Growth in a value-creation plan is rarely lost within a single team. It tends to leak through the gaps between teams, and now that returns have to be earned within the business, those gaps cost more than ever.
Earlier in my career, I worked on the launch of an SDSL broadband service at a telecoms business. Marketing and sales had one timetable. Product had another, shaped by limited resources, capability gaps and everything else a product team juggles, and nobody had ever lined the two up.
The launch date slipped and then slipped again. After a while I started calling it Slidy DSL, and the name caught on because everyone knew it was true.
Every slip triggered another round of replanning. Plans were rewritten and dates reset around a new launch date that would itself move. More and more effort went into reworking the plan, and less into getting the product in front of customers. It did launch in the end, at least six months late.
Nobody was idle during those six months. Every team worked hard, and the growth simply disappeared into the gap between their timelines.
I have come across some version of the Slidy DSL in most businesses I have worked in since then. The lost time usually goes to one thing: getting everyone back on the same page.
This is where the Synchronisation Tax is at its most expensive.
Being out of step is bad enough. What really eats into the plan is the cost of recovering, over and over again.
What alignment actually costs
Getting aligned sounds harmless. In reality, it means meetings, long email chains and decisions that have to be made twice. The product manager takes marketing through the roadmap again. Marketing rewrites the messaging because sales say customers will not buy it. Sales then requests a price change, and everyone goes back to the start. Each step seems sensible at the time, but added together, the cycle can run for months.
The people involved feel it well before it shows in the numbers. Product feels its work is not being properly taken to market. Marketing is forever chasing other teams for inputs, and sales is asked to sell things it does not fully understand. Meanwhile, the commercial leader spends more time brokering agreements than driving growth. When the slippage finally reaches the board pack, it looks like one team is underperforming rather than time lost among the three.
Why it matters more now
For years, the lost time could be absorbed. Rising valuations did so much of the work in private equity returns that a launch arriving a quarter late was disappointing rather than decisive.
Most of that cushion has gone. Bain’s 2026 Global Private Equity Report* sums it up as “12 is the new 5”. A typical deal that once needed around 5% annual EBITDA growth to hit its target return now needs 10 to 12%, and it has to come from the business itself. Holds are getting longer too, at around seven years for buyout funds.
For a management team, that changes the arithmetic. There is no spare quarter anymore. Every month spent getting product, marketing and sales back in sync is a month the plan had earmarked for selling, so the useful question is how quickly the teams can move together, not simply whether each one is performing.
*Source: Bain & Company, Global Private Equity Report 2026.
What the best teams do differently
The best product and commercial leaders I have worked with do not wait for alignment to happen. They agree on definitions up front, make someone responsible for each handoff, and get every team working to a single cadence. I describe what this looks like in practice in The Unified Cadence.
The catch is that, in most businesses, this alignment depends on a few individuals and tends to leave when they do.
Where I come in
With ClockSpeed, I look at how product, marketing and sales work together, find where the time is going and work out what that is costing against the plan. Then I help fix it from the inside, working with the team on shared definitions, proper handoffs and a single operating rhythm. The aim is for alignment to become part of how the business runs, instead of something a few people hold together by effort alone.
The question worth asking before the next portfolio review
If the plan needs 12, how much of this year will your teams spend getting aligned?
ClockSpeed helps investors and Operating Partners find where growth is being lost across product, marketing and sales, then embeds the fix so the plan gets its time back.