Your team’s velocity isn’t slow because they’re bad. It’s slow because they’re building the wrong thing right.
I tracked this at a client last quarter. Architecture vision: event-driven, loosely coupled. Engineering reality: whatever ships fastest.
Both sides competent. Neither wrong. Just not talking.
The result? Features built, then rebuilt. Diagrams created, then ignored. I’ve seen this pattern add 50% to delivery time. It’s like building IKEA furniture with instructions for a different model - you have all the pieces, but they don’t fit the plan you’re following.
I used to think this was a process problem. Buy better tooling. Add more documentation. Create stricter review gates. I was wrong.
Most alignment failures trace back to communication frequency, not capability. The fix at one client was embarrassingly simple: a weekly 30-minute sync. “Here’s what we’re building this week - does it match direction?”
Cut rework cycles in half.
The tax isn’t visible until you measure it. Then you see it everywhere - in extended review loops, in context-switching, in the frustration of engineers who keep rebuilding things “properly.”
How aligned are your architects and engineers right now? Be honest - 1 to 10.