In 2004 I was working temporarily in England. After a meeting with a customer – a product manager named Kate – a colleague pulled me aside and said: “Wow. Kate was really upset today.”

I had no idea. I’d missed it completely.

We both spoke English. We were both professionals. We were both in the same room. And I had still walked out of that meeting with an entirely different understanding of what just happened than the person sitting next to me.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot over the years. Because I keep seeing the same dynamic – in a completely different context – inside complex product teams.

Everyone in the room thinks everyone else understands. So nobody speaks up. And the misalignment doesn’t disappear. It just goes underground.

Here’s how it starts.

A team is building something genuinely complex – a new product, a new technology, a new launch. The people in the room are smart. They’re high-performing. They care deeply about getting it right.

And because everyone is smart and high-performing, no one wants to be the person who raises their hand and says: “I’m not sure I actually understand what we’re saying here.”
So they don’t.

Engineering understands the product from the inside – the mechanism, the physics, the thing that makes it genuinely different. Marketing understands the market – the buyer, the language, the pressure to land the launch. Sales understands the conversation they’re going to have to have in the field. Leadership understands the vision, the strategy, the story they’ve been telling investors for two years.

Each of these is real. Each of these is legitimate.

But they are not the same understanding.

The team isn’t misaligned because they disagree. They’re misaligned because they each assumed the others saw what they see. And that assumption never got tested.

I call this Assumed Alignment. And it is almost invisible from inside the team experiencing it – because on the surface, everything looks fine. Meetings are productive. Decisions get made. Work moves forward. The calendar fills up with milestones.

The problem is that all of that progress is being built on a foundation that was never solid to begin with.

I’ve walked into rooms where a marketing director has been crafting launch messaging for eight months – and when I ask her to explain the core mechanism of the product in plain language, she can’t. Not because she isn’t good at her job. Because no one ever sat in a room with her and engineering at the same time and forced that conversation to happen.

“We don’t really talk to engineering. They’re too busy. And honestly, they don’t love being pulled into our stuff.”

That sentence. Right there. That’s Assumed Alignment in its most honest form.
Two groups, both working hard, both moving fast – and operating from completely different mental models of what the product is and why it matters

Assumed Alignment doesn’t announce itself. It looks like momentum. It feels like progress. And it stays invisible right up until the moment it becomes expensive to fix.

Which is almost always later than anyone expected.

In the next piece I’ll write about what happens when the momentum really builds – and why moving fast makes this problem dramatically harder to surface.

For now: if you’ve ever walked out of a meeting and realized – only later – that the room wasn’t actually aligned the way you thought it was, you already know what I’m describing.

It’s more common than anyone admits. And it has a name now…