ve already figured out.
The Problem
Typically, creating physical products (not medical instruments, heavy equipment or cars) takes about 18-24 months from brief to launch - give or take a few months. That includes gathering some user insights, synthesis, rounds of ideation, refinement, prototypes, user evaluations, more refinement, etc, all the way through engineering, tooling, testing, pilot production and making and shipping your load-in inventory. And you’d be shocked at how often teams get a new brief and seemingly forget everything they’d ever done before and start working from scratch as though they were starting that company’s product portfolio with that one project. Unless a company is literally brand new, this is one of the biggest missed opportunities for brand cohesion and design efficiency through the development of design language guidelines, which can impact both the top and bottom lines.
The Solution
Design Language Guideline development has been central to the bulk of my career for a host of reasons, first and foremost being the wonderful opportunity to bring a brand’s physical expression to life through all the real life, sensory interactions a human has with a product. The scale, proportions, intuitive placement of features. Colors, materials, finishes and those a-ha moments that truly surprise and delight users and cultivate the seeds of brand loyalty through that person to product engagement. Done well, it’s magic. But it’s not all altruism in homage to the brand, there’s real purpose. First off, a unified product portfolio looks considered and becomes recognizable through its consistent use of form, materials, brand placement. That naturally and subconsciously elevates a brand’s impression which impacts the top line value. It also allows for more efficient development since there are now established principles as one approaches every new product. There may be shared silhouettes or actual parts, but though each product has its own use and appearance, the DNA of the brand at the product level allows for more consistent and efficient development, which saves time and cost both impacting the bottom line. Do they take some time to develop? Sure they do. But the power of creating and using a set of clear guidelines not only has all the benefits I just mentioned but even bigger, the collaborative effort to develop them has cross-functional benefits that can profoundly impact the soul of an entire company.
The Takeaway:
Take the time and build great design language guidelines. A well done set takes a few months to develop but will save years and millions afterwards. Things will move through the pipeline more smoothly and the people tasked with their development will all be speaking in the same way.
3 | Cost decisions are happening in one meeting while how a product actually gets experienced by the customer gets decided in another.
The Problem
Unless it’s a blue-sky or really upstream innovation project, every road-mapped product I’ve ever worked on has had cost targets included in the brief. Cost is one of the key sandbox barriers that constrain design and development, and meeting or beating those targets are the difference between hitting your bottom-line vs literally taping dollar bills to each product you ship. Meaning, it’s super important. That said, early in development costing targets are based on educated hopes which need to be aligned to at the outset so the teams aren’t behind the 8 ball right out of the gate. Over the course of that 18-24 month development however, cost always increases for one reason or another – a feature required more complicated materials or parts, a finish cost more than the supplier disclosed, raw material/labor costs, tooling complexities, a new competitive product came out requiring a scope change to what we’re already a year into, etc. The range of variables is wide and the implications all chip away at time and profit.
The Solution
These issues tend to arise at stage gate reviews with options being discussed among the teams closest to the products – design, product management, marketing, supply chain, etc – but with each team making their biased cases for what must happen, so begins the swirl of indecision all the while the clock towards launch is ticking. So the leaders bring it to their staff meetings, or worse, the team with most P&L responsibility raises the issue in a separate meeting where decisions ARE made by execs and before you know it, what should have been solved with reasonable debate now becomes a mandate from the people furthest from the product. This is where relationships come in to not only work “across the aisle” with the other department stakeholders but also the manufacturing partners too since they own a huge piece of the cost. It starts by aligning to a set of filters by which to make decisions – the best one in my experience being user experience. It was drilled into me many years ago when working on P&G products by then head of R&D: a consumer should never be aware of a cost reduction. Take all the cost out that you can but a consumer should never feel short-changed nor should their brand experience be compromised. So, when you can frame your rationale through the lens of arguably your biggest stakeholder – your customer – everything else falls in line and allows everyone to focus on the keeping or removing things that matter most not just the ones that are most obvious.
The Takeaway:
After a package is tossed out, the product being used is THE brand representative to a consumer. Yes, that needs to be profitable to be viable, but where and how someone experiences the product is where the dollar focus should be. Take cost out of the things they won’t miss.
4 | The big calls about what to put onto the roadmap get made before the people who know product best are ever in the room.
The Problem
This is sort of related to the a few above, with the big difference being that this issue shows up everywhere - the teams closest to the product, whatever function they sit in, often only get to influence how something is executed, never what gets built in the first place. They're handed a decision and asked to go deliver, when they could have helped make a better decision in the first place. I’ve seen this time and again, and the bigger the organization the more rampant due to one thing: it’s that the forum for these kinds of decisions is driven by dollars. So the conversation gets myopic and the decisions get mandated based on consensus rather than expertise. And the issue gets compounded as similarly to issue 3, as the year goes on and things come on and off the roadmap, the people who best know HOW to deliver, are left holding the bag and trying to figure out how to get everything done that’s now become critical.
