Untying the knot, practically

The case of the demoralised platform team

I got this comment from Vladimir in response to my writing on ‘Untying the Knot’ last week:

I’d love to see examples of specific situations from practice for each of the approaches. This would help me understand the trade offs.

- Vladimir Bychkovsky

To recap, I use the metaphor of the knot to describe how teams get stuck and begin underperforming. Rarely is it one single issue, but rather many small overlapping and interconnected niggles that add up and begin to smother the effectiveness of a team.

Untying the knot

Untying it can be done by cutting the knot with a sharp blade, like Alexander the Great, or slowly untangling it thread by thread.

But what does that look like in practice?

One example that comes to mind is when I unexpectedly ended up leading a platform team. Their lead engineer resigned and was shortly followed by the next most senior engineer, leaving the team reeling. I was the VP of Engineering but ended up stepping in as a ‘part-time’ team lead to fill the vacuum.

Everyone was dissatisfied.

• The internal engineering teams were irritated by the bugs and issues with the platform.

• The business was unhappy that the platform wasn’t making much progress on being ready to ship as a product in and of itself

• The team was miserable because they were stuck between a rock and a hard place and their most experienced engineers were jumping ship.

Stand-ups were long and unproductive. There was no feeling of focus or clarity. Morale was rock bottom.

In a way, some of the knot had already been cut loose. The senior engineers leaving was a moment of crisis, but it also presented a ‘fresh slate’ for me to come in and work with the team, building up their confidence and helping them get focused.

It gave me a clear example to help founders confront the fact that trying to build an internal platform that was able to support their successful existing product while also gearing it up to be a product in and of itself (in a completely different market) was a split focus that was costing everyone dearly.

There were some hard, frank and truthful discussions, and also lots of conversations in 1-2-1s with the team to understand what they needed, what was blocking them, and what they needed to feel confident.

Within 6 months, the team was focused primarily on being an internal platform team, the number of bugs had dropped to 0 for three consecutive months, engineering teams were much happier with the platform and the team was brimming with confidence.

When I reflect on this experience, as well as others in my career, it becomes clear that the two approaches to untying the know I outlined a more of a spectrum than a binary.

There were undoubtedly some moments of ‘cutting knots’: delivering difficult truths, calling out rituals and routines that weren’t serving a purpose any longer, pushing people out of their comfort zone.

But there was also plenty of untangling too: getting to understand the members of the team, helping to build up their confidence, pushing for slowing down and adding more observability tools so we could understand what the problems with the platform actually were, rather than rushing in with guesses.

Which side of the spectrum you’ll lean on will depend on a lot of factors, perhaps the biggest among them being time. The less time you have to work with the knot, the greater the temptation to just slash it completely, even if this might cost more time because of the fallout in the long run.

As a full-time employee, I’ve generally favoured the untangling approach because I’ve had the ‘luxury’ of time. As a fractional CTO and coach, I might only have a limited window to work with a company, meaning I might need to reach for my sword more often. But whatever the general approach, there will always be nuance, and so sensitivity to what the situation calls for is the true skill to be cultivated.

Thanks to

Vladimir Bychkovsky

for the request. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see me go deeper into or cover more, feel free to drop a comment or reply directly to the email.