Eight Teams. Zero Alignment. What We Found When We Finally Asked. The Retail Tech Diagnostic
- Greg Tennant
- May 22
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 8
Eight teams, two missed release windows, and a leadership team that already knew what was wrong. Nobody wanted to say it out loud.
A commercial group pulling toward market. A tech group pulling toward architecture. Leaders at the top in open conflict, which meant leaders in the middle managing politics instead of product, which meant teams at the bottom doing their jobs in silos and calling it progress.
Two release windows had already been missed. The weekly reporting showed the gaps clearly. Conflicts, dependencies unresolved, timelines slipping. Everyone could read it. Nobody wanted to say it out loud.
The elephant in the room had been in the room for months. We ran a diagnostic across the core operating fundamentals. Not top-down. Bottom-up. We went to the people doing the actual work, the ones closest to where things were breaking, and asked them what was wrong. We ran a retail tech diagnostics. They knew. They'd known for a long time. They just hadn't been asked, or hadn't believed that being asked would change anything.
What came back was precise: no aligned roadmap, no clear ownership of the end goal, no coordination mechanism beyond a reporting cycle that surfaced problems and resolved none of them. Six teams building toward six different versions of the same destination.
We addressed the strategic priorities, established 90-day containment cycles, created ruthless resource allocation toward the things that actually mattered, and rebuilt the operating rhythm at team level.
The work that was possible, we did.
The part we couldn't fix is the subject of the next post.
But here's the thing I want to leave with: the people doing the work already knew what was broken. They told us everything we needed to know within the first week. The diagnostic didn't reveal new information. It gave the organisation permission to act on information it already had.
That's usually how it works.
The business already knows. It just hasn't been asked the right questions yet.
What to learn more?
If your business is growing but execution is getting harder, the operating layer is where the real work happens. To learn more, why not grab some time to chat with us at AndExecute?
Greg Tennant is the founder of AndExecute, where he works as a scaling partner to startups and scale-ups. Drawing on more than twenty years of experience across startups, global corporations, and operational transformation programs, he writes about leadership, execution, operating models, and how businesses strengthen the way they run as they grow.
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