Have you ever been in a 15-minute meeting that somehow lasted two hours? You went in to "align on a few last details", and suddenly the developers are ready to jump your sales team, the designers are wailing over the mangled version of their UI – and your meeting schedule for the rest of the day is officially wrecked?

Yeah, I've been in that meeting. Over and over. I've been the disappointed designer. The frustrated developer. The desperate sales guy. And the business owner, just trying to keep it all from falling apart.

But that meeting isn't the problem. Everything leading up to it is.

Your teams don't talk – they tug. A constant tug-of-war of "us" vs. "them".

There are two major culprits behind that mess:

Too much distance.

If your designer works in a silo for four days and then drops a “spec” on the dev team — it’s already too late. No design should go unseen by a developer for longer than a day.

The sooner they sync, the smoother things go.

Bring your teams closer.

They need to work together, not for each other.

They need to collaborate, not present and defend.

They need to stand on common ground.

Different languages.

Developers are problem-solvers.

To them, the word "problem" is a companion. It means challenge.

But others usually do not share that appreciation. To them it feels like an accusation. A sign of failure. Being told "no".

A lot of friction is just language: The same word can mean wildly different things to different people from different contexts.

The more a team gets accustomed to each others vocabulary, priorities and perspectives, the smoother they will work together.

And once the friction fades, so do the meetings.

So do the blockers.

So do the headaches.