Conflict & communication
How to handle conflicts triggered by misaligned incentives between growth-focused and quality-focused teams.
When growth metrics and quality standards pull teams in opposite directions, leaders can transform friction into alignment by clarifying incentives, designing collaborative processes, and sharing accountability for outcomes that balance speed with excellence.
Published by
Andrew Allen
July 18, 2025 - 3 min Read
In many organizations, growth teams chase momentum and market share while quality teams protect reliability, safety, and long-term reputation. When incentives aren’t harmonized, conflict becomes almost predictable: marketing and sales push for faster releases, while engineering, QA, and product governance push for more testing, better documentation, and stricter controls. The result is a tug of war where neither side fully wins, and the organization pays in rework, bugs, dissatisfied customers, and delayed strategic bets. The cure begins with a precise map of goals, a shared language for success, and explicit commitments that tie performance reviews, bonuses, and promotions to outcomes that reflect both velocity and quality.
Start with a joint problem statement that reframes the tension as a shared enterprise risk rather than a zero-sum dispute. Gather growth and quality stakeholders in a structured session to articulate which incentives are driving behaviors, where misalignment arises, and how each team defines acceptable risk. The facilitator should encourage concrete examples and data-driven observations, not anecdotes or assumptions. By documenting a single source of truth about expectations, you reduce rumor and defensiveness. The objective is not to assign blame but to co-create guardrails, thresholds, and decision rights that keep both speed and reliability in view as the organization moves forward.
Clarify shared goals and measurable outcomes across teams.
A practical method is to design a blended incentive model that rewards coordinated outcomes. Rather than separate goals, craft shared metrics that require collaboration across teams. For instance, release velocity could be paired with a quality score, customer satisfaction, and post-release defect rates. Tie a portion of variable compensation to teams achieving those combined targets. This approach reduces counterproductive competition and signals that crossing silos benefits the entire business. Of course, it requires transparent data and auditable processes so neither side feels coerced or duped. When teams see their success dependent on one another, they begin to trade turf for teamwork and build mutual trust.
Another critical step is codifying decision rights and escalation paths. Misaligned incentives often stem from unclear authority: who approves a feature, who signs off on a risk, and who bears the cost of a failed deployment. Create a decision charter that specifies criteria for release readiness, tolerable risk levels, and the sequence of escalations if gradients of risk appear. This clarity helps reduce political maneuvering and last-minute compromises. It also empowers individuals to act without fear of inappropriate consequences. Over time, as teams observe smoother handoffs and fewer surprises, buy-in expands, and the grievance cycle shortens noticeably.
Embed processes that de-risk experimentation and learning.
Communication discipline is essential in preventing resentment from simmering into resentment-driven behavior. Schedule regular cross-functional reviews where growth and quality perspectives are presented with equal weight. Use objective dashboards that visualize how each release impacts user value, performance, and support load. Encourage teams to ask questions that surface hidden assumptions—such as whether a feature’s enhanced reach justifies the additional testing effort. Leaders should model constructive disagreement by focusing on issues rather than personalities and by praising collaborators who propose safe experiments that test critical hypotheses without sacrificing quality.
Invest in boundary-spanning roles that reduce friction and improve information flow. Create liaison functions or rotating program managers who understand both the growth and QA paradigms. These individuals translate technical constraints into business relevance and translate market demands into executable quality criteria. They also help teams anticipate trade-offs, such as the balance between a fast beta release and a robust rollback capability. With dedicated brokers in place, conversations stay grounded in shared objectives rather than becoming cultural clashes. Over time, these roles cultivate a culture of curiosity, mutual respect, and practical compromise that benefits all stakeholders.
Create robust governance that supports balanced growth and quality.
A disciplined experimentation framework helps reconcile competing demands by turning risk into data. Implement clear hypotheses, minimal viable outcomes, and predefined success metrics for every experiment. Require that failures are treated as learning opportunities rather than personal fault. Document lessons in a centralized knowledge base so both teams can reuse insights. In practice, this means frequent iteration cycles, robust rollback plans, and automated monitoring that flags drift from intended results. When teams see that experimentation is governed, safe, and actually accelerates learning, they become more willing to support changes that might temporarily slow velocity but improve long-term quality.
Transparency around cost of quality and cost of delay is equally important. Financial modeling that shows the impact of bugs, outages, and customer churn helps non-technical stakeholders understand why quality investments matter. Present these numbers in plain language and tie them to concrete customer outcomes. Leaders can then justify a measured pace for ambitious initiatives, balancing the appetite for growth with the risk of diminishing returns. This evidence-based framing reduces defensiveness and fosters a collaborative atmosphere where teams defend shared outcomes, not individual laurels. As truthfulness hardens, dialogue becomes a mechanism for continuous improvement.
Practical strategies for sustaining harmony over time.
Governance should be lightweight enough to avoid bottlenecks yet robust enough to prevent sloppy risk-taking. Establish guardrails that set minimum quality standards for releases, along with explicit criteria for times when speed must yield to resilience. Schedule periodic audits of release processes, security checks, and incident responses to ensure adherence and prompt corrective action. The objective is not to micromanage but to provide reliable expectations that every party understands and accepts. When governance is perceived as a partner rather than a punitive framework, teams perceive decisions as fair, not as power plays. This perception is critical for sustaining long-term collaboration across competing priorities.
Invest in tooling and automation that support both growth velocity and quality assurance. Automated test suites, continuous integration pipelines, and rapid rollback mechanisms reduce the friction of implementing changes without compromising safety. Build dashboards that surface real-time indicators relevant to both sides: deployment frequency and defect density, user-reported issues, and performance regressions. When teams can observe multivariate signals together, they are better equipped to pivot with confidence. Tools should enable cross-team validation rather than create separate silos of control. The end result is a more resilient system that embraces experimentation while preserving trust.
Sustaining harmony requires ongoing alignment work, not a one-off intervention. Schedule quarterly strategy reviews where leadership revisits incentives, outcomes, and lessons learned from recent cycles. Encourage teams to propose refinements to governance, metrics, and collaboration rituals. Publicly recognize collaborative wins that demonstrate the benefits of aligned incentives, and reinforce that trade-offs are a shared responsibility. This ongoing cadence keeps conversations fresh, prevents drift, and signals that leadership remains committed to balancing speed with quality. It also creates a culture where employees feel empowered to raise concerns early and collaboratively develop corrective actions before issues escalate.
Finally, embed a people-centered approach that acknowledges human factors in decision making. Recognize that incentives influence behavior and that individuals bring context, risk tolerance, and ambition to every choice. Provide coaching and neutral mediation options to resolve disputes without escalation to authority figures. Invest in skills development that equips staff to navigate ambiguity with integrity and curiosity. When teams trust one another and see that leadership prioritizes humane, data-informed processes, the organization unlocks enduring alignment. Over time, what began as friction becomes a source of innovation, resilience, and sustainable growth for all.
