To build a company that can take on almost anything, you need two things. A world-class team that builds the product, and a world-class team that takes it to market. Have both, and very little is out of reach.
A mentor of mine, an eminent engineering leader herself, once put it to me plainly:
I’d take a bad product with a great go-to-market team over a great product with a poor one, any day.
Coming from someone who builds for a living, that stuck with me. She knows how to build and run the engine she’s responsible for, and that’s exactly why she values the other one so highly. She isn’t claiming one function matters more than the other. She’s honestly weighed what she brings and what she needs alongside it.
Agreeing with the idea is easy. World-class is rare, but the bigger problem is that most leaders never check whether they have either engine in the first place.
If you’re leading, ask yourself: Do I have one of them? Do I have the other? Do I have both, or neither?
That sounds trivial. It isn’t, because the honest version of it almost never happens. The team exists, work ships, quarters close, and whether any of it is good enough is never tested.
When results don’t come, the instinct is to reach for tactics: another initiative, another reorg, more pressure. None of that gets at whether one of the two engines was the problem all along. You can’t set a direction when you’ve never established where you actually stand.
Once you can name where you stand, you can do something about it. You can hire into the weak engine, rebuild it, or bring in someone who’s run a world-class version before. None of that is easy, but it’s all available, and it all starts from the same place: an honest read of what you have.
The going remains tough as long as these engines aren’t firing on all cylinders, and that happens far more often than it should. Having one without the other is more frustrating than having neither.
At least I know how to make one of them hum.