Melissa Appel's Gems on Alignment, Culture Problems, and the Real Reasons Products Fail
Tamara Adlin
✧ Product & UX Strategy Leader ✧ Executive Alignment Expert ✧ Innovation & Transformation ✧ Host, Corporate Underpants
In this episode of Corporate Underpants Live, I chat with Melissa Appel , co-author of the book Aligned, about what really gets in the way of good product development—and surprise: it’s not a lack of process. It’s misalignment, culture issues, and politics masquerading as “delivery problems.”
Here are the standout gems:
💎 1: The Problem is Never Where They Think it is
Melissa shared a story where executives thought teams had a delivery problem. Turns out, they didn’t. The problem was that estimates were being overridden by leadership, creating a culture where engineers no longer felt safe being honest. So estimates became lies—and surprise, they kept missing them.
🧠 Lesson: When someone says “delivery is broken,” dig deeper. The symptom isn’t always the problem.
💎 2: Learn to Mine for Conflict
Alignment isn’t about agreeing 100%—it’s about creating shared understanding and commitment. Melissa’s advice? Mine for conflict. Ask people privately what’s really bothering them. Use stakeholder interviews to uncover hidden disagreements. Most “misalignment” is just stuff nobody’s said out loud yet.
🧠 Lesson: If you're seeing weird behavior, it's probably not random. Someone is optimizing for a goal you didn’t know existed.
💎 3: Glossaries Are Underrated Power Tools
Melissa and I both agree: teams often collapse over language that feels obvious—until you realize it isn’t. Teams fall apart because they use the same word to mean wildly different things. Want a low-risk way to uncover misalignment and start fixing it? Build a glossary.
🧠 Lesson: Confusion is a tactical tool. “Help me understand” goes a lot farther than “Why did you do that?”
💎 4: Alignment Personas vs. Just Talking About Users
I introduced my concept of alignment personas—collaborative, assumption-based user personas used to change the conversation and depoliticize product decisions. Melissa loved the idea because it makes everyone feel invested, rather than handed research they didn’t help create.
🧠 Lesson: It’s not about the artifact—it’s about the shared process of making it together.
💎 5: You Can’t Change a Culture Overnight, But You Can Prototype One
Melissa suggests starting small. Find a safe team, do something differently, and get better results. Then show your work. Use it to build influence. Want to make a stakeholder your champion? Figure out their goals and help them achieve them.
🧠 Lesson: No one wants to “align” just for the sake of it. Tie alignment to what they care about.
Bonus 💎: Thinking of Quitting? Talk to Melissa First.
Melissa is developing a “pre-quit checklist” to help people figure out if they really need to leave, or if they’re just stuck in an alignment problem they might be able to influence.
🧠 Lesson: Not every problem is solvable—but way more are than you think.
If you haven’t checked out Aligned yet, go to alignedthebook.com. And if you’re curious about my approach to wrangling stakeholders, look into my Align Before Design method.
Because as I always say: If our primary goal is to reduce churn, then we’d better make Phyllis ridiculously happy.
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