The One Big Reason Your Team is Stuck
Product teams are asked to do the impossible.
On paper, they’re responsible for making sure the business succeeds. They’re tasked with aligning strategy, figuring out what customers need, testing, learning, and delivering solutions that move the needle.
In reality? Most product teams spend their days buried in delivery metrics. Burn downs, velocity charts, retros about handovers, debates about whether the sprint could run smoother.
None of that is inherently bad. Delivery matters. But here’s the hard truth: none of it creates value if what’s being delivered isn’t tied to meaningful outcomes.
Most product people know this already. They’ve read Escaping the Build Trap. They’ve nodded along to the mantra “focus on outcomes, not outputs.” They want to work differently.
And yet… they’re stuck.
Why?
Because the tools they’ve been given anchor them in delivery, not discovery or strategy.
Tools shape the way we work
Let’s zoom out.
You wouldn’t dream of running a sales team without a CRM. Marketing teams get a stack of dedicated campaign tools, attribution dashboards, funnel reports. Finance has accounting software. Nobody argues whether these functions deserve dedicated tools. They’re considered essential.
Delivery is the same. Engineers are set up with Jira, Azure DevOps, or Linear. It’s non-negotiable.
But what about product?
Product teams are asked to carry even greater responsibility than sales or delivery. They’re expected to decide what problems to solve, how to solve them, and how those decisions connect to strategy. And yet, they’re usually told to “just make do” with:
- A few spreadsheets.
- A hacked together Confluence page.
- Slack threads.
- Maybe the odd Miro or FigJam board.
That’s not enough.
Because tools shape our behavior. They anchor our processes.
If your team’s only dedicated tool is built for delivery, then your entire product process will orbit around delivery. And when you orbit around delivery, you get more delivery.
Not necessarily more value.
Why “bolting it on” doesn’t work
When leaders start noticing that strategy feels thin, the instinct is usually to hack. They try to “bolt on” strategy to the delivery tool because that’s the system the team is already using. It feels easier to add fields, templates, and dashboards than to create a whole new space for product thinking.
I see it all the time:
- Goals written into Jira epics.
- OKRs shoved into custom fields.
- Discovery tracked in Kanban columns.
- Experiments “documented” as tickets.
But here’s the reality: a tool built for managing tasks can’t double as a strategy space.
You wouldn’t run your financial planning in Salesforce. You wouldn’t run your sales pipeline in QuickBooks. Wrong job, wrong tool.
And worse, this sets the wrong habits.
When strategy is bolted onto a delivery tool, everything gets dragged down to ticket-level thinking. Suddenly, strategy becomes: “Which backlog item maps to this goal?” instead of the real question: What problem are we solving, and how will we know if it worked?
It’s a subtle but dangerous shift. You think you’re managing strategy, but really, you’re just shuffling tasks.
The hidden cost of delivery-centered setups
It’s not always obvious when delivery tools dominate the product process. On the surface, things can look busy and efficient. Teams are shipping features, closing tickets, and reporting velocity improvements. But beneath the surface, the cost of this imbalance adds up fast.
When delivery tools define your product process, you lose sight of whether the work is actually making a difference. You become focused on activity rather than outcomes, which can erode trust with stakeholders over time.
Here’s what happens when delivery-first tools run the show:
Retros lose perspective
Teams stop asking, “Did this solve the problem?” Instead, they obsess over sprint mechanics. You get endless debates about velocity, story points, and QA handoffs, but little reflection on whether customer problems are solved.
Experiments get squeezed out
Velocity is easy to measure. Discovery work isn’t. So when push comes to shove, experiments look like inefficiency. Why “waste” time on testing when you could close 20 more tickets?
Stakeholder updates get warped
Roadmaps start looking like shipping calendars. You tell stakeholders what’s being delivered, not what problems are being solved. They feel “updated” but they’re not actually any closer to understanding how product drives value.
