When you're not involved in day-to-day prioritization and delivery, you lose the essential feedback loop that tells you whether your strategy actually works. You miss the technical constraints, the user journey friction, and the implementation edge cases that should inform strategic decisions. For more complex products, you might even lose touch with the product itself. You are too distant from its users to develop empathy with them.
When someone in your IT organization refers to another part of the company as "the business," you have a problem.
This is a trillion dollar discourse, coming from the worst idea since Taylorism: the separation of "thinking" from "doing." Taylor's scientific management split the worker who executes from the manager who plans, and a century later we've reproduced the same fracture inside software organizations, except now the line runs between "the business" who supposedly knows what to build and "IT" who supposedly knows how.
It's a category error dressed up as a division of labor. When your delivery organization calls marketing or sales or operations "the business," they've conceded that they are not the business: that they are a cost center executing tickets, a service desk for other people's strategy. And the moment that concession is made, the feedback loop dies. The people closest to the technical constraints, the user friction, the implementation edge cases, the people best positioned to discover what's actually possible, have been organizationally instructed that discovery is not their job. Their job is throughput.
This is why it's a trillion-dollar problem and not merely an annoying turn of phrase. The phrase encodes an operating model. "The business" tells IT what it wants; IT estimates, commits, and delivers; success is measured as the fidelity of delivery against the original request. Outcomes belong to "the business." Output belongs to IT. And so the entire apparatus optimizes for the wrong variable: utilization, predictability, on-time delivery of features nobody validated, while the actual question, should we be building this at all, has no owner anywhere in the system.
Business says: "Digital built it wrong."
Digital says: "We built exactly what you asked."
Everyone is technically correct. The product or initiative still fails.