​​​The situation: A team preparing to launch a new business offering ran into friction with the organization's cyber threat testing function right before go-live. The business team didn't understand why they were being asked to present their application for review, why a dedicated test environment had to be locked down, or why any of this had to happen before launch. Nobody was being unreasonable — there just wasn't a shared understanding of what the testing team needed and why. That gap was creating real risk to the launch timeline.

 

What I did: I interviewed the cyber testing team directly to capture the business rules driving their requirements — not just what they needed, but the reasoning behind each one. From those interviews, we built a FAQ and a checklist that translated technical security requirements into plain language the business team could follow without needing a security background.

 

The outcome: The business team stopped experiencing the testing process as an unexplained obstacle, and the testing team got a repeatable way to set expectations with every future team it worked with — not just this one. The launch stayed on track.

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Why it matters: This is the pattern I see over and over — a requirement that's completely legitimate, undermined by a lack of shared understanding between the team enforcing it and the team subject to it. Silos don't just slow things down; they turn necessary work into resentful work. Making the "why" explicit is often the entire fix.