Scaling Without Chaos: Creating Product-Tech Harmony

In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, host Ben Maynard tackles one of the most misunderstood and overlooked challenges in scaling product organisations: the persistent misalignment between product and technology teams.

Ben explores how chaos at scale is often a design flaw, not a team flaw — a consequence of mismatched incentives, unclear operating models, and siloed roadmaps that leave engineering and product pulling in opposite directions.

Through personal experience, practical insight, and a healthy dose of provocation, Ben lays out what it really takes to achieve harmony between CPOs and CTOs, and why true alignment doesn't kill autonomy — it unlocks it.

Topics include:

• Why most scaling efforts fail due to organisational architecture, not execution
• The signs your product and tech teams are scaling dysfunction, not value
• The “invisible war” between product outcomes and engineering throughput
• How to spot early misalignment and avoid bloated governance
• Practical strategies for shared roadmaps, operating models, and unified OKRs
• How platform teams can be internal product teams — not invisible bottlenecks
• Why alignment is the secret weapon for autonomy, clarity, and sustainable scale

Whether you’re a CPO, CTO, transformation leader or coach of those navigating growth and complexity, this episode offers a candid, systems-thinking perspective on scaling with intention — and without the chaos.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Ben Maynard

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Product Agility Podcast

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Transcript

0:00

Too many people, senior leaders particularly, assume that more teams equals more output. But without some intentional design, you're never going to scale things well. The only thing you're going to scale is your own dysfunction. In this week's episode of the Product Agility podcast, I'm going to chip away at a few things. I want to look at why chaos is often design flaw, not a team flaw. I want to consider the number one misalignment between let's say Cpos and Ctos. I want to look at how to spot if your organization is just Rd. mapping in parallel. So if you're a senior leader, a head of product of engineering in an organization or just a product or agile coach like this episode is for you because real product agility starts at scale when you've got the right architecture. Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast, the missing link between Agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product? It's a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. So today I'm going to be on my own once again and I'm talking about scaling without chaos and how we can really architect product tech harmony, specifically as a senior leader. Now, when I started the productivity podcast and the idea was to really help leaders and coaches of leaders really kind of do the best they could do through change, deliver better outcomes, faster to experiment. And when I first started the podcast and it was called the, the, I can't remember what it was called, it was called less matters. Large scale Scrum matters because I really cared passionately about large scale Scrum and I'd still do. I just find that we haven't really turned the dial much anymore. And with the agile bubble bubble going pop, I wonder when we think about scaling or descaling, as Les would say, does it still have a place? Are people still getting it wrong? Are people still trying to do it so much, which I guess they are because damn, everyone's got pressures on them. Everyone's got targets and things they have to meet. So I'm sure that people are still trying to scale. This isn't the same level of conversation around it. So today I just, yeah, I want to give you a few tips, share some of my own meanderings and some of my own experiences and how to scale without the chaos. So if you are trying to kick off some kind of change, if you're leading a change, if you've inherited a change, if you're just trying to coach people who are trying to do those things. And you know, I'm really talking to you today. So I want to get into that. The pervasive challenge which is really faced when scaling any type of organization. Which is the growing and seemingly default disconnect between product and technology teams. If you are finding that your courtly planning feels more like negotiating a peace treaty, like you're working for NATO or something, then actually really achieve a strategic alignment. If you feel that that your courtly planning and your planning attempts are just kind of going under my new students holding people to contracts. And again, this episode is for you. So today we will learn like why chaos is inherently designed, designed into scaling an organization. We're going to feel the early signs of the strategic misalignment and practical strategies for retrieving that true product tech harmony without a complete restructure. So make yourself comfy. And I'm going to get stuck, stuck into the first part, which is a chaos by design, which I just love that idea. So here's a really uncomfortable truth. Like most of the chaos and scaling organizations isn't simply down to poor execution of it. It often originates from foundational organizational architectural choices made long before you realized you were going to scale. And I don't mean the software architecture. I don't mean the physical architecture of the building. Like what I'm talking about here is the organizational architecture, your org structure, the