From stuck to shipping in 3 hours: NYC Tech Leaders Summit
Read Time 4 mins | Written by: Cole

Senior product and technology leaders walked into our NYC Tech Leaders Summit with familiar frustrations. Despite brilliant teams and solid strategies, they felt stuck – projects stalled, timelines stretched, and one question persisted: Why can't we ship?
Three hours later, participants left with specific commitments and mid-June follow-up goals. One person knew exactly how they were going to get an ERP system that had been stalled for 6 months back on track.
They had all realized the same thing: most delivery problems stem from people dynamics, not technology or process failures.
The power of "Minimum Viable Everything"
A concept that everyone found useful was our Focus Funnel Method, leading teams to ship "Minimum Viable Everything." This isn't about building everything perfectly – it's about shipping the smallest thing that proves meaningful progress.
One Chief Product & Technology Officer, starting a new role, immediately adopted this as her complete team process. Instead of trying to build comprehensive solutions, her team would now focus on creating momentum through strategic minimum releases.
Here's what this looks like in practice: Instead of spending three months building a complete customer portal, ship the login screen and password reset in week two.
Instead of designing the entire analytics dashboard, ship one key metric that stakeholders check daily.
The shift is a big one: from perfection paralysis to progress momentum. When teams stop trying to build everything and start shipping something meaningful, delivery transforms.
The churn trap that's killing your momentum
Most smart teams are trapped in what we call the "Churn Trap" – low clarity combined with slow speed. They're busy, they're working hard, but they're spinning their wheels instead of reaching "Distilled Delivery" where high clarity meets fast execution.
Take our Director of Product attendee. She came in struggling to align business stakeholders around customer-centric roadmaps, with an unclear value proposition creating constant friction.
Using our Churn-Free Delivery Framework, she diagnosed exactly where her team was stuck and created targeted recommendations to move toward distilled delivery. The breakthrough wasn't a new process – it was finally seeing the pattern.
Emotional intelligence: the missing piece in AI adoption
Another breakthrough came around emotional intelligence. A Senior VP of Innovation arrived focused purely on AI strategy implementation. He realized his approach was missing the human element entirely.
His entire AI strategy pivoted from technology deployment to employee engagement and empowerment. The same tools, completely different approach – and suddenly his implementation path became clear.
The problem wasn't technical complexity. The problem was that his team didn't understand how AI would help them do their jobs better. Once he shifted focus to showing people how AI would make their work easier, adoption became straightforward.
Similarly, a VP of Product Management & Design was struggling with an ERP project behind schedule and at risk. During the event, she realized two specific team members who were blocking progress. But instead of managing around them, she developed a strategy for a joint conversation to help them unblock each other.
Human factor: why technical skills aren't enough
The universal insight that emerged was profound: technical skills aren't enough for delivery success. Almost every leader in the room acknowledged that understanding team dynamics was their biggest delivery blocker.
This wasn't about soft skills being nice-to-have. This was about recognizing that the smartest technical solutions fail when human dynamics aren't addressed. The most elegant code doesn't ship if the team can't navigate conflict. The best product strategy stalls if stakeholders aren't truly aligned.
One attendee put it perfectly: "I've been optimizing processes when I should have been understanding people."
Here are three specific examples of how this shows up:
Your developers are working weekends because every deployment is a manual process that takes 6 hours, but nobody wants to admit they don't understand the deployment scripts someone else wrote.
Your product roadmap keeps changing because stakeholders aren't actually aligned on priorities – they're just avoiding the difficult conversation about trade-offs.
Your API integration is three months behind because your backend and frontend teams aren't talking to each other about data requirements.
What made this NYC Tech Leaders Summit work
This wasn't a traditional presentation where attendees passively absorb information. The interactive workshop format with hands-on exercises created real-time breakthroughs. Participants worked through their actual challenges, getting immediate clarity on problems they'd been wrestling with for months.
The real measure of success isn't what happened in the room – it's what happens next. These NYC tech leaders are now addressing the root cause of delivery problems: the human dynamics that technical solutions can't solve.
If your smart team is stuck on delivery, the answer probably isn't another process or tool. It's understanding why most delivery problems are people problems, and taking steps to address them.
The breakthrough isn't in working harder – it's in working on the right things, with the right clarity, focused on the human elements that make or break execution.
Ready to move from stuck to shipping?
Join Codingscape CPO Kim Sullivan for a free webinar on July 22, 10am PT and get proven frameworks to speed up delivery.
She’ll help you find exactly where your team is stuck and begin a specific action plan to start shipping faster.
You'll walk away with:
- The Churn-Free Delivery Framework
- How "Minimum Viable Everything" ships what matters most
- How a VP of Product & Design unblocked a stalled ERP system in 3 weeks
- When emotional intelligence + AI can unblock human bottlenecks
Real frameworks. Real results. Real talk about why smart teams can't ship on time.
From stuck to shipping: eradicate churn and unlock innovation
🗓️ July 22, 10am PT
Duration: 60 minutes (45 min content + 15 min Q&A)
Format: Interactive workshop-style presentation with real examples and actionable takeaways
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Cole
Cole is Codingscape's Content Marketing Strategist & Copywriter.