Most conflict between technical leadership and business development is not a clash of personalities. It’s a structural failure. When authority is undefined or inconsistently applied, people step into gaps. When responsibility is assigned without the power to shape outcomes, accountability becomes performative. What looks like friction between individuals is almost always the organisation leaking responsibility through poorly defined boundaries.
This problem shows up most clearly as companies grow. Business development accelerates opportunity before the internal structure has evolved to support it. Deals get signed, promises get made, and pressure gets pushed downhill. The organisation survives in the short term by absorbing that pressure through goodwill and heroics. In the long term, it destabilises.
Undefined domains create silent conflict
Business development is, by nature, outward-facing. It optimises for speed, optionality, and momentum. That’s not a flaw; it’s the point. The problem begins when that optimisation spills into domains it doesn’t own.
Without explicit boundaries, business development starts influencing execution indirectly. Commitments are made before delivery constraints are understood. Timelines are discussed as if they were negotiable suggestions rather than hard trade-offs. Technical decisions get “floated” in conversations without anyone formally owning them. Operational work is reassigned informally, often framed as urgency or necessity.
None of this looks malicious. In fact, it often looks helpful. But every one of these behaviours shifts responsibility without shifting authority. The execution team becomes responsible for outcomes shaped by decisions they didn’t make and couldn’t veto. That’s not collaboration; it’s structural ambiguity disguised as teamwork.
Responsibility without authority is a governance failure
The moment someone is held accountable for outcomes they cannot control, leadership has failed. This is not a communication problem and it is not a trust problem. It is a governance problem.
If technical leadership is responsible for delivery, quality, and system stability, then they must control the levers that determine those outcomes. That includes technical direction, resourcing, prioritisation, scope trade-offs, and delivery timelines. If those decisions are being influenced or overridden elsewhere, accountability becomes fictional. It exists only to assign blame after the fact.
Organisations tolerate this for longer than they should because things still ship. People compensate. They work around bad decisions. They take on stress that should have been absorbed by structure. But compensation is not free. It accumulates as burnout, disengagement, and quiet resentment.
“Helping” is often just interference with better branding
Boundary violations are rarely framed as power grabs. They’re framed as help. Someone steps into another domain because they believe they’re unblocking progress or protecting the company.
In practice, this creates a predictable pattern. Teams receive conflicting signals. Priorities shift without explanation. Decisions are reversed without ownership. Leaders unintentionally undermine each other while believing they’re acting in the company’s best interest. Execution slows, not because people are incapable, but because no one knows whose direction to follow.
Intervention without authority destabilises systems. It trains teams to hedge instead of commit and to escalate instead of decide. Over time, people stop taking ownership because ownership no longer protects them.
CEO overreach and the illusion of necessary involvement
This problem intensifies when the CEO refuses to respect delegated authority. Founders, especially technical or product-oriented ones, often believe their involvement is still required because it once was. Early on, that belief is correct. Later, it becomes corrosive.
A CEO who delegates responsibility but continues to intervene in execution creates a contradictory environment. Leaders beneath them are told they own outcomes, but their decisions can be overridden at any time. This teaches the organisation a simple lesson: ownership is provisional and authority is fragile.
From the CEO’s perspective, this feels like staying informed or maintaining quality. From the organisation’s perspective, it feels like instability. People stop trusting the structure because the structure is not enforced consistently. The system adapts by routing decisions upward, slowing everything down and re-centralising control around the CEO’s availability.
The founder becomes the bottleneck, then wonders why the organisation feels sluggish.
Why founders resist formal structure even when it’s needed
Founders resist structure because structure removes plausible deniability. Once domains are explicit and authority is formalised, outcomes become traceable. Decisions can no longer hide inside ambiguity. That’s uncomfortable for leaders who are used to operating on instinct and improvisation.
There’s also a deeper reason. Structure feels like loss. It means admitting that the company can no longer be run through personal intuition alone. It means accepting that the organisation must function even when the founder steps away. For someone whose identity is tied to having the full picture, that transition feels like surrender.
So instead of hardening the structure, founders delay. They rely on goodwill. They lean on personal relationships. They keep things “flexible.” What they’re really doing is postponing conflict with reality.
The irony is that avoiding structure doesn’t prevent conflict. It just pushes it downstream, where it becomes more expensive and more personal.
The illusion of alignment masks degradation
In the early stages, these issues are easy to ignore. The company is still moving. Revenue is still growing. Customers are still being delivered to. Leadership assumes the system is working.
What’s actually happening is quieter. Execution quality degrades. Capable people absorb stress they shouldn’t have to. Teams stop pushing back because it’s futile. The organisation becomes dependent on a few individuals who know how to navigate the ambiguity. When those people leave, everything breaks.
Goodwill gets mistaken for resilience. It isn’t.
Structure feels rigid, but ambiguity is slower
There’s a persistent myth that structure slows companies down. In reality, ambiguity is what creates drag. When people don’t know who owns what, decisions take longer, not shorter. Every action becomes a negotiation. Every problem becomes political.
Clear domains don’t reduce collaboration. They make collaboration intentional. Business development owns opportunity. Technical leadership owns execution. Operations owns delivery stability. Where those domains intersect, decisions must be explicit and respected.
Without that clarity, the company doesn’t move faster. It just burns people out more efficiently.
Companies don’t scale on goodwill
Goodwill is finite. It gets spent every time someone absorbs a problem they didn’t create and couldn’t prevent. Once it’s gone, people stop compensating. They disengage, or they leave.
A company that relies on goodwill instead of structure is borrowing against its future. It will eventually default.
Most “BizDev versus Engineering” conflicts aren’t cultural. They’re architectural. And like all architectural problems, they don’t resolve themselves. They either get fixed deliberately, or they collapse under their own weight.