We spent months building a feature, only to find out another team was building the exact same thing.

It sounds ridiculous, but it happened to my team. And yes, it sucked.

We were an EdTech company, with product teams split by business line: K–12 and Higher Education. Each team was building a scheduling tool to help students manage class time, reminders, and resource links… without the other knowing about it.

We only found out because a design lead switched teams and spotted both roadmaps. By then, both teams had invested engineering time, run research, and aligned stakeholders. Separately.

We realized the tools weren’t compatible. This led to wasted time and resources, but also to friction and frustration from everyone involved.

It was a mess.

A mess that could have been avoided with the help of systems thinking.

What is systems thinking? And how can it help product teams?

Systems thinking is a holistic approach to decision-making.

It makes you see your work as part of a larger whole, understanding how teams, tools, and decisions interconnect. Systems thinking leads us to ask questions such as:

• How will this feature affect customer support?
• What happens if adoption is higher than expected?
• Are we changing something that another team depends on?

It’s about shifting your point of view, constantly, and intentionally.

Suddenly, delivering a feature requires you to think about not only that one feature, but also about how your product evolves, how different teams collaborate, and how customers engage with your whole product. Your focus shifts from the technology to the ecosystem – customer experience, marketing, ops, and every element that surrounds that technology.

I’m not suggesting you turn every project into an organization-wide initiative.

It’s more of a mindset shift.

When you understand that even small decisions can have ripple effects, you learn to anticipate them before they turn into bigger problems. You build feedback loops that empower you to make the best decisions you possibly can.

And that naturally turns you into a better leader.

Once you start seeing how the parts connect, you’re more equipped to align people, avoid friction, and make tradeoffs that work across teams, not just within your own.

And that’s something invaluable to any company.

Because when teams think in systems, they stop solving isolated problems and start building resilient, scalable products. It’s no surprise that some of the world’s most successful companies have embedded systems thinking deep into how they operate:

• Apple: You can start writing an email on your iPhone and finish it on your Mac because every product team at the company understands how their work fits into a larger ecosystem.
• Amazon: When you return a product, their system automatically updates inventory forecasting, adjusts recommendation algorithms, and triggers warehouse restocking. Every customer action ripples through multiple systems to create a smoother future experience.
• Google: From Search to Maps to Ads, and every other Google product, nothing operates in silos. Dozens of teams coordinate to ensure consistent experiences across the entire ecosystem. That kind of alignment at scale doesn’t happen without deep systems thinking.

These are just a few. Spotify, Toyota, or Shopify are also excellent system thinkers. And it’s no coincidence that every company on this list is a giant in their field.

Systems thinking is hard (and it never gets easier)

If systems thinking is so valuable, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Because it’s hard. Not because we’re lazy, but because we have blind spots. We don’t know what we don’t know.

It’s especially true earlier in our careers.

When you’re focused on shipping a feature, hitting deadlines, and managing your Jira board, it’s easy to assume that’s the job. You’re not ignoring the bigger picture, you often don’t even realize there is one. You don’t know which teams to loop in, or what questions to ask. You might not even know a feature impacts marketing, or customer success, or compliance until something breaks.

Bad news: it doesn’t get easier as you move up.

In many ways, it gets harder. Now, you’re managing a portfolio, not just a product. You’re connecting dots across multiple teams, journeys, and business lines. A tiny decision can have legal, operational, or marketing consequences. And you’re expected to catch it all while still delivering results.

That’s why systems thinking isn’t a skill, it’s a habit. A muscle you build by asking the right questions again and again.

And you can’t do it alone.

The only way to see more of the system is through people who live in the parts you don’t. That’s why high-trust relationships are non-negotiable. If people don’t trust you, they won’t share risks, join your meetings, or challenge your thinking.

But when they do?

You can become the product leader every company is looking for: a problem solver who thrives in ambiguity by asking all the right questions.

What happens when systems thinking is missing

When teams are not thinking in systems, it’s not like things explode overnight.

The damage usually shows up in quieter ways, like friction, rework, and missed expectations. Here are three patterns I’ve seen firsthand:

1. Short-term fixes create long-term messes

When I worked at that same EdTech company, we released a new, streamlined interface for students to enter their answers. The rollout was fast, and the feature worked.

For students…

We only realized we had broken the grading tool for teachers when they started submitting support tickets.

When systems thinking is missing, quick wins become long-term liabilities that cost time, trust, and team morale.

2. Stakeholders are misaligned, execution is fragmented

I was once involved in a healthcare app launch.

Engineering focused on HIPAA compliance and performance. Marketing promoted it as a way for patients to “get answers fast.” But customer support wasn’t staffed for the message volume they got. Healthcare specialists were overwhelmed, replies took a long time, and NPS score dropped.

Everyone worked hard. Just not together.

Without a shared mental model of the system, efforts clash instead of compounding.

3. Trust and morale erode

Remember the story I told at the beginning of the article?

It was more than a waste of time and money. It was a hard blow to the team’s morale.

Realizing you’ve spent weeks duplicating someone else’s work is frustrating and undermines trust in leadership and in the system itself.

If this sounds painfully familiar, don’t worry.

These patterns can be avoided. It just takes a shift in how we think and work.

How to apply systems thinking in 5 simple ways

So how do you make that shift?

You don’t need a new framework or a reorganization. Just a few small habits that help you step back, zoom out, and invite others in.

These are five small habits that I use and coach others to build into their ways of working (some of them, I learned the hard way):

1. Zoom in and out intentionally

Some days, you’re in the weeds, grooming backlogs, triaging feedback, or listing out every possible edge case. Other days, you’re zoomed out, aligning on strategy and planning the next quarter. Both perspectives are useful, but the real value comes from switching between them. Train yourself to shift focus, instead of getting stuck in one mode.

2. Map the system

Sketch out your system and all of its interconnected parts: teams, tools, workflows, customers, metrics. What connects to what? Where does information get lost? What is prone to breaking?

3. Ask about ripple effects

Before launching, pause and ask: what happens if this works? If it fails? If it scales faster than expected? This is how you uncover second and third-order effects. And that’s often where systems thinking starts to pay off.

4. Design for learning, not just execution

You can’t always predict what will happen. That’s okay.

What matters is that you can see what’s happening and adjust.

Build systems that give you feedback: instrument your features, talk to downstream teams, and stay close to user signals. You can’t always prevent problems, but you can get better at spotting and solving them quickly.

5. Make collaboration part of the process

You can’t see the whole system alone, so pull in the people who operate in the parts you can’t see. A few ways to do it:

• Include marketing or support in pre-launch reviews
• Run pre-mortems to surface risks early
• Keep async updates flowing across teams
• Create the conditions for people to tell you what might go wrong

The right meetings with the right people, at the right time, can change everything.

And so can good async infrastructure: clear communication channels, up-to-date product tracking tools, and shared visibility into what’s happening where.

One last thing

Don’t turn systems thinking into an impossible standard.

You’ll never catch every blind spot (I’ve been trying for years, still haven’t).

That’s not the point anyway. Systems thinking isn’t about having all the answers, it’s about asking better questions, early on.

And when you do, your role shifts. You stop chasing alignment and start creating it. You build trust, not because you always get it right, but because you’re the one thinking beyond your team’s corner of the organization.

Start small. Ask a better question. Invite one more voice into the conversation.

You’ll be surprised how much more of the system you can see.