"Our marketing isn't working." I've heard that in almost every company I've been part of. It's rarely where the problem actually lives. Years ago I watched a startup tear itself apart over exactly this. Sales blamed marketing for weak leads. Marketing blamed sales for fumbling the ones they sent. Both were sure, both were loud, and both were wrong. The real problem was two doors down, in the product. The UX team had rolled out a new version built on a new mental model. The old product worked like email: you create a message, attach a big file, hit send. Everyone already knew how to do that. The new one worked like a shared, collaborative file system — cleaner on paper, but it asked users to think in a way they didn't yet think. They opened it and didn't get it. That confusion didn't show up with a label that said "mental-model mismatch." It showed up as soft demos, stalled trials, and a sales team and a marketing team pointing at each other. The symptom surfaced at the front of the funnel. The cause was sitting in engineering. Once we accepted that and reshaped the experience to feel like email again — meeting people inside the mental model they already had, instead of the one we wished they had — it unlocked everything. This pattern shows up in the data too. When CB Insights studied hundreds of failed startups, the headline cause was "ran out of money." But they were careful to call that the final event, not the reason. The real reasons lived upstream — the product didn't fit how the market actually thought. The empty bank account was just where it finally became visible. Marketing and sales are usually the windows, not the wound. When they're both struggling, I've learned to stop refereeing the fight at the window and go find the wound. What's the visible problem you keep trying to fix — and what might actually be underneath it?