The Catch

“So, what’s the catch?” Steve asked. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

We were on the back deck. It was a little chilly but sunny, a typical Bay Area autumn day. We used to work together, back in the twenty-teens, consulting and coaching in Silicon Valley. He was still consulting, but the beginning of the pandemic had killed my work, and I’d decided that was a cue to give it up and do something else. Be a house-husband, tend to the yard, write a little. Hell, just play video games. He thought that sounded idyllic.

I leaned over to top up his glass, and give myself a moment to think. “Well,” I replied, “let me tell you the story.”

“Like I could stop you,” he clinked his glass to the bottle. I smiled and shrugged, happy to live up to my reputation.

“I suppose this was in, what, 2014. Remember how stretched we were? Coaching up to fifteen teams each?”

He pulled a face, nodding. “Impossible. But we did what we could, eh?”

“We did what we could, yes…”

It must have been a Wednesday or Thursday. Most of the development teams did their planning mid-week, the day after they finished their last two-week sprint, so what they’d learned from their review and retrospective was still fresh in their minds. There was no way I could attend all of the meetings for all of the teams I’d been given to coach, so I alternated between working with the ones that welcomed me, and asking if I could drop in on teams that were more cagey. Although all the coaches had been employed to help the teams, we were sometimes viewed as being management stooges, there to crack the whip, to get results at any cost. It said more about the management than it did about us.

Anyhow, I’d asked if I could attend this one team’s planning session. Bear in mind that it was generally accepted that a team should have around seven members, fewer being preferable to more. The larger the team, the harder it was to communicate within it, so large teams tended to split themselves into working groups or simply large sets of individuals, negating any of the potential benefits of collaboration. But some managers thought that bigger was better, either in the misconstrued belief that more people meant more work, or just as likely, deliberately growing their fiefdoms.

This team was bloated. Seventeen developers, with three product owners to set direction, and every quarter, one of the developers would pretend to be a scrum master, usually with no training, just to tick the box in the reports.

Now, most well-run planning sessions took at most a couple of hours. But this assumed that the product owners had done their work preparing the backlog so they were clear was what up next, and all they had to do in planning was go over it all with the team so the devs understood what was important and how it would be clear that they’d made something that did what was required of it.

Assumption.

It was glaringly apparent that the team was a mess. Only two of the three product owners were there, and there was no way they’d done the work to prepare properly, so they were winging it. I’d bet they were also working for other teams and were desperately overloaded. Most of the developers were not paying attention, instead, they had their laptops open and were working on something, rather than listening to the product owners. The “scrum master”, instead of facilitating the session, had his laptop open and seemed to be reading social media posts, clearing keeping his head down.

My job, on this first visit, was just to observe. I’d asked the current acting scrum master if I could attend, and just got a shrug. That was a red flag. A good scrum master would want to know why I was there, how it would help them, and if they liked what I said, how they could work with me. Or even, if they knew the team was doing well, to tell me to stay away and not mess with something that didn’t need help.

It was excruciating. The first hour dragged on, and nothing much was agreed on. The second hour dragged past, and there was the beginning of a plan. Now we were past the third hour and well into the fourth. It was lunchtime. People were edging past just being bored and grumpy.

And then, lo and behold, the third product owner arrives. Flustered, banging the meeting room door open, she dumped her stuff on the corner of the long table and announced, “Drop everything. Turns out the VP of Product has a whole other priority for us, must do it, super-urgent. Guys, I’ll need to go over it with the other two POs, we’ll let you know once we have a plan.”

The saddest thing? The rest of the team didn’t even really complain. There were a few eyeballs rolled, someone muttered “Bloody marvelous”, but mostly everyone just shut their machines, packed up, and left for lunch.

I introduced myself to the third PO.

“Oh, yeah, I’d heard you’d be here. Can’t talk now, go to work with these two.”

“I understand. But before I leave you to it, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, make it quick.”

“How do you know that’s the VP’s top priority?”

She looked a little stunned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you came in and announced that that’s what was going on,” I used my best caring-uncle voice and body language, “and I doubt if you wanted to blow up the team’s plans, such as they were, but that’s what it did. So, it made me curious. How did you find out…?” And waited.

She shook her head and made a “duh” face. “The product manager told me. He’s my boss, if he says it, I do it.”

“Fair enough. Ok, good. Want me to grab some lunch for you guys, since you’re going to be stuck for a bit?”

There was an impatient mumbling of thanks but no thanks.

I went to find the product manager.

The product manager was at his desk, eating a salad from the corporate cafe. It was a quick conversation. I didn’t need to introduce myself; we’d met a couple of times already.

“Hey, so this just happened…” I described the wasted time and blown-up backlog. When you do the math, wasting two hours of such a large team’s time cost somewhere between three and five thousand bucks, never mind the impact on in-progress work.

His reaction was basically a cheerful “Waddya gonna do?” He felt the same as me, but the message had come down to him from above too. The Director of Product for the entire business unit had issued a decree. It was a top priority, and the Director had invoked the wishes of the Vice-President of Product themselves!

I asked the manager, “Sure, but any idea why? Why so important?”

“I dunno. What am I gonna do? You know how it is, middle management. I want to keep my guys happy, but I can’t do that and keep the boss happy. If the boss isn’t happy, that shit sure rolls downhill, and I catch it first.”

“Ok, gotcha. Later!” And he’d forgotten I was even then within seconds as he got back to dealing with emails while ruining his digestion.

Seems I was going to have to have a word with the Director of Product.

One of the things about being an organizational coach is that you have to choose. Do you “tell truth to power” as the saying goes and point out when someone senior has done something that’s patently counter-productive, or do you keep your head down in the belief that working below the radar is the wiser option.

