A New Way to See Misalignment Before It Hurts You
Introducing The Systems Edge - a practical lens for spotting alignment drift before it turns into cost, chaos, or conflict.
A Pattern Too Common to Ignore
Every time I've switched industries, companies, or even roles, I’ve made a deliberate choice. Each jump felt risky, sometimes sacrificing immediate opportunities for deeper insight. Like leaving a stable role to join a smaller, more chaotic environment, just to understand how decisions are made in a completely different setting. Or choosing to move sideways across functions rather than upward, just to gain context others weren’t seeing. Still, those decisions shaped something incredibly valuable: a unique lens for spotting the root causes behind persistent organizational friction.
Why Now: The Pressure to Move Faster and Smarter
We are all operating in a time of increasing pressure. Markets are shifting faster. Consumer expectations are evolving in real time. Technology, especially automation and AI, is accelerating the speed at which businesses must adapt. This environment demands more from every team, every leader, and every system.
And yet, most organizations are still trying to meet that demand with coordination models built for slower, more stable conditions.
Tools Everywhere—And Yet, the Same Friction
We’ve never had more powerful tools, clearer frameworks, or smarter methodologies at our fingertips. Agile, Lean, Design Thinking, OKRs—each offers proven ways to improve execution. Yet despite these tools, teams still grapple with the same problems: reactive problem-solving, double work, unsynchronized efforts, and conflicting approaches across teams or departments.
Research from MIT Sloan shows 95% of employees can't clearly articulate their company's strategy. Columbia University found that value mismatches within teams significantly heighten disengagement. McKinsey reports only 20% of leaders believe their organizations excel at decision-making.
And honestly, I’ve seen every one of those stats play out in real life. It’s jarring how often smart people end up working at cross-purposes, not out of apathy or misalignment, but because the bigger picture just isn’t visible soon enough.
The Hidden Cost of Siloed Translation
Even when strategy is clear and business goals are set, the way those goals get translated into departmental or team-level plans is usually done in functional isolation, often with only upward coordination.
The problem? Leaders of functions are not, and are not supposed to be, experts in all other operational areas. This is where most disconnects quietly take shape. Marketing may not understand what’s realistically possible in tech. Product might not foresee sales cycles or external constraints. Design might push innovation that breaks implementation timelines. Not because teams aren’t capable—but because no one is tasked with mapping these interdependencies systemically.
In the most coordinated companies I’ve seen, these issues still appear. The difference is: they catch them early enough to respond before damage compounds. That ability isn’t magic. It’s systems thinking applied to planning.
Why We Can’t See It Clearly—And Why That’s Okay
Another reason this misalignment is so persistent is because no one, no matter how senior, can see the whole system with equal clarity. We are all biased. And that’s not a flaw; it’s a functional strength. Our biases make us sharper in our own disciplines. But they also make it easy to overlook how our decisions ripple through the system.
For example, let’s take a CEO who came up through sales. They’d naturally look at performance through that lens and might underestimate how deeply sales outcomes depend on product timing, tech capacity, or marketing sequencing. The same is true in reverse for product- or ops-oriented leaders.
The Systems Edge: Making the Invisible Visible
This is where I uncovered the need for The Systems Edge.
At a high level, The Systems Edge is a strategic lens and diagnostic mindset that helps you detect misalignment early, understand how decisions echo across functions, and act with context, not just urgency. It's being shaped specifically for modern work environments—where velocity and complexity coexist, and where traditional alignment tools fall short.
The Systems Edge isn't another framework or tool to layer onto your existing ones. It addresses the issue where business goals quietly devolve into functional goals—where each department begins to optimize in isolation, often unintentionally. Despite all the tools and standups and alignment rituals, this remains one of the most common and dangerous dynamics in product organizations.
If you've ever worked in a company with more than 20 people, you’ve likely seen at least one cross-functional initiative go sideways because the system allowed efforts to drift apart while everyone thought they were aligned.
The Systems Edge helps you see how your current methods and teams interact, conflict, or reinforce each other. It reveals hidden points of friction and misalignment early—turning reactive firefighting into proactive coordination.
From Uncoordinated Motion to Aligned Movement
We’ve all seen these kinds of breakdowns:
A product team scopes a feature based on business goals, but engineering wasn’t looped in early enough to raise feasibility red flags. Delays follow. Frustration builds.
Marketing launches a campaign before the product is fully ready, creating support overload and damaging trust.
Two teams unknowingly work on overlapping solutions to the same user problem—each in isolation, with different assumptions and conflicting implementations.
A sales team closes a deal based on roadmap promises that the product team quietly deprioritized two quarters ago.
These are not bad actors or broken teams. They are symptoms of misalignment at the system level, and they happen even in strong organizations.
