The Kinesthetic Product Org
Building functional awareness with posture, tension, and breath
I love spotting parallels between things that shouldn’t be related. That’s probably why I’m drawn to analogies. They reveal patterns that matter everywhere.
Here’s one that’s been on my mind lately.
For years, I’ve been dealing with the long tail of a high school sports injury. With nerve damage and chronic pain I’ve spent years rotating around rehab strategies like physical therapy, strength training, HIIT, and more. All of it helped a little, but nothing stuck. Lately, I’ve been training something called Functional Patterns (FP).
FP…is different. It doesn’t work isolated muscle groups or brute strength. It’s focused on teaching the body how to move again intentionally, systemically, as a whole.
FP is slower, more intentional, and more methodical. It’s about teaching the body to move in total alignment through posture, tension, and timing. Not just repetition, but functional movement.
Naturally, I started seeing the parallels to product work. And the more I looked, the more it held up.
Because when you look at the dysfunctions of product development and the constant voices promoting the best frameworks and methodologies, I see the same pattern I saw in my own body: strength in some areas, deep compensation in others, and a lot of unaddressed dysfunction reinforced by well-meaning routines.
So here’s the analogy: product organizations are not factories to be optimized, but systems to be trained for kinesthetic awareness.
A Kinesthetic Product Org is built with a felt sense of how we move, where we’re drifting, and what needs attention.
What Is Posture in a Product Org?
In the body, posture isn’t about standing up straight. It’s about creating systemic stability through structural alignment of how weight is distributed, how tension is stored, and how energy flows through the system. Good posture makes movement and applying force efficient. Bad posture makes everything harder.
In product teams, posture is strategy. Not the deck, the alignment. Healthy alignment creates clear focus, shared understanding, and smooth, purposeful coordination between parts. Posture is teams being able to apply the right amount of force and energy to any given situation.
If your product org feels like it’s fighting itself (think competing priorities, lack of risk-taking, absence of decision-making, constant rework) you likely have a posture problem. You're expecting teams to move fluidly without enabling them to work together. You’re compensating for lack of alignment.
Like the body, you can’t fix posture by solving one of the symptoms. You have to train the supporting systems.
What’s Breath?
In FP, breath isn’t only breathing. It’s the act of recentering your stability under pressure. Breath acknowledges and regulates tension, realigns posture, and directs how you move next.
Breathing is rhythmic. Without it, posture breaks down during movement and it creates more dysfunction.
For product orgs, breath is akin to the habits that maintain strategic alignment. It’s how you retro. It’s how you listen to feedback loops. It’s how you respond and how you adjust to improve alignment.
In both FP ad product, breathing should become second nature. Of course, product teams that don’t breath don’t collapse. But they will drift out of alignment, moving with no sense of direction. They might execute but can’t explain why.
Breath is how your org remembers what it’s doing while in motion.
Awareness won’t come from more flowcharts
You can diagram a system all day but that doesn't mean you can feel it. Just like you won’t learn how to ride a bike without getting on an trying it, mapping out dependencies or adding swimlanes won’t fix how teams interact.
That’s one trap: we mistake one-off maps for embodying it. Diagrams are helpful, but they’re snapshots. Good movement is a dynamic feedback loop.
FP reminded me that alignment isn’t proven on paper, it’s felt under pressure. The best product orgs have strong body awareness*.* They **know when tension is healthy, when movement is drifting, and when it’s time to reset.
I struggle to articulate this model precisely because it’s not one-size-fits-all. Think of it like your neuromuscular system: health isn’t about memorizing stretches. It’s about moving well, sensing misalignment, and adjusting often. It’s more about discipline than dogma.
A Kinesthetic Product Org sustains that cycle. It doesn’t depend on any one methodology but it always comes back to how it moves.
The Core Mechanisms
These are the embodied dynamics every healthy org needs to sustain forward motion:
Breath: Reflection rhythms. Your capacity to realign while in motion.
Tension: Potential energy. The friction between priorities and perspectives that creates stored power.
Elasticity: Adaptive strength. Your ability to flex and focus effort without breaking.
