Conflict Scenario - Hackathon Project

You came to this company 6 months ago from being an early engineer at a startup and were immediately shocked by the technology choices made here – this company was filled with smart people, but they weren’t using any modern technology and and a really painful process for product development.

You’ve been suggesting ideas for ways to replace some parts of the technology stack with easier-to-maintain and industry-standard alternatives, but kept getting told that this work needs to be done by the Infrastructure org and they don’t have the resources to support these “new” approaches (they lack both sufficient people and qualified people). In the meantime, your team is constantly slowed down by their inability to use modern tools.

Eventually, you manage a discussion about the choice of technology that ends up involving VPs from both your Product organization and the Infrastructure organization. The result of this discussion is that your team has to use the tooling provided by the Infrastructure organization for the time being, but that the Infrastructure organiztion will get additional resources to support your team.

That was 3 months ago. In the meantime, the Infrastructure has deliberately avoided making any commitments to your organization and hasn’t even delivered on its own roadmaps. You’re working to build from scratch a new feature that you would have gotten “for free” if you’d been working with a modern tech stack.

Frustrated, you realize that coming up next month is a company-wide Hackathon. The company has a long, proud history of encouraging exciting innovation during the Hackathon. You come up with an idea: you’ll do a Hackathon project to demonstrate how much easier it would be to demonstrate how much easier it would be if we were using a modern technology stack. You get a sympathetic tech lead in the infrastructure org to give you some hardware and start spending some nights and weekends preparing for the Hackathon.

Unfortunately, your new peer is going to throw a wrench into your plan. They’ve said they don’t agree with your hackathon project idea and that they plan to tell the Infrastructure org about this project. If the VPs hear about the project before your team finishes the work to show the value the work, they might kill the project before it gets off the ground.

You are having a 1:1 with this peer and you want him to let you have the space to show off your Hackathon project.

You came to this company 3 months ago from working at a much larger company and were immediately shocked to discover a deep rift in the relationship between your org and the Infrastructure org that had been going on for 2 years. People on both sides had contributed to this rift. On the Product side of the house, your predecessor was not known for being tactful and your team had been created for the explicit purpose of finding experimental new ways of doing things that weren’t the way the Infrastructure had been doing them all along. On the Infrastructure side of the house, they had been unable to support the new technologies desired by the Product org due to staffing challenges and had also had a cantankerous leader. The situation had gotten so bad that engineers on both sides refused to talk to the other and were deliberately making less effective technical decisions to avoid relying on the other org.

As you came up to speed, you deliberately built relationships inside the Infrastructure org and realized that the situation was substantially better than it first seemed: the key leaders on both orgs had recently been replaced with people eager to mend fences, the Infrastructure org had made some strong recent hires who were capable of doing experimental work; and the Infrastructure org had even hired PMs who were trying to understand your use case and adjust their roadmap to better support you.

You’ve spent the better part of the past month slowly repairing the relationship between the two orgs. You started to have standing 1:1s with your counterparts in the Infrastructure org to keep information flowing both directions. You met the strong engineers in the Infrastructure org and celebrated their work with your team to start to build some trust and respect from your team, and then encouraged your team to meet them and create cross-org working groups to deepen the direct engineer-to-engineer ties between the orgs. The relationship has developed to the point where, for the first time in 2 years, teams from the two orgs are working together to make a joint roadmap.

Something suprising has come up though – you’ve heard from several people on in your org (and one or two people in the Infrastructure org) that your peer manager is starting a secret project to bypass the Infrastructure org by creating their own infrastructure. Their plan is to do a few weeks of preparation and then unveil their project during the company Hackathon in a couple of weeks. While this new infrastructure has some clear technical advantages (namely, it is using the modern standard for technology and so can benefit from community support), it doesn’t integrate with all the rest of the technology created and maintained by the Infrastructure org. Worse, this effort is being done in secret because it is revisiting an old dispute between your two orgs and the work is an explicit violation of a months-old decision made by the VPs of both orgs to standardize on the technology used by the Infrastructure org. The people who have brought this to your attention are worried that your peers project may disrupt the budding relationship you’ve been developing between the two orgs.

You have a recurring 1:1 with this peer manager; you want to make sure that whatever action your org takes improves the relationship between the two orgs.