Every growing company eventually discovers the invisible fault line between its business teams and its product/tech teams. At first, when the company is small, everyone is in the same room (sometimes literally). Business people know what tech is building, tech people know what business is selling. The gap is narrow.
But as the company scales, that gap widens. Business teams chase growth, revenue, and partnerships. Product and tech chase stability, scalability, and user experience. Neither side is wrong. But their incentives are not the same. And left unchecked, that difference creates friction.
Business asks: Why can’t we move faster?
Tech asks: Why can’t they think longer-term?
At its worst, this turns into open hostility. Business sees tech as a bottleneck. Tech sees business as reckless. Each believes they’re carrying the company while the other side drags them down. And yet the truth is neither can win alone. A company that only optimizes for business without solid product and tech will collapse under its own promises. A company that only optimizes for tech without business growth will build beautiful systems for an audience that never shows up.
The healthiest companies recognize this fault line not as a flaw, but as a natural tension. The goal isn’t to eliminate it but to manage it. Like tectonic plates, the friction generates the energy that moves the company forward.
Managing it requires three things:
Shared language. Business and tech often talk past each other because they use different vocabularies. Metrics, roadmaps, OKRs — these mean different things on each side. Someone has to translate.
Mutual empathy. Business should understand the costs of technical debt; tech should understand the costs of a missed quarter. Without empathy, every discussion turns into trench warfare.
Aligned outcomes. The only way to reconcile conflicting incentives is to design goals that bind both sides. Revenue that depends on system reliability. Product milestones that are tied to customer adoption. If the scorecard is shared, the work becomes shared.
What feels like a fault line is really a feature of building something big. It’s the tension between speed and stability, short-term and long-term, selling and building. Pretend it doesn’t exist, and it will break you. Acknowledge it, manage it, and it becomes the very pressure that keeps the company moving forward.