Why product leaders are losing influence

A VP Product I coached last year described the moment she knew something was wrong. "I walked into the steering committee with the clearest recommendation I'd ever made. I knew the data, I'd stress-tested the trade-offs, I had the right answer. And somehow, twenty minutes later, the CTO had restated a worse version of my point and the room was nodding along like he'd cracked it."

I've coached hundreds of product and engineering leaders over the past two decades, first as a CPO through two exits, then as a fractional CPO, then as a leadership coach and trainer. The pattern she described is the most common and the most damaging one I see. Great thinking, strong track record, real strategic depth. But somewhere between the brain and the room, the value drops out. I call it signal drift.

The problem nobody names

Signal drift is the slow, invisible erosion of influence that happens when your thinking doesn't land with the weight it deserves. It's a gradual failure. A course that shifts by a degree at a time, so gently you don't notice until you look up and realise you're miles from where you should be.

Signal drift starts small. For example in a meeting where you over-explained and lost the room, or a strategy document that got quietly rewritten by someone who understood the problem less well but packaged it more neatly. Although each incident is survivable, together, they form a trajectory over six to twelve months. Over time, you get passed over for a bigger scope, your team's work gets deprioritised, and you become "the person who executes" instead of "the person who leads."

The irony is that the leaders experiencing the worst signal drift are often the strongest strategic thinkers in the organisation. They see patterns others miss, think in systems, process complexity faster than their peers, and often hold the right answer before anyone else in the room has framed the question. However despite all of this, their signal doesn't arrive cleanly, so their capability gets underestimated.

Why good work doesn't speak for itself

Product leaders, particularly those from technical or analytical backgrounds, tend to share a core assumption: if the thinking is rigorous enough, the room will see it. So when the message doesn't land, the instinct is to add more. 

This is the trap. In product-led tech companies, complexity reads as noise to senior stakeholders. What they need from you is a clear signal: what's the decision, what's the trade-off, and what do you recommend?

When leaders don't make that shift, three mistakes tend to compound.

• Overcomplicating with detail. We walk through the room with our entire analytical journey instead of leading with the conclusion. Every dependency gets surfaced. Every edge case gets a mention. The result is more questions and the meeting ends without a decision.
• Leading with output. We believe our results will speak for themselves. They rarely do. Influence requires shared understanding, and shared understanding requires deliberate framing. Without it, we build a reputation as a reliable executor rather than a strategic leader.
• Jumping to fix mode. Under pressure, many of us switch into intense problem-solving or withdraw entirely. Both responses make sense internally, but executive settings demand shared thinking and consensus. By leaping to solve, we inadvertently shut down the room and damage the very trust we need.

What actually works

The leaders who correct signal drift  adopt a better structure, specifically, they do three things consistently.

Lead with the decision

Use portable storytelling

They frame meetings for decisions

The deeper pattern

There's something else worth naming here, because it affects a significant portion of the product and engineering community. Many of the leaders I work with think differently from the neurotypical norm. They're dyslexic, have ADHD, ASD, or some combination. Their cognitive styles give them genuine advantages: speed, depth, pattern recognition, radical honesty, systems thinking. These are extraordinary assets in product leadership.

But the boardroom communication template wasn't designed for how they process and transmit information. So their signal drifts faster, and the feedback they receive ("be more executive," "have more gravitas," "raise your altitude") is maddeningly vague. There's no concrete behaviour to change. It's just a warning that they don't fit a narrow template.

Research suggests that up to 20% of the general population is neurodivergent, and surveys indicate the proportion in tech companies may be significantly higher, closer to 50%. If your product organisation has ten senior leaders, the probability that several of them are experiencing signal drift linked to cognitive style is high. You're losing strategic insight because the transmission is drifting off course.

Start here

If any of this feels familiar, try one experiment this week. Take your next important stakeholder communication and restructure it. Lead with your recommendation in two to three sentences. Follow it with the single most important trade-off. End with a clear ask. Send any supporting details as an appendix or pre-read, not as the main event.

Notice what changes. Not just in how the room responds, but in how you feel walking into it. When you stop trying to prove you've done the thinking and start trusting that the structure will carry your signal, something shifts. 

Signal drift is not inevitable. But it won't correct itself. The longer you wait, the wider the gap between your actual capability and how people perceive you. And that gap has consequences that compound silently, affecting promotions, influence, and the impact you're capable of making.

For further information, I hope you enjoy the 20% club report I recently published.