Pete CrosbyCEO, Revelesco · Ask me about delivering predictable, scalable, repeatable revenue.

Misalignment across your leadership team is NORMAL! But you need to fix it fast...

20 Oct 2026 · 2 min

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In this interview, a marketing leader from Paddle discusses how rapid growth during COVID led to cross‑functional misalignment, with product, sales, marketing, and customer success pulling in different directions. Using a rowing‑boat metaphor, he describes the problem of “great rowers” rowing at different speeds and directions. Paddle addressed this by establishing two parallel programs: a “run the business” program that handles day‑to‑day sales, pipeline, and product roadmap, and a “change the business” program that consists of quarterly, cross‑functional initiatives aimed at transforming the company. To keep these initiatives on track, the leadership team holds a dedicated two‑hour Monday call each week, reviewing each change‑the‑business initiative in 15‑minute segments to assess progress and remove blockers. The discussion highlights the importance of intentional alignment structures and regular rhythm for scaling organizations.

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And how do you, as leading a marketing function, how do you make sure that everybody is aligned within that function?
So, I think company alignment or cross-functional alignment is a super interesting topic, because it's something we've worked extremely hard on at Paddle. When myself and a few of the other key execs joined, we were a very interesting, high-growth business that, not by design, but by default, had ended up becoming reasonably misaligned across functions as the company has scaled very fast through COVID. And so product was doing one thing for one reason, and sales was doing another thing, and marketing was doing another thing, and CS was doing a slightly different thing. And actually, we used the paddling metaphor, the rowing boat metaphor. We said that actually, you know, we've got some great rowers who are rowing in slightly different directions at different speeds, and that's a real problem. So I think that's where it all comes down to the foundational elements that marketing can help steward, but are a cross-functional agreement. At Paddle, we have a very kind of well-built muscle around this now, and it's been lots of hard yards over the last couple of years where we have a change the business and a run the business program. Our run the business program is, you know, sales and pipeline and product roadmap, the things that have to happen every single day, every single month, every single quarter. And then we have a change the business set of initiatives, which are cross-functional by nature, and they are the top initiatives across our key pillars in our strategy that we have prioritized for that quarter to go and get a job done. Job done that we believe has a chance of changing our business. All of those things might sound like they're led by one function, but they have to be cross-functional if we're gonna make them change the business. And we have a rhythm about that. Every Monday, we spend 2 hours on a call going through every change of business initiative one by one in 15-minute chunks to check that it's on pace and we're unblocking it.