Insight

A Queue With a Name

Most organizations solve the business-and-technology gap by appointing someone to represent one to the other. A product owner. A stakeholder. Someone who attends on behalf of.

It looks like a fix, and it is a well-designed one for the problem it actually solves: prioritization, translation, negotiation. What it cannot do is answer the question that most often blocks the work — should we be doing this at all, and what happens to the customer if we get it wrong.

That answer lives with whoever holds real authority over the domain. So the team asks, and waits, and the handover you thought you had removed reappears wearing a job title.

The distinction worth holding onto is between someone who can describe what the deciders want and someone who can decide. Only the second removes the wait. The first converts an organizational boundary into a person, which feels better and costs the same.

Staffing the second is harder, and that is precisely why it is rare. It means placing someone the business considers too valuable to embed into a single team, and accepting that their judgement now gets exercised there rather than in a forum. It is usually the highest-return move available, because it turns the most frequently repeated handover in the organization into a conversation across a desk.

The test takes a week. Look at what a team escalated last month. If any of it was a question about the domain rather than about money or headcount, the team is arranged around the work but not around the decision — and no amount of ceremony will close that gap, because the gap is authority, not process.