way that you've put the pieces together is how you're going to make decisions is how those operating rhythms and rituals are in place. And as we grow, when organizations tend to scale the headcount and output faster than the clarity. So what do I mean by that? We scale all the pieces. We scale all the teams, we scale all the output. We try to make everything bigger. We try to get everything working together in some kind of rhythm. But what we're not doing is scaling clarity, clarity for the change, clarity for the product that we're creating. And inherent within those architectures is the chaos of no clarity. No clarity makes a difference. Let's say no clarity about the product and the customers we're trying to serve. So before we know it, engineers are building features that are just getting shelved. Shelved because they didn't hit the mark, or just shelved because no one bloody uses them. Product managers are just swamped with endless alignment meetings. Tech debt is solely slowly ballooning. You don't really notice it, but before you know it, every estimate that comes out, it's off by an order of magnitude. And this begins to impact everything we do downstream. And at this point, cracks begin to appear. Products and engineering escalate. The most simple of decisions to get rectified, to get made Rd. maps will drift. They cease to become Rd. maps and start to become contracts. Products are chasing the outcomes whereas engineering are just struggling under the tech demands. It doesn't make any sense. They've been feeling like products and tech harmony product will always tell you make an impact, strive for those outcomes. Don't worry about the output. Let engineering figure out the output, the engineering do the delivery part. But engineering are just struggling under all the demands and we're dealing with a technical debt, dealing with people from many different parts of the organization all asking for things and as a consequence delivery tools as leaders debate the priorities rather than finding out just simple ways to ship value and often need this respond by sadly introducing new process, new meetings, new rituals, new roles tied to reviews, more process, which just adds insult to injury. It does nothing to improve productivity. But processes alone master symptom. It rarely ever cures them. So what is the organizational architecture design gap here? Well, if we approach it differently, think of organization as a complex system, not just software. So to scale effectively, your organizational structure and communication patterns need intentional design. This is Conway's law in action. The products you build mirror your organizational communication structures. If anyone's ever seen that picture of a number of team members and lines and all the different communication channels or people who are familiar with Dunbar's Number and Dunbar's Law, these things have become omnipresent because we know that the communication becomes painful. In actual fact, the diagram which has all the lines connecting it I believe is called Brooke's Law, which is a by a guy called Fred Brooks. His book The Mythical Man Month, if you haven't read it, is a must have. I'd even recommend just saying, just pause this episode now, go to Amazon, find the Mythical Man Month and buy it. It's from that, the 1980s, but it's still so, so true to everything we're trying to do in products and tech today. So if your products and tech teams aren't aligned, your products won't be either. But here's an example. If you have platform teams reporting into tech leadership, you've got product squads chasing growth opportunities separately, month after month, delivery volumes increases, but speed to market will stall. Why? Because you scale delivery, custom capability, capability and capacity without scaling alignment. We have increased the number of teams that are putting out stuff, but we haven't aligned everybody. We've got product teams operating under product striving for the outcomes. We've got the tech teams and with the platform teams and the tech trying to scale the platform, and we have, you know, an unintentional, perhaps misalignment. The hard idea was fast decisions reduce conflict and really improve time to value. The fix wasn't more people, it's better organizational clarity. It's aligning all the teams around what really matters. And that's more than just shared rituals. So if we've got separate tech and product teams, what we don't want to do is have them being separate. We want conflict. We want the hard decision about what everyone should focus on. A platform team has multi tiered discovery, it is delivering for the internal teams and then ultimately it's going to be impacting the end customers and users. So they should also have an insight into this, separating out the platform and the product teams. Whilst it makes sense on paper, there needs to be some clarity alignment to what brings them together. So having them under separate leaders for me doesn't make much sense. So where do we see the leaders get stuck? And misalignment typically manifests in three ways. One, conflicting incentives. Your product people product officer is focusing on outcomes, growth and adoption. And your CTO is understandably focusing on stability and throughput. And without shared goals, competing incentives turned to trade war trade-offs and trade turf wars. Prioritization, gridlock. Ambiguity around ownership Is an infrastructure investment was a product or tech priority? Who owns scalability versus user facing features at the platform? Product disconnect. Platform teams risk becoming bottlenecks or