Coordination Became More Valuable Than Execution

For years, the competitive advantage in growth was execution speed. Ship more experiments. Launch more campaigns. Move faster than competitors.

That era is ending. Not because execution doesn't matter, but because everyone can execute now. AI tools, automation platforms, and global talent markets have commoditized the ability to do things.

What's scarce now is the ability to make those things work together.

The coordination gap

Watch a typical growth team for a week. You'll see plenty of activity:

• Paid campaigns launching
• Content publishing
• Product experiments running
• AI tools generating outputs

What you won't see is deliberate coordination between these efforts. The paid team optimizes their metrics. The content team optimizes theirs. Product has their own roadmap. Everyone's busy. Results are mediocre.

The problem isn't effort. It's that uncoordinated effort cancels out. Your paid campaign drives traffic to a page your content team is about to redesign. Your product experiment changes the conversion flow that marketing is optimizing against. Your AI tools give conflicting recommendations because they're trained on different signals.

Why coordination is hard

Coordination requires things that execution doesn't:

Shared context: Everyone needs to understand not just their piece but how it connects to other pieces. This is expensive to maintain and easy to let slip.

Deliberate sequencing: Some things need to happen before others. But sequence constraints slow you down, and speed is how most teams are measured.

Saying no: Coordination often means not doing something because it would conflict with something else. But most cultures reward adding, not subtracting.

Cross-functional trust: You need to believe that when another team says they'll do something, they will. Many orgs have burned this trust through years of siloed optimization.

The leverage shift

Here's why this matters strategically: coordination is now where the leverage lives.

If you can execute 20% better than competitors, that's nice. But if you can coordinate 20% better—if your paid and organic work together instead of fighting, if your AI tools are aligned instead of contradicting, if your experiments build on each other instead of colliding—that compounds.

Coordinated teams don't just do more. They waste less. Every effort reinforces other efforts instead of diluting them.

What coordination looks like in practice

Coordinated teams have:

• One roadmap: Not a paid roadmap, a content roadmap, and a product roadmap. One roadmap that shows how they interact.
• Shared metrics: Not metrics that each function optimizes independently, but metrics that only improve when functions work together.
• Decision rituals: Regular moments where cross-functional dependencies get surfaced and resolved, not discovered mid-execution.
• Kill authority: The ability to stop work that conflicts with other work, even when that work would hit its own goals.

What to do this week

• Map your conflicts: Where is one team's work fighting another team's work? These are coordination opportunities hiding in plain sight.
• Find one integration: Pick two efforts that should reinforce each other but don't. Make them work together before launching something new.
• Measure coordination: Track how often execution gets blocked by dependency on another team. High numbers mean coordination debt.

The teams that win from here will be the ones that treat coordination as a capability worth investing in—not a tax on execution, but a multiplier of it.