The Roadmap the Sales Team Sold Without Asking
A 400-person industrial sensors company set a strategic goal to shift revenue mix from 70% legacy hardware to 50% recurring software subscriptions within 24 months. In Q1, the executive team approved a roadmap with three software initiatives. By Q3, two of the three initiatives had been quietly deprioritized. Investigation revealed that the VP of Sales had promised two large distributors custom hardware configurations for Q4 delivery, consuming 80% of engineering capacity. Engineering had never seen the software roadmap's dependency chart. The board is now asking why strategy and execution have diverged, and the CEO wants a diagnosis before the next quarterly review.
1. Diagnose the root cause of the strategy-execution gap. Is this primarily a communication problem, a governance problem, or an incentive problem?
Read the worked answer
It is tempting to call this a communication failure, but the evidence points to a governance failure with an incentive amplifier.
Evidence of governance failure: Engineering never saw the dependency chart, and no mechanism existed to reject or route a sales commitment that exceeded capacity. Strategy was set in Q1 and never re-checked against capacity commitments. A roadmap without a capacity-allocation gate is a wish list.
Incentive amplifier: The VP of Sales was rewarded on bookings, not on revenue-mix shift. Selling custom hardware was locally rational.
The fix is structural, not motivational: (1) a single capacity ledger where every committed deal draws against the same pool the roadmap draws from; (2) a portfolio review cadence that explicitly reconciles strategy themes to allocated capacity; (3) sales compensation that includes a mix-shift component. Communication alone would not have stopped the divergence, because the sales VP had no reason to look at the roadmap.
2. The CEO proposes adding a monthly cross-functional alignment meeting. Assess whether this will solve the problem and what else is required.
Read the worked answer
A meeting is a container, not a control. Without decision rights and a shared constraint, the meeting becomes a status update where sales announces deals already promised and engineering absorbs the consequences.
For the meeting to matter it needs:
- A binding artifact: a capacity ledger showing committed vs. available engineering hours by quarter, visible to all functions.
- A decision rule: commitments above a threshold require portfolio-level approval, not unilateral sales sign-off.
- Escalation authority: someone empowered to say no to a deal that breaks the mix strategy.
Otherwise the meeting is theater. The test is whether the first time sales brings an over-capacity deal, the meeting can actually block or reshape it.