Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision(learnings.aleixmorgadas.dev) |
Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision(learnings.aleixmorgadas.dev) |
> All of a sudden, in the slides there were a new team.
> I had a new team that nobody asked me for my input, nor informed me before that decision was made. It just appeared out of nowhere.
I had to read into the middle to discover the key information that the team reported to another product leader:
> The first odd decision was that the team didn’t report to any of the tribe leaders. They reported directly to our product business vertical product leader.
Was this really "his" team? Or did someone else put together a team and assign them to work with his teams, which offended his sense of empire-building and control?
There is a lot of writing and diagrams in this blog post, but throughout the post he talks about everything except how he tried to work with this other leader. It's all just complaints and washing his hands of the problems.
I agree that the way this team was introduced wasn't optimal (if we can trust the narrator), but the way this person handled everything afterward feels like office politics to the max: I didn't create this team, so I will relentless identify problems with it and make no attempt to address them until they're destroyed. I feel sorry for the people hired into this position who got caught in this EM's crosshairs while they were just trying to do their job.
It's not "tribal" to refuse to do something that is misaligned with all your explicit incentives. Otherwise we'd have to pay lip service to every internal tooling team just because they exist. It's the leadership team's job to keep pushing if they strongly believe the sub-org leader is acting in bad faith.
The problem is leadership has priorities 1-5. Your team works on 1-3, but the PM keeps getting hassled about 4 and 5, so they look for levers to get them to happen.
In this situation, the PM scrounged up headcount from elsewhere, but if you present the option of adding headcount to the existing team, then you create a more harmonious option of getting these lower priorities accomplished.
Of course, this guy was taken fully by surprise by the suggestion. It's much harder to present a better option after the fact, and I agree that letting leadership feel the consequences of its decisions is a reasonable thing to do in this case.
Work with the other engineering manager.
This person was angry about the team's appearance, but the other engineering manager who assembled the team is barely a side note in the document.
The way you deal with these situations is by working with the other managers involved and propose better solutions.
This is a weird blog post because it's supposedly from someone in a high up engineering manager position, but it's written with a political awareness that I'd expect from someone who had never managed before or who was a first-time manager without good mentorship.
Strategy and leadership don’t come to exist on their own. It’s middle management that has the best operational and tactical view bear none. Use that to influence decision making instead of complaining. (Yes, this is a theme in my professional life. Our middle managers don’t know their own worth. Pretty please give me Plans about what you Want to Deliver. Those are so much better than general strategies.)
if you are playing as a team, and someone on the team makes a committed decision then it no longer matters if it was the best decision or not given the info at hand - the team is committed. Everyone making an effort to make the best of ANY plan usually has way better results than a confused/sloppy execution of the best plan.
and with longer term plans, once everyone is moving together and following each others lead, you can quickly pivot into the right plan if something is very obviously wrong.
This definitely reads like someone up top – with the obvious power of creating teams – circumvented the author, and for good reason. Your peers' and bosses' motives shouldn't come as a surprise, nor remain mysterious for months!
The manager decided there wasn't enough alignment (no "human connections"), and therefore each team should build an individual dashboard, then later (how much later?) realized the teams did not have the skills/motivation to do so.
The justification for why the manager steered the project in a completely new direction might be missing context. Unless I'm reading this wrong, their devs just needed to expose some APIs and they could get back to their work, no longer on call for handling support requests.
I'm left a bit confused why the original plan wouldn't have worked.
Even though that's not what leadership wanted and they tasked the CX team with the dashboards (..for good reason?)
I was definitely confused the whole article and have had to guess at the author's intention. I hope the communication was clearer during working hours..
EDIT: Just like Agile, it's poorly implemented at most companies and can lead to a ton of fighting due to multiple reporting arrows coming off employees.
> The dashboard wasn’t that complex: View information, perform some API calls. Replicate what we were doing in the DB and API manually but in a web page.
> People weren’t comfortable with frontend development. Indeed, some shared that they were backend developers, and they wouldn’t do any HTML work.
Thankfully Claude Code exists. And something like Vue, if you want to keep things simple enough for some internal dashboard. Grab PrimeVue and it mostly gets out of your way.
If you think about the people in your team who command the respect and trust to be able to get past all of that wariness of team outsiders, it's usually a really small number of people, and usually they are veterans who've been around for long enough to have built those relationships.
In this case the consequence of leadership's decision was a permanent solution to the CX problem with no permanent increase in headcount.
"Sometimes when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
This was not a cooperative situation. Trying to cooperate in this situation will make you walked all over and also will make you the one to be blamed when it fails.