Lack of trust kills organisational potential

How to rebuild trust between Product, the CEO and the rest of the organisation

One of the most consistent patterns I see when I’m brought into an organisation to help fix Product is a lack of trust.

It can look like a product problem. Delivery is too slow. Stakeholders are frustrated. The roadmap is constantly changing. The CEO is getting more involved.

But underneath it, there is often a much more fundamental problem.

The business does not trust the product team, and the product team does not trust the business.

The CEO or executive team doesn’t trust Product to make the right choices for the business. They don’t trust them to move fast enough. Sometimes they don’t even trust that the team is working hard enough.

On the other side, Product doesn’t trust the rest of the organisation to understand what is going on.

They don’t think the business understands the trade-offs they have to make, or the complexity underneath something that sounds simple. And they’re frustrated because nobody seems willing to say no to anything.

Eventually, both sides become convinced that the other is the problem.

The stalemate

I have seen this pattern in countless organisations.

The product team gets increasingly frustrated and burnt out. They feel like they’re constantly being asked to do the impossible while nobody understands why it is impossible.

So they start to pull away.

Stakeholder conversations become something to endure. Product becomes more insular. They talk to each other about how the rest of the organisation “doesn’t get Product”.

Meanwhile, the rest of the business is getting pretty pissed off too.

They have targets to hit. Things they need aren’t being delivered. They don’t understand what Product is doing or why it takes so long.

So they push harder.

They ask for more updates. They get further into the roadmap. The CEO starts joining more meetings.

And Product sees all of this as further evidence that the business doesn’t trust them.

Low trust creates more control. More control creates even less trust.

This is how you end up with a product organisation full of capable people operating at a fraction of its potential.

And this is where strong product leadership matters.

A great product leader has to bridge that gap. They need to surface the real tensions, help people make difficult trade-offs and create enough clarity for the team to do its best work.

You don’t rebuild trust by demanding it.

Here’s where I would start:

1. Start listening again

By the time trust has broken down, people have usually stopped properly listening to each other.

Product thinks: They don’t understand.

The stakeholder thinks: Product is going to tell me no again.

Both might have legitimate reasons to feel that way. But once everyone becomes certain of their own position, curiosity disappears.

One of the first jobs of a product leader is to get people talking to each other again.

That means genuinely understanding what the business is trying to achieve.

Why does Sales care so much about this customer request? What target is the CEO worried about? What is underneath the urgency?

You don’t have to agree with every request.

But people are far more likely to listen to you once they believe you have actually listened to them.

And Product has to resist the temptation to believe everyone else simply needs to be better educated about Product.

Sometimes Product needs more context too.

2. Surface the trade-offs and put the decision in the right place

One of the hardest things about building software is that there is almost always more you could do than you have capacity to do.

Which means somebody has to make a trade-off.

In reality, many organisations are remarkably good at avoiding this.

Everything is important. Every customer matters. Every revenue opportunity is urgent. The strategy contains twelve priorities.

Then the product team is left trying to make all of it happen.

This is where some product teams get uncomfortable. They believe being empowered means they should be allowed to make all of these decisions themselves.

But often they aren’t the P&L owner.

Your job as a product leader is to do the thinking required to make the decision well.

Bring the customer insight. Understand the technical implications. Show what you would have to stop doing. Make a recommendation.

Then be clear about who ultimately owns the call.

You can have a strong point of view. You can make the trade-off impossible to ignore. But you don’t need to carry accountability for a decision that belongs somewhere else.

What you should not do is quietly accept twelve priorities and burn out your team trying to deliver them.

3. Create much stronger communication lines

Sometimes there is a huge amount happening inside a product organisation and almost nobody outside it knows about it.

This is the easiest trust problem to fix.

Make the work visible.

Tell people what is happening. What has shipped. What you have learned. What has changed. What is coming next.

Give stakeholders consistent forums where they can ask questions and be heard.

And explain the difficult bits in plain English.

I’ve seen product teams get this wrong because they feel like they are constantly having to “educate” the business about Product. Another presentation about discovery is unlikely to fix your relationship with Sales.

Talk about the things that matter to them.

Here is the problem we are trying to solve. Here is what we know. Here is the choice we need to make. Here is my recommendation.

Good communication gives people confidence that somebody competent is on top of the problem.

4. Actually deliver something valuable

Of course, there is a limit to what communication can fix.

Sometimes trust is low because delivery genuinely isn’t good enough.

I tend to see a few versions of this.

Sometimes good work is happening but nobody knows about it. That’s a visibility problem.

Sometimes the team really is too slow. Projects are huge. Work takes months before a customer sees anything.

That requires changes to how the team works.

And sometimes lots is being shipped, but nobody knows whether any of it is valuable.

Features go live. Everyone celebrates (at its best). Then the organisation moves onto the next thing.

Nobody checks whether customers use it or whether it changed the metric it was supposed to change.

The output is visible. The return isn’t.

These problems need different fixes, which is why “Product needs to go faster” is rarely a useful diagnosis on its own.

One of the fastest ways to build trust is to create tangible evidence that Product is making things better.

5. Be predictable

This one is incredibly simple.

Do what you say you are going to do.

If you say something will be ready in two weeks, do everything you reasonably can to have it ready in two weeks.

And if something changes, tell people before they have to ask.

No surprises.

People don’t expect everything in software development to go exactly to plan.

What destroys confidence is finding out at the last minute. Or having to chase. Or repeatedly hearing dates that nobody really believed in.

Being predictable doesn’t mean predicting the future perfectly.

It means being somebody whose word means something.

It also means asking for help when you need it.

I’ve definitely fallen into the trap myself of wanting to be the hero. You take the problem away, solve it and come back when it is done.

Often that means carrying too much for too long.

There is a lot of trust in being able to say: Here is where we are. Here is what I can solve. Here is where I need your help.

6. Become the source of customer truth

There is one final pattern I see a lot in organisations where trust in Product is low.

There often isn’t enough customer insight and decisions are dominated by internal opinion.

Sales has heard one thing. The CEO has a strong instinct. Operations has another hypothesis.

Nobody really knows.

This creates an enormous opportunity for Product.

Become the team that understands the customer better than anybody else.

Talk to customers. Bring behavioural data into the conversation. Do analysis that helps the whole organisation understand what is actually happening.

And don’t keep that knowledge within Product.

Use it to help Sales. Help Marketing. Give the executive team better evidence to make decisions.

You stop becoming another function arguing for its own priorities.

You become useful to the whole organisation.

And usefulness builds trust.

Trust is earned in both directions

There is a temptation when Product feels mistrusted to believe the solution is for the CEO to back off.

Sometimes they should.

But waiting for somebody else to trust you more is rarely an effective leadership strategy.

You can start changing the dynamic.

And the same challenge applies to CEOs and executive teams.

If you want a capable product organisation, you have to create the conditions in which capable people can operate. That means being willing to hear recommendations you don’t like, making real trade-offs, and giving people room to use their judgement once they have earned your trust.

Because the cost of low trust is much bigger than a dysfunctional relationship between Product and the business.

It creates slower decisions. More intervention. Less ownership. Eventually, good people stop trying quite so hard to change things because experience has taught them that it isn’t worth it.

A low-trust organisation can employ brilliant people and still get very average results from them.

I think that is one of the biggest wastes of organisational potential there is.

If this resonates, get in touch at emma@product-leadership-coaching.com. My diary is open in September for 2 more coaching clients and 1 more advisory client.