alt Hacker NewsWhat 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.
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> What exactly should the author have done differently?
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.
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.
What about expecting them to suck up their pride, work with the other lead for a comprehensive plan that includes possible WONTFIX-es?
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.)