7. Organizational Physiology

No Pain, No Gain, or is it Know Pain, Now Gain?

Digital as the Shiny New Thing

Too often, “digital product” is treated like a shiny badge: a sleek new website, an AI‑powered chatbot, a branded mobile app that no one uses. These are hood ornaments, attachments meant to signal innovation without altering how the organization operates. The problem with this perspective is that while it might give marketing the boost it needed to build brand awareness, it doesn’t add any value to the business. Technology as a marketing play is a strategy, and I would argue Domino’s Pizza has made this shtick incredibly impactful in the short term—remember the button to order or the tweet‑a‑pizza emoji to order launch?

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Technology as marketing is a fine strategy. It goes after short‑term buzz, but the usage numbers aren’t something to share in the board deck. You’re more than likely sharing the Marketing ROI versus the ad spend and reach—not the technology investment or the boost in sales through the actual ordering channel. Again, fine, fun, and buzzworthy, but not a long‑lasting strategy. Enough to beat your same‑store sales number from the previous year.

These types of strategies are a great example of something that could yield incredible stress on the system if the organization is out of balance. That is, the momentum of Marketing may out‑leverage the infrastructure to deliver it—Technology and Operations.

Sometimes executives treat the organization not as a body to be stewarded, but as a vehicle to be ridden hard and left behind—a stepping stone to the next, bigger role. It’s a selfish strategy that runs the system ragged. Their hastily created momentum creates an imbalance. Teams stretch to deliver promises they didn’t make. The best people leave. The average performers burn out, then pull back further. Technology debt piles up like scar tissue. And for what? A positive quarterly slide. A talking point in an earnings call. A résumé bullet for their climb to the next rung on the ladder. Yuk.

It’s best not to think of the enterprise as a machine, but as a living organism, and more to the point of this chapter, a human body moving through space to accomplish a goal. The muscles of marketing, sales, and growth are built for motion and forward momentum. They generate force, produce momentum, and respond to external pressure. The bones of operations and technology offer structure, stability, and durability. They give shape to motion, provide leverage, and protect internal systems from collapse.

An organization strong in marketing but weak in technology and operations will find itself tearing tendons, straining ligaments, and even fracturing bones. The muscles are powerful, but the infrastructure can’t bear their force. Every campaign becomes a stress test the body fails.

Conversely, when operations and technology are overbuilt relative to marketing, the body grows dense, sluggish. When marketing sees an opportunity to move, it finds itself dragging weight it can’t carry; an architecture too rigid to pivot, a system that resists acceleration.

So what holds the body together? What signals an imbalance before a full collapse? In my experience, it’s Product Management, acting as the tendons and ligaments that align the system toward strength, stability, and adaptive capacity.

It’s an apt comparison. In moments of success, the muscles—Marketing—and the bones—Technology and Operations—receive the recognition. Product remains unseen. Often misread as helpful but nonessential. But when imbalance starts to build, when motion outpaces structure or structure slows momentum, Product is the first to feel it. And when something breaks, the blame rarely lands on the system. It lands on the person who named the problem too early, too quietly. The ones who had been signaling for weeks that something was off.

This is where things get complicated. Because tendons don’t scream when things go wrong. They whisper. A delay in launch, a misfire in messaging, a slow bleed in customer retention. These are not system failures, but stress responses—early signs that something in the body isn’t moving as one.

Misalignment rarely begins in digital, but digital feels it first. When marketing moves faster than operations can sustain, the connective tissue strains. When technology scales without a grounded sense of customer need, tension builds in silence until something gives.

In these moments, executives often misdiagnose the problems. They swap out tools by replacing Product Management with Project Management. Fire old vendors and hire new ones. Invite consulting firms to run stress tests and personality assessments, who then roll out proprietary “transformation programs” designed less to solve the problem and more to signal that all is well. That we’re on track. That we just needed a shot of lidocaine, or a course of corticosteroids, to numb the pain (but not correct the systemic imbalance).

You see this in sports medicine all the time. When an organization needs players to play, it looks for short‑term wins rather than keeping the long‑term health of the athlete in front of them. Sometimes this leads to championships, other times it leads to devastating injuries that can impact a career.

See Thunder vs. Pacers, Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, where Jalen Williams of the Thunder received lidocaine shots for his wrist injury before every game, avoiding surgery to play. Juxtaposed with the treatment of Tyrese Haliburton’s strained calf, who implemented similar remediation tactics but ended up with a torn Achilles tendon.

In physiology, proprioception is the body’s ability to know where it is in space, to adjust posture and balance without conscious effort. In the organizational body, Product Management plays a similar role—a sort of sixth sense to potential imbalance. Product management acts, in many systems, as the connector of the departments, translating marketing goals and sentiments into actionable product designs and user stories for technology teams to build and operations to manage. Prioritizing features, updates, and launches to maximize revenue impact while balancing scalability, stability, and reliability of the systems that support them. Product knows the tension, because they facilitate the conversation and collaboration. A good product lead will grow in their intuition and ability to perceive shifts in external terrain before they manifest in metrics.

A great product leader knows it’s less about the dashboards and more about discernment; sensing the subtle shifts in the room, reading the tension, and using the relational equity they’ve built to name what’s off and propose a path back to alignment. At this point, it’s not about optimizing the system. It’s about orienting the organization toward its true goal.

This touches something I’ve said throughout this manifesto: Product is at its best when it can clearly articulate the what and the why, empowering teams to shape the how. It translates vision into movement while keeping every stakeholder anchored in the value being created.

A healthy and well‑performing organization is a lot like a professional athlete who is in tune with their body, especially the tendons and ligaments. These connective tissues don’t just signal pain; they tell a story. They offer clues about where to adjust, where to focus, and what phase of training the body is ready for next.

Treating digital as connective tissue means caring about alignment.

And it means taking responsibility for how your leadership shows up in the body. Are you listening to your team? Are you compensating for short‑term gains that will cost the organization in the long run?

Don’t let the consultants fool you. There is no playbook for this—no off‑the‑shelf system that guarantees harmony. What there is, instead, is a commitment to embodiment, to moving with awareness, to treating strain as a teacher, and to building not just for speed or strength, but for coordination, flexibility, and performance.