When you ask a company how they work, within the first two minutes someone will point to an intent tree. Three-year goals → one-year goals → strategic pillars → OKRs → initiatives → epics → work items.

Useful… but absolutely not the full picture

A few examples of what gets completely obscured in these trees:

1. How influence actually flows

Two companies can have the exact same tree, but in one the teams genuinely shape strategy...and in the other teams are stuck at the bottom executing whatever comes down.

2. The shape and size of work

“Key initiative” means something totally different when it involves 2.5 tribes for 12–20 weeks vs 1 tribe for 2–4 weeks. Same label, wildly different collaboration patterns

3. Shared teams and competing priorities

Every department saying their request is P0 doesn’t mean the cost of delay is the same. Separate budgets create totally different outcomes than shared prioritization. A tree will never show this.

4. Dependency structure

Two teams can be pointed at the same metric. One has minimal dependencies and experiments weekly. The other requires a giant coordinated rollout with multiple handoffs. On the tree, both look identical.

5. Type of team, type of bet

A “program” looks neat in a hierarchy, but the reality is new-offering teams, growing teams, margin-optimizing teams, sustaining teams...they all work differently and produce different shapes of work.

6. Cross-cutting business + tech realities

Three business segments with separate P&Ls + one shared R&D pool + shared product/platform teams = a completely different operating challenge than a tidy functional tree suggests.

7. The revenue chain is uneven

A checkout-conversion team has a direct, clean line to revenue. A design-system team is essential but connects to revenue through several hops. A tree won’t show the real path between work and value.

8. Overlapping vs. diverging perspectives

Intent, funding, value chain, collaboration patterns sometimes overlap neatly. More often, they drift apart as companies scale. That's the challenge

Intent graphs/trees are helpful, but they’re only a small part of the picture.

Most of the real operating model is in the relationships, interfaces, funding flows, dependencies, team types, and context collisions the tree doesn’t capture. That's what we try to model at Dotwork, and why custom fields and labels just don't cut it.