I was warned, by multiple people, that this would be a very difficult role. Then the person who was supposed to show me the ropes quit two days before I started.
On the first day, the tech lead pushed back hard — they can’t add another item to the list. They’ve got too many things going on. They are already working on high priority things that cannot be switched out.
Then something blew up — a bug in one of the integrations. Marketing and Operations were super unhappy, wanted immediate resolution.
This was a fully remote role, which meant that it was much more difficult to get a sense of the energy in the room. There was no opportunity to grab a coffee and chat stuff through - I had to organise a meeting with anyone I wanted to talk through stuff with.
I remember drafting an email with the details of what happened, what the resolution would involve and caveats.
I’d been in tough situations before, but I was always involved in it from the beginning, and had full context. This was different, and I couldn’t lean on my charm or built up trust quite as much as before.
On the one side I had a clearly capable team putting out a lot of work, and on the other side was nothing but disappointment and mistrust.
My first step was to understand the problem better. I started talking to the team lead and other team members to start to get a sense of the lay of the land. Then I wanted to speak to the marketing lead. My primary goal was to understand motivations and their perspective on what was happening.
Unsurprisingly, they felt that the team failed to deliver on features that were promised.
We got to talking about what might be causing it, and as a matter of course, I started to explain how last minute requests derail ongoing work. I must admit I expected they already knew this, but they were surprised. They had expected that if work was accepted, that it would not impact work that was already going on.
A reasonable assumption.
They wanted to know why someone hadn’t explained that to them before. I suspect it was that everyone in that role before just assumed everyone knew how these things worked.
From the other side, developers were feeling like no amount of work they were doing was good enough — they were only given more work.
What I found really surprising was just how prevalent the “us vs them” attitude was. This was an organisation with multiple departments, all meant to be pulling in the same direction. Inside the organisation, that was not the feeling.
Thinking back to it now, all everyone wanted was to do a good job. This translated to doing everything possible all the time. There were no clear boundaries on what was actually possible.
What was missing was an accountability surface. I became it — taking accountability for everything the team accepted or declined, in both directions, to everyone who needed to know.
I told them that no last minute work would be accepted. We would discuss any new work on Wednesdays as part of the weekly refinement and we’d go back with a plan, including details of any impact anywhere else. They could then choose how to proceed.
Once I started giving the Marketing and Operations lead meaningful choices, they could make informed choices.
They held me to deadlines from that point onwards, but in truth, when deadlines slipped, they understood. I don’t think the understanding came necessarily from my reliability, but because they knew the risks and the boundaries at every point.
Everything became a lot less chaotic very quickly. The refinement sessions worked as a kind of funnel and also limited the impact of any incoming request. It also helped to have only one person on the team who would take on support requests, with the person rotating each sprint.
It wasn’t long before we had a several month plan for what would be delivered, and to deliver it consistently, including large cross-functional pieces of complex work.
After a few months, someone asked me — what are the “Shri caveats?” I hadn’t realised how intrinsic it had become in my communication to outline risks and set boundaries.
It took longer to understand why it worked. At first, I thought it was that I took accountability, but others could say the same - in fact, if anything, people probably took on too much accountability. People were working evenings, weekends, anything to get things sorted.
In hindsight, what I did differently was to surface the cost of each decision, and to consider the team delivering the work also as stakeholders. I communicated the needs, capabilities, and limits of the team back to the other stakeholders, so that each decision made was more informed.
I don’t know what happened before me, or what happened after — I can only go by what I saw. I can’t claim it was unique to me, only that I was positioned to do it.
I remember pointing out that we are all in the same team, pushing in the same direction. Something that harms any of us harms all of us.
A few months into the job, my boss told me that they were very impressed with how I handled the other departments. I didn’t understand at the time what they were talking about. I didn’t think that I did anything particularly special or difficult.
What had solved it wasn’t actually the structural changes - it was the reorientation of the other teams to help them do their jobs well. It was unintentional. The structural changes only fed and watered that seed which was planted on day three.