Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision

This is a strange read. The intro buries all of the important information about where the team came from and pretends like a headless team appeared out of nowhere and he was in charge of the team:

> 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.

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.

This is full of red flags. "Mysterious new team nobody told me about", "I don't focus on why I wasn't included in the meeting", "the problem is they don't report to me."

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 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.

> 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.

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

What surprises me most is hiring a full three FTEs for the purpose of creating an internal dashboard.

> 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.

These are the worst kind of engineering managers. Arrogants, god-complex, always serving the company instead of serving the employees

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.

So good to read one single sentence. After the team wasn't delivering (it's separate discussion why and who was at fault) - it was disassembled and issues were still being resolved. So much better than big corps leaving people as-is and then making hardcore reductions seen as bad...

"tribe"?

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