The Solution
Fixing this is partly structural and partly cultural, and both pieces have to move together or neither one sticks. The structural part is giving those people a real seat earlier in the process, before the “what” is locked. That might mean co-authoring the roadmap or at least through forming a close relationship between responsible teams, where each function and their input is respected enough for consultation since at the end of the day, the entire company wins or loses based on what that roadmap is populated with. The cultural part, and this is the one people underestimate, is those same people learning to speak the language of the business, in outcomes and tradeoffs and dollars, so that leadership actually trusts them with bigger calls. Most of the teams in that decision making circle are already trained to operate that way, while Design teams rarely are. I've watched brilliant teams stay stuck at the execution table for years simply because they never learned to make their case in terms the business could hear. That's absolutely a fixable thing.
The Takeaway:
The solution starts before the problem arises. Meaning that design teams in particular, though rooted in craft and emotion, fundamentally must learn to communicate their decisions and rationale through the language of business. And the leaders of those departments need to be strong enough to create space for their team’s input when the roadmap wrinkles do eventually pop up.
5 | The people closest to the product keep raising the same issues, no processes, no support, no budget, then nothing changes, and now they're checking out.
The Problem
This might be the biggest issue of all. You lose your team and you just flat out lose. And when your best people start to disengage, the instinct is to reach for retention levers, more money, more perks, a title bump. In my experience that rarely gets at the real problem. Disengagement is almost never about pay at its core. It's about whether people feel valued in whole. They want to see that their work connects to something the company genuinely cares about, and whether raising a problem ever actually leads anywhere. My friend Blair Hasty recently posted a poll on LinkedIn where he asked what has changed most for design teams over the last 2 years, starting with “more work, same team”, “same work, smaller team”, “less work overall” and “nothing has really changed”. I loved the question and added my build which was “more work, smaller team”. As Design steadily lost its value they resort to being a service organization that gets asked to do more with less which aside from becoming a quality risk, ultimately causes burnout and resignations which are incredibly disruptive to teams and company cultures.
The Solution
The fix starts by making that line of sight real, helping every person understand how what they do ladders up to something that matters to the business, and it continues with leadership visibly acting on the things that get flagged. Recognize the humanity of each team member, tap into their purpose for why they do what they do, then defend the hell out of them to leadership. People will stay through a surprising amount of hard work and long hours if they can see it's going somewhere and that their voice moves the needle. They check out when they don’t feel supported or heard, when the work feels disconnected and the flags they’d raised seemingly disappear into a void. Meaning and positive momentum helps keep people. The perks are just a nice-to-have, but a team lunch won’t solve as much as truly listening to their front-line expertise.
The Takeaway:
Everyone is getting asked to do more with less these days, and with more AI entering workflow, there's a seductive myth that product design teams are about to get dramatically faster. Spoiler alert, until that day comes, the risk of running amazing people into the ground is real. And aside from it being cruel to snuff out someone’s fire, it’s incredibly disruptive to lose the chemistry and institutional knowledge of an employee. Think about all the implications that listening and caring can have to the business.
If you read those five and nodded along to more than one of them, you're in very good company, because nearly everyone I talk to is. And here's what I've come to believe after three decades of doing this work: again, none of these are talent problems. The people are almost always great – nobody hires for mediocrity! And none of them are really "design problems" or "product problems" or "marketing problems" either, even though each function tends to feel the pain in its own particular way.
They all live in the same place. That messy, unglamorous gap between what the business wants and what actually reaches the market. And at most companies, it’s unclear who truly owns that gap. It's the space between everyone's job, which is precisely why it's where things go wrong, and why it's so hard to fix from the inside, where everyone is understandably heads-down on their own piece.
For a little context on why I care so much about this: I'm Demetrius Romanos, and I've spent about three decades leading design and product development, much of it inside companies like Ergobaby and Targus, plus over a decade in agencies working with brands like P&G, Whirlpool, and Motorola. A big part of that job, in every seat I ever held, was closing exactly these gaps, whoever happened to own them on the org chart that particular week. Now I do it from the outside, which, it turns out, is often the easier place to see the gaps from in the first place.
So if one or two of these hit closer than you'd like, I'd honestly enjoy talking it through with you. No pitch, no deck, just twenty minutes and a straight conversation about where you're stuck and whether I might be able to help. You can grab some time with me here: Contact Us
And if nothing else, I hope seeing these written down makes the thing you've been feeling a little easier to name. In my experience, that's usually where it starts.
