The Startup Alignment Myth: Thriving in Chaos

Our quarterly planning sessions at Ola were an exercise in shared delusion. We’d commit to frozen targets based on new features that were still just ideas in another team’s backlog.

It felt like building a beautiful house on a phantom foundation. We knew it wasn’t a matter of if the plan would fail, but when.

This recurring chaos wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was a predictable outcome of the system itself. A hyper-growth startup’s engine runs on scarcity, forcing big goals to compete for one precious resource, like engineering time.

This is why textbook theories about perfect, company-wide alignment are a myth in a startup. Your team is pushed for growth while another is pushed for profitability, creating a silent war for the same limited resources.

This dynamic creates the most frustrating part of the chaos: accountability without authority. Your ability gets questioned when you miss targets, even though the failure was baked into the system from day one.

The result is a culture of scrambling, not strategy. Deep work dies, and everyone is just trying to do their best with what’s left, which guarantees mediocre results.

My breakthrough in understanding this came years later, from the concept of the "domino effect." The company’s failure wasn't a lack of talent; it was the failure to identify the single domino that would make everything else easier.

Instead, we were trying to knock over ten different dominoes at once. This approach ensured that none of them would ever truly fall.

You cannot fix the system's chaos, but you can change how you navigate it. The most critical skill is to stop managing the noise and start ruthlessly identifying the one domino you truly control.

So look at your own overwhelming list of priorities, and ask yourself: What is the one thing I can do this week that will make everything else easier or irrelevant?