Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision

farazbabar•about 2 hours ago

This team does not report to me, I will ensure their demise and make sure their work is never adapted by anyone within my sphere of control. It is easy to justify such behavior behind snazzy terms but I have seen this so many times that it isn't funny. Sometimes leadership may make a decision you may not agree with or even understand but focusing on why it happened, what you can do to align yourself and how you can help product, customer and business succeed are more important than your walled garden of carefully controlled conway conventions. It is right there in your own terminology of tribes, how very tribal.

belval•about 2 hours ago

What exactly should the author have done differently? It's part of the leadership roles to understand the power structures within your organization. Reading between the lines, a new team was thrusted onto an arguably functioning sub-org to address concerns that they had not themselves raised. Then the expectation was for that sub-org to take a hit on their KPIs to onboard to the new teams platform.

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.

lostdog•36 minutes ago

The best managers I've seen would turn this situation into a headcount request.

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.

cbbb•36 minutes ago

The CX team was created to facilitate the creation of a centralized dashboard to help support staff resolve customer issues quickly.

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.

ben8bit•about 1 hour ago

Am I missing something - what's with the "tribe" terminology?

stackskipton•about 1 hour ago

It's part of Spotify model, here is a blog article explaining it: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale/spotify

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.

ben8bit•about 1 hour ago

Thanks!

stronglikedan•about 1 hour ago

Funny, I was just involved in the opposite of this, where the PM proposed a new "E2E" team (coincidentally also called the CX team) that reported to someone outside the "tribe", and the proposal was shot down by leadership. I really didn't give it much thought since, but after reading this I want to find out why they shot it down.

Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision

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