I've been working on an article about how honesty and communication is the solution to most of the problems that a product or team faces.
To write that article, I found it helpful to first list the most common problems large product teams face, particularly in enterprise software. I thought you might enjoy it, if only for your own commiseration and edification.
Strategy Challenges
Timing / go-to-market / market fit / value prop / job-to-be-done is wrong
A competitor has any of the above down better than you do
Business model is wrong (e.g. selling a service that should be a product)
Bad margins per-customer (see above)
Ignoring a sea of unhappy customers
High costs due to internal "thrashing" (repeated pivots in product, design, tech, or strategy), leaving a team too weary to further correct course
Strategy team is too busy supporting sales to actually defend the product
Sales Challenges
Sales exist before product and thus heavily impact the product roadmap (yes, this was the arc of an entire season of Silicon Valley, and this practice is more common than you'd think)
Sales subsidizes development and thus, holds all the financial and political cards, steamrolling and ultimately unintentionally setting product roadmap
Sales distracts product leadership with exciting pre-sales deals, leading to a lack of product oversight
Sales is selling a vision of the product that is years away, but their runway with the customer's loyalty / their own reputation isn't that long (to paraphrase a wise and sarcastic friend, "never let reality impede your sale.")
Sales commitments outstrip organizational capacity
Executive Challenges
Leadership derails current efforts by making decisions behind closed doors that influence roadmap, tech, or design without understanding of the implications of their decisions
Design, development, strategy, or product teams do not have roles in the c-suite
Leadership is isolated or mislead by their own teams
Leadership is excited by a "bright shiny object," a holy grail mirage in technology, business, or design that distracts from the fundamentals of success
Product Challenges
Product leadership can't or won't stand up and fight c-suite decisions
Product directors see themselves as "above" design and development teams
Product directors see "UX" dev priorities running counter to "product" dev priorities (“user experience†development work comes second to “feature†development work)
Design and development teams are isolated from or don't support each other
Product directors don't see the above as a serious problem
Strategy, sales, design, or development are not heavily involved in the product roadmap
Product directors de-scope without involving the team
Development Challenges
Poor architecture decisions
Poor tech stack decisions
Avoidance of open-source frameworks
Lack of capable resources or uninterested talent pool (see 1-3)
Reliance on academic and unseasoned developers
Fixed scope and fixed timelines (both of which are about as real as Sasquatch)
Poor collaboration with designers and/or product owners in sprints
Lack of standards, UI component libraries, and clear devops
Negligence of performance problems and necessary refactoring
Orthodox agile development
Design Challenges
Lack of close collaboration with and respect for design, development, or product directors
Designers aren't given the time to work in the backlog and practice rigorous user-centered design
Designers are given too much time and "waterfall" the product's design
Designers introduce unintentional scope creep with their clever ideas
Designers facilitate product owners' introduction of scope creep and thus hinder MVP mindset
Designers don't research or test with actual users
Designers don't understand development or scope implications of their work
Designers don't work closely with developers to continually evolve their work