Your org structure is killing innovation. Two product leaders share how they fixed it — one built a firewall, one turned a constraint into permission.
Every product leader eventually hits this wall.
You have a good team. Strong engineers. Sharp PMs. Talented designers. But the roadmap keeps slipping. The innovative work gets pushed to next quarter, then the quarter after that, then "next year." The fires are real. The compliance demands are legitimate. But somewhere in the accumulation of urgent work, the future keeps getting cannibalized.
The instinct is to prioritize harder. Add a framework. Ask the team to do more. But sometimes the problem isn't the priorities. It's the structure itself.
That's the scenario at the center of Episode 7 of the Product Leaders Lab. Lilach Yaniv, VP of Product Innovation at SkillOnNet, watched compliance work eat her roadmap until she made a structural bet that changed everything. Adrianne Stone, Principal PM at Big Cartel, found herself with two mandates, two sets of stakeholders, and not enough runway to serve either well. Two different companies. Two different problems. Two very different solutions.
Most product organizations are running two fundamentally incompatible operating modes inside the same team, calling it a prioritization challenge.
Execution work rewards precision, predictability, and low variance. Compliance deadlines are real. Regulatory demands don't move. Innovation work, on the other hand, requires experimentation, ambiguity, and tolerance for failure. These aren't just different types of work. They demand different rhythms, different success metrics, and different mindsets.
When you ask the same team to oscillate between both, you don't get the best of both worlds. You get the worst. Execution suffers because it's interrupted by exploratory thinking. Innovation suffers because it keeps losing to the urgency of the present. And the people doing the work (your best people) quietly start to disengage.
The dashboard won't tell you this is happening. The signal is subtler.
For Lilach, the moment of clarity didn't come from a missed revenue target. It came from the texture of a meeting. The roadmap conversations had started to feel more like operational briefings than product strategy decisions. Innovative initiatives were slipping more often. Nothing dramatic — just a slow erosion of strategic space.
She describes what happened to her team as vision fatigue: not burnout, something quieter and more dangerous.
"When you have very strong engineers and designers and brilliant product managers, but they find themselves spending too long just maintaining the present, they gradually lose their innovators muscle. You still get execution. You still get efficiency. But the curiosity and the creative stretch start fading. I think that's a very expensive human cost."— Lilach Yaniv
When people stop believing the roadmap is real, you've already paid a cost that won't show up on any dashboard. Before she landed on a fix, Lilach tried the obvious options: spreading resources across both compliance and innovation, relying on prioritization frameworks to manage the tension. It diluted both sides. Then she tried the superhero model — asking the same teams to do mandatory regulatory work and still innovate on the side. In practice, it produced burnout rather than innovation.
The breakthrough came when she stopped treating this as a resource problem and recognized it as a mindset problem.
"It's not a prioritization issue. It was two incompatible operating modes inside the same system."— Lilach Yaniv
Once she named it that way, the solution became clear. Stop trying to make one system do two incompatible things. She created a dedicated innovation function with ring-fenced resources, its own roadmap, its own governance rhythm — separate from the core execution org, but not disconnected from the business. The core org keeps protecting revenue and meeting regulatory commitments. The innovation team has structural space to go long.
They stopped trying to protect innovation with good intention and started protecting it with operating boundaries.
That distinction is the whole thing. Good intentions are not a structure. Separate roadmaps, separate governance, and separate KPIs are a structure. Seven months in, three major innovation projects — some dreamed about since the pandemic — are now in motion.
"It's living your dream and no one disturbs you in the middle."— Lilach Yaniv
Adrianne didn't have the luxury of building a separate team. She had three product development squads, two mandates, and a CEO who had just stepped in to make growth the top priority.
Big Cartel had spent a year doing a full rewrite of its seller admin panel: architecture through front end, everything. When that work wrapped, the company hadn't hit its growth targets. The CEO formed a cross-functional growth team and pulled Adrianne in to lead it. Suddenly she was still responsible for a product roadmap built around features that long-time customers had been waiting for, and also accountable to a growth mandate focused entirely on the first seven days of the user experience.
"Am I on a different team now? Do I not work on the product team? How is this going to work? What are we supposed to do?"— Adrianne Stone
Adrianne's answer came from her background as a scientist. She has a PhD in biomedical science, ran experiments throughout her career at 23andMe, and approaches every problem with an experimentation-first mindset. The unlock was a running experiment: the growth team was testing a reverse trial model, and because of how it was structured, the first seven days surface area was locked. Any change to it would contaminate the experiment. Which meant her engineers couldn't work there while the test was running.
"But I still have four engineers that I have to keep busy. So that is how we were able to justify being able to work on those retention-focused features."— Adrianne Stone
The constraint became the permission. Because they couldn't touch the growth surface, they could justify building the product features the core team needed. Both mandates served. Same team. No structural conflict.
Her squad was already wired for multi-threading — usually two or three projects running simultaneously — so the shift wasn't jarring. The other piece that made it work was leadership alignment. Her CPO and the CEO weren't fighting over her time; they were figuring out together how to make it work. That alignment, more than anything else, is what kept the dual mandate from becoming a crisis.
The result was more coverage, more perspective, and more support on the problem than Adrianne had ever had before. Two years of user knowledge, now amplified by an entire growth team's perspective.
But as Adrianne put it:
"You'll never have less pressure and more time than you do right now."— Adrianne Stone
Start with the hardest, scariest thing first. Because that's the only moment when the stakes are low enough to learn from it.
These two paths look very different on the surface. Lilach restructured the org. Adrianne worked within the existing structure. But they're solving the same underlying problem: how do you protect different types of work from crowding each other out?
Lilach's path makes sense when the operating modes are genuinely incompatible and the problem has been building for a while. Prioritization frameworks won't fix a mindset problem. Asking the same people to be both execution machines and innovators will keep producing burnout. When the modes are truly incompatible, you need the firewall: separate systems, separate governance, separate identity.
Adrianne's path makes sense when the tension is more about competing mandates than competing operating cultures, and when leadership alignment is achievable. Find the constraint that creates the permission. Let the experiment run. Use what's locked to justify doing the other work. Multi-thread deliberately, and make sure the people above you are solving the same problem rather than pulling in opposite directions.
The trap most product leaders fall into is treating both versions of this problem as a prioritization challenge: adding a framework, asking for more, hoping good intentions will protect the future. They don't. Good intentions are not operating boundaries. The work you don't structurally protect will always lose to the work that's urgent right now.
Both Lilach and Adrianne moved before the situation became a crisis. That's the detail worth sitting with.
Lilach acted on the signal that roadmap conversations felt like operational briefings, not on a revenue miss. Adrianne leaned into the experimentation discipline before the dual mandate became unmanageable.
The temptation is to wait. To see if it resolves. To try one more prioritization framework before making a structural change. But the org problem compounds quietly. Vision fatigue sets in. People stop believing the roadmap is real. And by the time it shows up on a dashboard, the human cost has already been paid.
The org fix isn't a one-time event. It's an ongoing negotiation between what the business needs now and what the business needs to become. And most product leaders are under-resourced for that negotiation, not because they lack insight, but because they lack structure.
What Lilach and Adrianne both demonstrate is that the answer isn't cleverer prioritization. It's clearer separation. Knowing which work belongs where. And then actually building the conditions that let each type of work succeed on its own terms.
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Episode 7 of the Product Leaders Lab wherever you get your podcasts:
