Stakeholder Alignment: The Launch That Died in Legal

Your team spends a quarter building a payments feature. Engineering is proud. Design is proud. You're proud.

Three days before launch, it detonates: Legal has never reviewed the flow and flags a compliance question that takes six weeks to resolve. The sales VP learns about the launch from the marketing email draft — and is furious, because two big prospects were promised something different. Support has no docs and no training. The CEO asks why she's hearing about all of this in an escalation thread.

Nobody sabotaged you. Everyone was busy. You just never made them part of it.