The role of leadership, at every level, is central to how alignment either holds or unravels. Not because leaders are failing, but because the complexity they navigate is often underestimated. Even in high-functioning teams, critical coordination issues go unseen, not out of neglect, but because leaders naturally focus on delivering in their domain without the system-wide visibility needed to anticipate how their decisions interact.
The cumulative cost of these blind spots is enormous. And yet, it’s rarely traced back to how alignment was handled early. Supporting leaders with systems-level foresight isn’t about holding them to impossible standards, instead it’s about giving them a way to see further and coordinate smarter.
One widely adopted example of intentional cross-functional collaboration is the Product Trio model, popularized by Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product Group. In this model, product, design, and engineering work together from the outset to address feasibility, usability, and value early. It’s a powerful example of foresight in action and a glimpse of what becomes possible when that kind of alignment is scaled beyond the team level.
Making Alignment Visible at Any Level
One of the simplest tools I’ll be expanding on soon is a tool I call the Foresight Radar - a lightweight yet powerful way to surface hidden interdependencies across teams, functions, and time horizons.
It doesn’t require org-wide rollout to create value. Team leads can use it to clarify cross-team dependencies. Functional managers can use it to prevent overlapping or conflicting initiatives. Department heads can use it to anticipate friction before it derails strategic execution.
But what makes this map powerful isn’t the tool itself - it’s what it invites.
It prompts real conversations across functions about not only today’s challenges, but the dependencies and risks emerging tomorrow. In doing so, it elevates the diagnostic thinking of the organization. Bit by bit, the business becomes more system-aware; not through a big transformation initiative, but because alignment is being designed into how people think and plan.
Each team maps out its short-, mid-, and long-term goals. Then they identify which other teams they depend on to achieve them. That output becomes a Foresight Radar: a visual map that highlights where coordination is essential, where assumptions may be one-sided, and where proactive alignment work needs to happen.
The radar is not a tracker, it’s a diagnostic surface. It helps reveal where alignment silently slips, before it turns into delays, frustration, or rework.
This is The Foresight Radar
A lightweight diagnostic that surfaces cross-functional dependencies across time horizons. It helps teams shift from assumed alignment to intentional coordination.
Use it to ask:
What goals do we have that rely on another team’s success, even if they don’t realize it yet?
What might we be planning in isolation that could disrupt others downstream?
Where do we assume alignment that hasn’t been explicitly confirmed?
How The Systems Edge Complements What You're Already Using
Design Thinking
Centers on user needs, empathy, and rapid ideation
The Systems Edge: Connects user insights to operational and technical realities—ensuring promising ideas don’t collapse in execution due to overlooked constraints or cross-functional misalignment.
OKRs (Individual & Cross-Team)
Aligns teams around measurable goals and shared objectives
The Systems Edge: Makes goal-setting truly cross-functional by exposing where delivery depends on coordination, ensuring alignment isn’t just aspirational but structurally reinforced.
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
Focuses teams on customer motivations and outcomes
The Systems Edge: Prevents fragmented experiences by helping multiple teams working on the same job align scope, timing, and delivery assumptions.
The Lean Startup
Emphasizes experimentation and fast learning
The Systems Edge: Adds a systems lens so local experiments don’t create friction or duplicate effort and ensures learnings translate across team boundaries.
Continuous Improvement
Drives incremental change across workflows
The Systems Edge: Helps teams choose changes that improve the system, not just the silo, making improvement efforts additive instead of parallel.
Team Topologies
Improves team structure and interaction modes
The Systems Edge: Helps teams spot coordination risks across streams or functions, especially when boundaries, responsibilities, or timelines begin to drift out of sync.
Agile (Scrum/Kanban)
Enables flexibility and faster delivery cycles
The Systems Edge: Keeps local agility aligned with system-level priorities and reveals (upcoming) friction that sprints alone may not expose.
What’s Next
I'm continuing to shape practical tools and visuals grounded in real-world applications of The Systems Edge, based on both research and direct experience across teams and industries. The goal is simple: support clearer, more connected decisions in the systems we already work inside.
If you’d like early access to upcoming tools, you can sign up here at martinilievski.com.
In the meantime, pay attention to the system surrounding your work. Where does misalignment show up repeatedly? Where do expectations quietly diverge?
These aren’t one-off problems. They’re patterns. And now, you have a new way to see them.
Sources
MIT Sloan: “No One Knows Your Strategy — Not Even Your Top Leaders”
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/no-one-knows-your-strategy-not-even-your-top-leadersHarvard Business Review: “How Companies Can Improve Employee Engagement Right Now”
https://hbr.org/2021/10/how-companies-can-improve-employee-engagement-right-nowMcKinsey & Company: “Effective decision making in the age of urgency”
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/decision-making-in-the-age-of-urgency