“Done” becomes the finish line
When delivery is the anchor, shipped equals done. Few teams loop back to ask whether the outcome was achieved. And that reflection, that learning, is where actual value lives.
Melissa Perri calls this the Build Trap. And she’s right. But I’d add: the Build Trap is reinforced, even amplified, by the tools we use.
So where does ProdPad fit?
Now, you might think I’m biased. After all, I built one of these tools. But here’s the important bit: ProdPad isn’t here to replace all the other tools you already use.
You’ll probably still use Notion to document your processes. You’ll still use FigJam or Miro for brainstorming sessions and retros. You’ll almost certainly still use spreadsheets and PowerPoints to crunch numbers and present to stakeholders. And yes, you’ll still use Jira (or ADO, or Trello, or whatever) to track the delivery of tasks.
Those tools are all useful. They’re not going anywhere.
But here’s the problem: right now, they’re all floating around disconnected. Strategy ends up in one place, ideas in another, experiments in yet another. Slack threads. Shared drives. Lost links.
ProdPad becomes the center point these tools orbit around.
It’s the place where you can link that Miro brainstorming board directly to the experiment it spawned. Where you can connect the pricing analysis spreadsheet to the initiative it supports. Where the roadmap itself becomes the hub that answers the ultimate questions:
- What are we doing here?
- Why are we doing it?
- How will we know if it worked?
And yes, all the useful artifacts—the files, notes, discussions—are right there too, so the story of how we got here is clear.
That clarity changes everything. It shifts the focus from throughput to outcomes. From tickets to strategy.
How to know if your team needs this
Not every team realizes they’re missing a product tool. Delivery looks fine on the surface, which can mask deeper gaps. But there are telltale signs that the system is broken.
If you recognize yourself in the examples below, your team doesn’t have the right environment to create value:
- Your roadmap is just a list of features with dates.
- Strategy is scattered across docs, threads, and decks.
- Retros focus on sprint mechanics, not customer impact.
- Success is measured in tickets closed, not problems solved.
- Stakeholders ask “what’s next?” and all you have is a backlog.
If this sounds familiar, it’s not your team’s fault. It’s the setup.
How to reset the balance
Fixing this doesn’t happen overnight. But the first step is recognizing that product deserves a dedicated system, just like sales, marketing, and engineering. Once you shift the environment, the habits will follow.
Here’s how you pull back from delivery-first and rebalance toward outcomes:
1. Give strategy a dedicated home
Stop pretending strategy fits in Jira. Create a space where objectives, ideas, experiments, and outcomes live together.
2. Connect the dots
Link every initiative back to an outcome, and to the artifacts that inform it. That Miro board, that spreadsheet, that doc. Make your roadmap the single source of clarity (important distinction: this only works if your roadmap is outcome-led rather than a pile of features on a Gantt chart!)
Get the guide on how to convert your timeline roadmap into a Now-Next-Later outcome-led view
3. Close the loop
Make reflection non-optional. After release, circle back. Did it work? Did we solve the problem? What did we learn?
4. Change what you celebrate
Celebrate learning, not just shipping. Make “we validated this won’t work” a success, because it prevents wasted effort.
5. Bring stakeholders along
Use outcome roadmaps like Now-Next-Later to show how initiatives connect to strategy. Give execs the view they need: not what’s shipping, but why.
Why Product deserves its own tools
Delivery is rightly seen as essential. Of course you need a tool to manage it. But product? Product is treated like it can get by with duct tape.
That’s the one big reason most teams aren’t creating value.
It’s not the people. It’s not even culture. It’s the tools.
If you want your product team to deliver real outcomes, give them a tool that anchors everything they do.
ProdPad doesn’t replace your stack. It gives it a center of gravity. A single source of truth where the strategy, experiments, and delivery all connect.
Because if the only dedicated tool in your process is for delivery, the only thing you’ll get is more delivery.
Faster.
Not better.