Hey there, product development enthusiast!

Welcome to the cozy autumn edition of The Tech Impact Uplift!

In this edition, I’ll tackle a topic often seen as not-so-cozy: escalations!

Contrary to popular perception, escalation can actually be a healthy mechanism that drives progress within an organisation.

But how do we ensure that?

Let’s have a look.

💡 Why Escalations Are Deemed ‘Inappropriate’

An escalation happens when an employee raises an issue to their leaders.

Why is this often deemed a negative thing? There are two main reasons.

Escalating an issue could be interpreted as:

• You can’t solve the issue yourself (indicating missing competence).

• You are complaining about others (indicating inappropriate social behaviour).

These two possible perceptions often keep people from escalating issues.

While both might occasionally be true, the advantages of escalation are far greater.

🔍 Progress in Organisations Gets Stuck All the Time

Most mature organisations today don’t primarily struggle with complex tech challenges, legacy systems, or missing hard skills. Instead, their biggest pain points are organisational and collaboration issues:

• Unclear roles and responsibilities

• Knowledge and collaboration siloes

• Unclear overarching priorities

• Interdependencies between teams

All these challenges slow down progress in organisations.

What they have in common is that individual employees within the organisational units cannot necessarily solve these themselves.

As a result, important initiatives are stuck. And if people are afraid to escalate, those initiatives stay stuck.

🧱 Why Escalations Are Valuable and Needed

That’s why we need to change the narrative: Escalations are actually a good thing!

When initiatives are stuck because people or teams are waiting for others but nothing moves, an escalation is needed.

If priorities are conflicting and unclear, escalations should be the tool of choice to come to a solution.

Every time individuals or teams get stuck, it’s their leaders’ job to get them un-stuck again. But they can only do that if they’re aware of the issue.

🚀 How to Build a Positive Escalation Culture

So how can you reduce the reluctance to escalate and establish a mindset that empowers leaders to un-stuck the organisation?

You need to lead by example and create a positive culture around this.

If someone brings you an escalation, these reactions will encourage them to do it again the next time they’re stuck:

• Most importantly (and this is what this is all about): help find a solution.

• Identify the root cause and fix it, but do it in a blameless, constructive way.

• Thank people for bringing it up, and emphasise how it helps the organisation.

Handled constructively, even tricky or political issues can be resolved without offence.

One mindset helps me every time: in 98% of cases, people act with good intentions - the system just nudges them into unhealthy behaviour. It’s our job to spot and fix that.

A classic example is when some team is not collaborating. This might be because they are (over-) loaded with work from other stakeholders.

Sitting down with them and revisiting (or clarifying) priorities often leads to a constructive solution.

🌀 The Dark Side of Escalations

Of course, there’s a dark side too.

I’ve seen behavioural patterns where people tend to escalate everything right from the beginning.

Sometimes even before an issue arises or before trying to solve it themselves.

They see escalation as an easy way to hand off work and responsibility to managers, avoiding direct conversations with other teams

That’s not healthy.

In those cases, I tell them to try solving it first - and that I’m happy to help once their best attempts have failed.

✅ Wrap-Up

All in all - escalations are much better than their common perception!

They’re a useful tool - especially in complex organisations - to surface issues people can’t solve alone.

Escalations help leaders identify and resolve those issues, which is a core part of our job.

So let’s make sure escalations are seen as a constructive, necessary tool - nothing to shy away from, as long as there’s a real problem.

That’s TTIU for today. I hope you enjoyed it and found it helpful. Let me know what you think!

📬 I read every piece of feedback - hit reply and let me know your thoughts! Got a topic you want me to cover? I’m all ears.

💡Jan’s Knowledge Nuggets

This week’s bonus inspiration:

• 🧠 How to keep your brain sharp as a leader: A super practical post by Taha Hussain on optimising our mental work.

• 💰 The real development of costs of AI: A smart reflection by Ben Torben-Nielsen on AI token costs dropping linearly while usage is skyrocketing exponentially.

• 🤖 The snares of AI running a business: A fascinating post by Mirela Mus about what happened when Anthropic let AI run a vending machine.

• 💡Your PM skills for 2026: Already on Nov. 5th the Product Management Festival will take place in Zurich. If you are into Product Management, you will learn all you need to succeed in 2026. With the code DISCOUNT20JAN you can get 20% off ticket prices. If you go there, let me know - I would be happy to meet!