Stop Playing Referee: How to end priority wars between Product & Eng

​Engineering says refactoring takes 8 weeks, period. Product says the launch date is non-negotiable. Sales already promised a custom client feature for Q4...

​When cross-team deadlocks hit a wall, leadership inevitably gets dragged in to play referee.

​If your team's execution velocity is systematically hijacked by priority wars, you don't have a comms problem — you have an execution framework failure. Stepping in to make the final call feels like a quick fix, but it creates a dangerous trap: it rewards political maneuvering, kills team autonomy, and turns leadership into the ultimate operational bottleneck.

​Join Inês Boska (Founder & ex-Lead PM) for a 45-minute tactical masterclass at Poland Tech Week 2026. Learn how scale-up leaders retire themselves as referees and build frameworks that force cross-functional teams to resolve roadmap deadlocks autonomously.

​What you'll learn

• ​A plug & play script to drain emotional hostility and defensive posture before touching the roadmap

• ​How to reframe positional arguing ("you vs. me") into collaborative problem-solving ("us vs. the constraint")

• ​How to eliminate unilateral escalations to leadership so teams can no longer escalate a dispute without bringing pre-analyzed options with trade-offs.

​Who it's for

​This session is built for leaders in scaling tech companies (30–250 headcount):

• ​VPs & Directors of Engineering / Product: Looking to protect technical standards or delivery momentum without clashing with commercial priorities or burning cross-functional trust.

• ​Founders & COOs: Exhausted from refereeing internal disputes and wanting 10+ hours of executive bandwidth back every week.

• ​Senior Engineering Managers & Lead PMs: Seeking the high-leverage negotiation tools needed to navigate cross-departmental friction and drive alignment.
  
  📍 Imaguru Tech Hub, Warsaw

  📆 
28th October 2026, 18.00
  🎟️ Registration upon approval (spots limited)

​About the speaker

​Inês Boska is the founder of Druga Strona, an executive consultancy that helps scale-up founders & C-suite leaders resolve cross-functional deadlocks and rebuild execution flow. Drawing on her experience as a former Lead Product Manager catering to 12+ million users, she’s made it her mission to translate high-stakes negotiation psychology into battle-tested frameworks for steady operational velocity. Learn how at: www.drugastrona.com.pl

See the full Poland Tech Week calendar -> https://luma.com/polandtechweek