You Don’t Have a Process Problem. You Have an Alignment Problem.
When organizations feel stuck, they usually believe they have two levers:
Hiring and process.
They open reqs for more engineers. They search for certified PMPs and scrum masters. They adopt new frameworks, sanctify the process, build new SOPs, and refine their roadmaps. They add tools to track all of it.
This is all done in good faith. But it is built on the same flawed assumption: output scales linearly with more people or with more process.
It does not.
When results stall, adding structure does not create alignment. It compensates for its absence and gives teams excuses not to produce value.
Hiring, Process, and the Illusion of Progress
The belief goes something like this:
- If we had more bodies, we would move faster.
- If we had better process, we would be more predictable.
- If we followed the right playbook, we would succeed.
So organizations hire, formalize roles, and standardize execution.
At the same time, many technology organizations struggle to clearly articulate what success actually looks like in the real world. When outcomes are fuzzy, they default to measuring what is easy: tickets closed, lines of code produced, pull requests merged, and releases shipped.
These metrics feel concrete. They fit neatly into dashboards. They offer reassurance that work is under control. But they do not tell you whether you are winning. They tell you whether people are busy.
The result is predictable. Decision-making slows. Ownership blurs. Teams spend more time coordinating than solving problems. Leaders do not double down on clarity. Instead, they double down on oversight. Process expands to fill the vacuum left by lack of alignment.
The Linear Scaling Lie
It is easy to pretend that software teams scale linearly.
Add more engineers and get proportionally more output. Add more process and get proportionally more reliability. In reality, teams are systems. And systems either compound or degrade.
I have seen small, deeply aligned teams outperform far larger ones, not because they worked harder, but because they were not fighting ambiguity, coordination overhead, or each other. Aligned teams can make decisions and execute them concurrently and effectively. They do not need significant oversight.
Alignment reduces friction. Process institutionalizes it.
High output teams do not scale through control. They scale through shared understanding of the problems they are solving and the outcomes they want to achieve.
When alignment is weak, hiring and process feel like progress. In reality, they are substitutes for clarity.
The Myth of the Playbook
Deeply woven into this commitment to process is the powerful and tempting belief that somewhere, a playbook exists. The thinking goes that success will come: “If we just adopt the right methodology. If we just copy what worked elsewhere. If we just follow the steps correctly.”
But playbooks do not create success. They codify past success in a different context. Truly hard problems do not have obvious solutions. Thinking you can copy and paste methodologies is misguided, lazy, and unlikely to advance your outcome.
Treating a playbook as a substitute for thinking turns teams into operators, not problem solvers.
A Concrete Example: Alignment Beats Process
In one deployment of our income verification product, we were convinced we knew the missing feature.
SNAP applicants, we believed, needed online payroll logins – the ability to sign into their payroll provider instead of uploading income documents. If we could make verification more digital, approvals would move faster.
So we built it.
We integrated with payroll systems. We connected to government systems. We shipped quickly.
And it did not work.
Internally, everything looked fine. The roadmap was executed. The features existed, but the real-world outcome did not change. The problem was not execution. It was framing.
When we stepped back and spent more time with applicants and caseworkers, a different gap emerged. What people were missing was not a more sophisticated way to submit data. It was guidance. Applicants did not know what they needed to provide. They did not know how to provide it. And they did not know when they needed to act.
We were missing the core problem: that we needed to provide a virtual case worker to applicants. We needed to provide clarity to a confusing process. Applicants needed clearer explanations, step-by-step directions and just-in-time reminders to ensure that people were getting through the process end-to-end.
We already knew the problem, but we had lost sight of it: faster SNAP approvals. Our goal was to ensure that people can put food on the table, so that was the thing to measure.
Once we sat down as a team and talked about that north star, alignment replaced process. Engineers worked directly with users. Decisions got faster. Tradeoffs got clearer.
We measured one thing: time to approval. Processing time dropped by 75 percent. Not because we followed a better playbook but because everyone was aligned on the hard problem to solve.
Alignment Is the Work
High-performing teams do not rely on heavy process or perfect playbooks.
They rely on shared intent. They know what problem they are solving, how success is measured, and why it matters. With that clarity, coordination becomes lightweight and execution becomes fast. Process becomes a tool, not a substitute for alignment.
If your organization keeps adding process, it is rarely because people are careless or undisciplined. It is because the goal is not clear enough.
Clarity scales. Alignment compounds. Process does neither.
Build teams that share a goal deeply enough that they do not need to be managed into coherence. That is how teams become greater than the sum of their parts.
