How are you executing?
Execution might just be the most important thing.
“Strategy is a commodity. Execution is an art.”
Peter Drucker
Why is execution an art? Simply due to so many things that can go wrong, especially with technology deliveries. Delays in hardware arriving for a new data centre (not everyone uses cloud in low-latency trading!), requirements were not properly understood and your customer tells you the product you have so far is wrong.
People not communicating effectively across teams add complexity and miss key data, such as whether a data store was being replicated to a disaster recovery site (whoops, we assumed it was). Leaders can become accustomed to delegating everything and as such don’t know what is happening on the ground and people are not inclined to put up their hands that they are in trouble until it is too late and the client deadline is now going to slip.
A lot of stars have to align to get all the inputs, ingestion of requirements and data, through to outputs that bring value to customers.
The best product and tech people are paranoid. It’s not that they don’t trust people; they just know the art of getting things done means having a close relationship with the delivery teams and not having layers of communication.