Agreements vs. Expectations

Expectations

Expectations are the unwritten requirements we assume are obvious to everyone. They form in the background, shaped by past experiences, investor decks, Slack lore, and a CTO’s off-hand remark in a hallway. A project manager might expect the team to ship the MVP in two weeks. A Sales VP might expect the bug backlog to be zero before the next demo. A founder might expect 24/7 on-call without ever writing a schedule.

These expectations feel so self-evident to the person who holds them that they assume the entire org shares the same mental model. The core problem: expectations are invisible to anyone except the person who holds them. Like dark matter, their impact is felt even when their presence isn’t detected.

Internal data from two Series-B SaaS companies show that unmet expectations are the number one driver of cycle spill-over, outranking tech-debt and head-count issues. Engineering teams that articulate explicit agreements report 38% higher release predictability than those running on unstated expectations.

Agreements

Agreements are the explicit contracts we make, written or spoken, that define what each party will deliver or do. Unlike expectations, agreements are visible, negotiable, and mutual. They require the vulnerable act of stating requirements and the collaborative act of finding acceptable trade-offs.

Compare:

• Expectation: “The infra team should know we need zero-downtime deploys.”
• Agreement: “Let’s freeze the pipeline on Tuesdays 10-12 UTC and roll back within 5 min SLA.”

The first creates escalation when violated. The second creates clarity and mutual accountability.

The cost

When expectations go unstated and unmet, the results are predictable:

• Velocity drops as teams build against misaligned success criteria
• Rework multiplies as people act on different assumptions
• Trust erodes not from bad code, but from mismatched definitions of “done”
• Morale tanks as employees try to hit targets they never agreed to

A VP of engineering told me they lost four senior engineers in one quarter. Exit surveys revealed the identical pattern: each engineer expected “career-level scope” (which the VP never found the time to do). The VP felt blindsided and the engineers felt gas-lit.

Neither side had made clear agreements.

Shifting towards agreements

The transformation from expectation based to agreement based work relationships requires three deliberate shifts:

1. Make the invisible visible

Start by identifying your expectations. Ask: “What am I assuming engineering already knows or will do?” Write these down (either as Standard operating procedures or otherwise). The act of externalizing them often reveals how ambiguous or uncommunicated they are.

2. Initiate the vulnerable conversation

Shift from “You should just know…” to “Can we agree that…?” This requires courage because it exposes your needs and opens them to negotiation. Rejection of a requirement is not rejection of the person, it is simply a scoping conversation.

3. Design explicit agreements

Good agreements have four components:

• Specific deliverable – What exactly will be shipped?
• Timebox – By which demo, sprint, or board meeting?
• Quality bar – Under what SLA, error budget, or test coverage?
• Renegotiation clause – How do we revise if priorities shift?

The cultural challenge

In tech companies, the expectation-agreement gap costs millions in lost ARR and recruiting churn. Projects fail not from technical complexity, but from misaligned stakeholder expectations.

Tech culture romanticizes hustle and implicit knowledge “If you’re really senior, you’d just know”. Remote-first cultures often rely heavily on long form communication. Both tendencies struggle with the expectation-agreement gap.

The solution isn’t to abandon cultural values but to recognize when they create invisible barriers. The most successful distributed teams and cross-time-zone startups I’ve consulted share one trait: they explicitly discuss their cultural assumptions and create lightweight “hybrid agreements” that honor multiple working styles

The ultimate goal isn’t to eliminate all expectations. Rather, it’s to become conscious of our expectations and transform the critical ones into agreements.

This creates an org where:

• Clarity replaces confusion
• Collaboration replaces escalation
• Trust grows through consistency, not assumption
• Teams scale through vulnerability and negotiation

Start today!

In the space between what we expect and what we agree to lies either the foundation of predictable delivery or the seeds of the next outage. Choose consciously.

If you need help shifting your organisations culture book a free constulation with me where I can share more insights for your specific case.