About

It is not always apparent when teams are faltering at execution. The obvious version does happen – a committed goal is not met, a simple task takes much more effort than it should – but the more common version is subtle. Work gets done, nothing is visibly broken – and the team is operating at a fraction of its potential.

Closing the execution gap – that is what I write about here.

I’m Manish Nair. I’m a Product Owner who is leading cross-functional teams through large-scale legacy modernisation – transforming eServices that thousands of businesses depend on. Legacy modernisation is not glamorous work. But it is unequivocally consequential, and the hardest kind of work to sustain energy through, because the wins are slow and the constraints are real.

I’ve spent several years trying to work out how teams stay energised within those constraints. Not as a culture problem, but as a design problem – how work is defined and decomposed, how decisions get made and unmade, how a person comes to feel like an invested collaborator rather than a cog checking off their tasklist. It is a continuing journey, and what I have to share comes from the times I got things right, and even more so from the times I got things wrong.

The causes of lacklustre execution are genuinely multi-factorial – organisational, structural, cultural. I’m not writing about the parts that may feel too large for you to influence. I’m writing about the interventions available to an individual contributor, a product owner, a team lead, on any ordinary day.

I aim to release new pieces every two weeks. They are written for people who own delivery and suspect their team has more in it. If you are grappling with this in your own team, I’d love to hear about it – feel welcome to reach out.