disappearing entirely from strategic discussions. And crucially, this misalignment isn't malicious. Everyone's acting in good faith, yet the system itself undermines collaborative success. As senior leaders, your role shifts from optimizing departmental efficiency to fostering cross functional flow. Now there are frameworks that drive harmony, and I'm not here punting an agile framework. You know, I don't offer any public training around scaling agile. I don't offer any training about it anymore. I don't see the point, but there are some excellent strategies out there which can create true products and tech harmony without the need to go on expensive training course #1 like clear product engineering operating models implicitly defining strategy to execution flows within this one to clarify decision rights and outcome ownership. We want to understand the roles and interactions for each of the people within that. Not the roles and responsibilities, but what's the role you're playing and who do you need to interact with And actually strive for fuzziness. Stray. Strive for some overlap. Don't make the roles so perfectly defined that everyone stays in their box. Create fuzziness. Create the need for people to talk with each other, because if you can align them against a real motivating goal, they will be compelled to then go and talk and figure out who's doing what if you're going to be doing quarterly planning. It's quite a popular thing. Bring product engineering into the shame. Same space, damn. Bring commercial, bring marketing, bring everyone into that. And don't see quarterly planning as an opportunity to go into the minutiae. Focus on this shared outcomes that teams will be aiming to achieve. If you're going to be using OK Rs as part of that, then always go by the principle of having as fewer OK Rs for as many teams as possible. Create that clarity, create that alignment, give an incentive of people to work together and then there's a quarterly planning sessions don't just leave them as a let's go through the motions. Use them as an opportunity to build some relationships, build some connections make people feel that a part of something bigger than just themselves. Bring in external talkers, bring in customers, make them an event where everyone feels that they're in it together that with the clarity you can get from minimizing the objectives and minimizing the goals, it can turn everything around and talking about OK, Rs go for unified IK Rs go Co create Rd. maps don't have any surprises. Platform as a product. Treat it as an internal platform teams, as internal product teams with clear missions, customers and measurable outcomes like the services teams or enabling teams, whatever it might be, youth dedicated teams to enable others. So whether it's having dedicated experiments, teams or portfolio layering, create visibility and balance across product initiatives, tech enablement projects and strategic debt. Remember, alignment enhances autonomy. It doesn't stifle it. It's the perfect bedfellow to really untapping a lot of the potential and great ideas that people have got. Lack of clarity, however, does stifle everything. So remember, alignment enhances autonomy. It doesn't kill it. Now there are some classic scientists scaling into chaos. So before we wrap up, I want to give you some red flags that indicate organizational misalignment. Products and tech maintaining separate Rd. maps and isolated tools is a classic. Don't have separate Rd. maps. Change your operating model, change the way things are working. So actually you can architect the organization to say if we're gonna come up with shared road map, what needs to change? How do we change our organizational architecture? How do we create that clarity? What arguments do we need to have? What roles need to be fuzzier so we can actually come up with a joint road map? Engineers frequently claim ignorance of business priorities. Platform decisions occur about broader product contest context, features launched, about appropriate readiness or support. Leadership then spend significant time resolving into team conflicts weekly and meeting after meeting of the meeting. And if any of that resonates and it's time for that strategic reset and that starts from leadership alignment. So what are some of the actions? And for senior leaders, as you take these three critical questions into your next discussion around this one, where exactly is misalignment causing friction and slowing us down? Like does our current structure reflect our strategic goals and our customers? Are we clinging on to outdated reporting hierarchies and our products and tech teams collaborative, solving shared problems, or mainly coexisting and separate silos? True productivity isn't just about speed, it's about cohesion and learning at scale. So if today's conversation has given you some kind of new insight or it's hit a nerve in some way, then then it's my pleasure. All of these are familiar struggles in many organizations and I'm happy to continue the discussion. So reach out to me on LinkedIn or just go to my website, sheave.co.uk and contact me from there. Every organization is cracked in some way, but that's where the light comes in. Those cracks are what make the difference. And those cracks are what give us the opportunity to figure out what is that light that's gleaming through it and how do we work go towards it rather than just ignoring the cracks and paving over them. So until next time, keep trying to align, keep adapting, and keep adapting. Meaningful value at scale. My name is Ben Maynard and this has been a Product Agility podcast.