Why Product Decision-Making Breaks at Scale (And How to Fix It)

Growth adds people, teams, and priorities, but without clarity, it also adds friction and confusion.

In a 20-person company, decisions happen quickly. Everyone’s in the loop, roles are fluid, and there’s usually a shared gut instinct driving direction.

But then you need to scale? That instinct gets replaced with process. And if the process isn’t clear, aligned, and owned, decision-making stalls.

The result: product momentum slows down and cross-functional trust breaks down. And this isn't the fault of the people, but a failure from leadership whose responsibility it is to create clarity.

The Pattern That Plays Out Again and Again

In growth-stage SaaS companies, especially those navigating M&A, new leadership layers, or a shift from sales-led or consulting-led to product-led, decision-making tends to fall into one of two traps:

1. Decision chaos: Everyone wants to weigh in, priorities bounce between teams and the loudest voice wins while progress ultimately stalls.

2. Decision vacuum: No one is sure who owns what. The PMs defer to sales, engineers wait for answers and leadership assume things are happening.

Both are symptoms of the same root issue: unclear accountability.

Real-World Breakdown: What Happens When Roles Are Fuzzy

I once worked with a product team where new senior hires were brought in during a period of rapid change. They had strong opinions, good intent, and serious experience.

But no one had clarified:

• Who owns what

• How decisions get made

• What the team values, or how they communicate

As a result:

• Prior decisions were revisited, creating instability

• People began bypassing each other

• Assumptions turned into tension

• And respect, the glue that holds fast-moving teams together, quickly eroded

  
  

This didn’t happen because anyone was wrong. It happened because the system we were operating in didn’t support clear ownership or trust.

The Invisible Cost of Broken Decision-Making

Unclear product decisions delay features and create negative ripple effects across the business:

• Strategy drift: teams can’t connect day-to-day work to long-term outcomes

• Misaligned priorities: delivery teams work on what’s urgent, not what’s valuable

• Frustration: PMs and engineers feel disempowered, sales loses confidence

• Loss of trust: teams stop collaborating, start working around each other

And over time, product becomes a delivery function instead of a strategic driver.

Why This Gets Harder at Scale

As orgs grow, so do the variables:

• More layers of leadership

• Multiple product lines

• Cross-functional dependencies

• Teams in different time zones

• Pressure from sales, marketing, finance, ops

This complexity is normal. But if you don’t explicitly define how decisions get made, you default to one of two things:

• Executive override, or

• Political negotiation

Neither scales and neither builds the kind of empowered product organisation that can drive real growth.

So How Do You Fix It?

The answer isn’t a new framework or more meetings. The answer is restoring clarity and trust through structure and behaviour.

Here’s what works in the real world:

1. Clearly Define Product Ownership

Every product team should know:

• What they own (and don’t)

• Who they’re accountable to

• Where they need to collaborate

If it’s unclear who makes the call, the default is delay or passive escalation.

This is where an accountability chart (not a job title or org chart) becomes useful.

Unlike a traditional org chart, an accountability chart maps out what needs to be owned in the business (key functions, decisions, and outcomes), and who is ultimately accountable for each one.

It exposes:

• Overlapping or unclear responsibilities

• Gaps in strategic ownership

• Places where teams are stretched beyond their mandate

It’s especially useful during growth, when roles evolve faster than reporting lines.

A good accountability chart doesn't just show who reports to whom, it shows where accountability lives, and where it doesn’t.

2. Connect Decisions to Outcomes, Not Just Outputs

Teams move faster and with more confidence when they understand the business context behind their work.

But too often, product decisions get reduced to “What’s in the backlog?” or “What does sales want?” and is measured only in velocity and by stakeholder demand, instead of linking decisions to business outcomes.

Instead, connect decisions to outcomes by:

• Sharing strategic priorities in plain language

• Defining clear problem statements, not solution mandates

• Making product metrics traceable back to business KPIs

  
  

3. Make Decision Rights Visible

Many teams assume decisions will “just happen” in meetings. But when no one knows who’s accountable for the final call, decisions either drag on, get made in backchannels or get undone later.

You don’t need a RACI chart pinned to the wall, but you do need to make decision roles explicit. This is especially helpful in cross-functional product work, where PMs, designers, engineers, and GTM leaders often share space

Make this explicit in the context of how your company actually works, not what a textbook says or purely copying how another company did it without understanding their context.

4. Set Expectations for How Teams Work Together

When collaboration breaks down, it’s rarely about the tools, but usually about mismatched assumptions.

Growth-stage teams need working agreements that set expectations before conflict arises.

Practice: Create a Team Operating Manual

A simple document (1–2 pages) where the team defines:

• How decisions get made

• How disagreements are handled

• What “done” looks like

• Communication preferences (Slack? Meetings? Docs?)

• What to escalate to and how

This creates psychological safety, especially in mixed-seniority or post-reorg teams.

I do these workshops whenever I start leading a new team, when there are large team changes or when there is discontent between different teams working together.

5. Reinforce Accountability from the Top

Even the clearest systems break down if leadership doesn’t back them.

When leaders consistently:

• Delegate without clarity,

• Reverse decisions mid-flight,

• Step into team-level work without context,

they unknowingly train the org to stall, second-guess, or escalate unnecessarily.

Practice: “Leadership guardrails” check-in

During team reviews or planning sessions, ask:

• Are decisions being escalated too often?

• Where are teams hesitating instead of owning?

• Where has accountability been blurred or avoided?

Use these moments to coach, not criticise. Leaders set the tone by what they tolerate and what they reinforce.

Teams watch leadership far more closely than they read internal process documents and policies.

Structure supports better decisions, but it doesn’t make them for you.

Even with a well-designed org and smart people in every seat, if no one feels safe or empowered to make a call, decisions won’t happen.

Clarity doesn't mean rigidity. It means people understand their lane, their mandate, and how to move forward when things are unclear.

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If This Sounds Familiar

I work with scaling SaaS companies where product teams are caught between growth, complexity, and change.

Whether you’re dealing with M&A tension, shifting from sales-led to PLG, or rebuilding trust post-reorg, we can get clear on roles, reset ownership, and get your teams moving again.

Let’s talk