Posture: Strategic alignment. The integrated structure that holds all motion together.
Together, these form the rhythm of how an org moves. Breath → Tension → Elasticity → Posture → back to Breath.
The Awareness Practices
This is how you know it’s working:
Postural awareness: Can you feel drift before the metrics say so?
Breath discipline: Do your teams pause before reacting or do they react and chase requests?
Functional feedback loops: Can you sense which parts fail under pressure, and why?
Embodied knowledge: Can your teams anticipate issues before they’re measurable? Have you trained that organizational proprioception?
This is how I think we move from systems thinking to embodied practice. It’s less about what you document. More about what you feel.
Functional First Principles
1. Focus small, intentional movements
In FP, it’s it’s about making small adjustments with control. You don’t rush reps or stack on weight to feel progress. It looks really easy from the outside. Even I’ll catch myself thinking, “this can’t possibly help.” And then I’m drenched in sweat.
I call this “wiring and firing.” If you don’t wire your connections right, you won’t fire them right.
It reminds me of how good product work happens. You don’t earn long-term leverage by pushing harder. You do it by making precise, high-signal adjustments that set up future movement. Your roadmaps are honed through progressive overload, not a pre-seeded to-do list.
I once worked with a team building an internal platform. Stakeholders loved the long-term vision but didn’t want to start small. Every foundational starting point was blocked because it did not create the “value” of the long term vision. "That feature is not for us," they'd say, "let's focus on the big things we’re all excited about." They weren’t allowed to build stabilizers. Trying to push weight with bad form stalled them for over two years.
2. Integrate movement across planes
Real movement is 3D. In FP, you’re always moving forward, twisting, stabilizing. The big muscles might visible move you, but it’s the deeper, hidden muscles that stabilize you. If any part overcompensates, others collapse.
What's fascinating is how product orgs are no different, excet the planes here are dellivery, discovery, and strategy. When you separate them, you create weird imbalances and the system has to compensate. This might look like research getting buried, or like designers being left out, or roadmaps ignoring reality. Over time these things compound into dysfunctions that eventually lead to injury.
I’ve seen teams spend weeks on discovery, then never revisit it again. Or ship something technically brilliant that no one can maintain. Or chase metrics that don’t match the problem. That’s all the same thing: overtraining one plane while ignoring the others.
Functional movement means your entire org system is stable during motion, the visible and hidden muscles flexing and firing together.
3. Tension and elasticity create functional power
In FP, tension is potential waiting to be used. The right amount of stored energy lets you move fluidly and explosively. With too little tension you collapse and with too much you strain.
The same goes for product orgs. Healthy tension (between strategy vs. delivery, today vs. tomorrow, speed vs. safety) creates resilience. Functional teams know how to hold that tension and translate it into forward motion.
Breath helps here too. Reflection is how you learn to tell the difference between productive strain and misalignment. It’s what lets you redirect energy rather than leaking it.
Most orgs are overtrained in the wrong direction
Like gym bros skipping leg day, a lot of product orgs are overdeveloped in the show muscles like velocity, demos, and dashboards. And they’re undertrained in the stabilizers that sustain progress like discovery cadence, cross-team trust, decision hygiene, and strategic alignment. They’re all biceps, no core.
Functioning well isn’t about pushing harder, it’s about moving smarter. That means improving how your system coordinates: how decisions flow, how information transfers, how feedback loops close. It’s the interplay between discovery and delivery, short-term execution and long-term vision.
At least that's what Functional Patterns taught me. And it's a mindset product orgs should train for too.
how can your team move more like a system with awareness and intention?
You don’t need stronger teams. You need an org that moves better.
Instead of looking at how each team is working, keep an eye out for alignment across them, set up points for inspection, and help them focus their push ⇆ pull energy well.
If you liked Be a Weed, this is the next layer. Resilience isn’t much more than enduring change, it’s adapting to it in motion.
If you liked Real Options, this is the embodied version. Sensing tension and elasticity tells you where to push and where to flex.
If you liked Velocity ≠ Progress, this is what progress actually feels like.
Train your org like you’d train a body. Odds are, you don’t need more strength. You need better movement.