Well, it’s usually a mix. But in this instance, I wanted to find out what the truth was that the “power” had wielded, and maybe take it to a higher power as I doubted they wanted to waste their business unit’s resources. “Higher power”, yeah, that sounds right.

The Director of Product had her own office, complete with a PA guarding the gateway. But I was in luck. It was lunchtime, and the PA wasn’t at her desk, but the DP was in her office.

She was a daunting woman, with a reputation for leaving trails of weeping and body parts behind her. I took a deep breath before knocking on her door.

“What?” she shouted.

I put my head round the door. “Hi, I’m the coach for your dev teams. I know your time is valuable, but can I ask you a quick question?”

“What?” she repeated. She had the ability to compress so much testiness into a single word it felt like she’d just shot at me.

Persevere, I told myself. I explained what had just happened in as few words as possible, then asked, “It had me wonder, how does the VP know that this is the next most important thing to work on? This is going to blow up this team for at least a quarter. I’d not heard of any new market research to suggest it, and I work with those teams too. What’s going on?”

She took her hands off her keyboard, clasped her fingers together, as if going to bow her head in prayer, but did not. She looked at me, expressionless, for a long, long moment.

She sniffed, and finally replied, “There are sometimes factors at work that even the consultants would not be told. I’d suggest that you ask the VP himself, but I don’t think that would be at all wise.” She paused and maintained her gaze. I think I might have heard a crackling sound, but whether it was lightning brewing or the room starting to freeze, I couldn’t tell you. “If there’s nothing else…”

“Ok, understood, sorry to trouble you.”

So, I wasn’t going to learn “power’s truth” from her. Well, I’d never been career minded, so it was off to find the VP, regardless. Was it Dorothy Parker who said she’d lit her way with the bridges she’d burned?

The VP wasn’t in his office. So, hungry, I went down to the cafe to get some lunch myself.

Which was where I found him. I grabbed a take-away sandwich, and, standing behind him in the queue for the check-out, took a shot.

“Pardon me, but you’re the VP of Product, right?”

“For my sins!” He grinned. Unusually for a corporate heavy-weight, he wasn’t a tall, buff, alpha-type, but was slightly shorter than me, slightly plumper, bearded, and wearing a slightly crumpled plaid shirt and cargo pants. You’d take him for one of the devs, rather than a senior executive. “Who’s asking?”

“Hi! I’m one of the coaches for the dev teams.”

“Oh, good to meet you, you guys do great work I hear!” He shook my hand. He had a reputation of being a good guy, worked his way up from being an engineer, and was one of those people who just did everything well, and cheerfully. Instantly likeable.

“Thank you, that’s appreciated. Listen, I was hoping to ask you about something.”

“Sure. Walk and talk? I’ve a meeting in ten minutes, is that enough?”

“Let’s find out!”

I outlined what had happened as we walked briskly back to his office. Glancing across at his face, he gave nothing away until we were there. He closed the door and gestured to his sofa.

He put his food down on the desk, but stayed standing, looking out the window at the leafy view. “Welcome to my world. Motherfuckers!” He sighed and turned to me. “All I said was ‘Well, I’d be interested to find out’”. He shook his head sadly and went on. “I’ve got to be so damn careful what I say, and who I say it too. You’ve no idea. Actually you probably do, you coaches get into almost everywhere, eh?” Talk about a rueful smile. “Would you be interested in helping me out with this?” he asked.

“Sure. That’s why I’m here, to try and push out waste. I mean really, to try and make sure folks don’t go home wondering why they were even at work that day.”

“Right, good, that’s exactly right. Harder than it sounds, eh?” He picked up the phone, and left a message, apparently for my boss. “I’m stealing one of your guys for a few days. I’ll tell you all about it at our next sit-down.”

Long story short, the Director of Product, it turned out, had pulled this trick many, many times. The VP gave me carte blanche to talk to whoever I needed, and over the next couple of days I found out that the Director had made a habit of this—taking anything that looked to her like a chance to get in well with her seniors and forcing it through, never mind the impact. Reputation grown. Ambition fed. At any cost.

Now, the thing to get, is that this business unit had been tasked with a huge overall project, and it was roughly a year late, and around twenty million dollars over budget. As the pieces fell into place, we realized that it was all down to this one Director. Rather than doing what was good for the organization and for their customers, she did what was going to make her look good, making sure that any failure was down to her subordinates, who’d disappear promptly leaving behind fear and confusion in the teams and groups they’d led. I’m not qualified to call her a sociopath, but still.

She was swiftly “promoted” into a role just as senior on paper, but in practice isolating her from any opportunity to cause more mayhem. I seem to remember she moved on shortly after that, doubtless with glowing references to make sure the organization got rid of her quickly and without fuss. It’s how things worked.

The VP gave us coaches a bit more leeway after this. Big teams were broken up along the natural fault-lines that just appear when a team is too big. Get this: the entire product management group were given a training in how to say “No!” so they could manage their workload.

It worked. Everything changed. Work flowed along. The enormous project had its first release at the end of the quarter. Over the rest of the year, maintenance releases happened every couple of weeks. The numbers went up and to the right. Huge success, everyone was happy, albeit for a very Silicon Valley range of values of happiness.

“So, my original question. What’s the catch?” Steve asked. “I mean, that sounds like a career highlight for you, the kind of thing us coaches live for, right?”

“Well, you’d think, wouldn’t you.” I took a big swig from my glass. “Here’s the thing. You know how most of us start our careers? We get a qualification, maybe as a programmer, and we get stuck in solving problems. Maybe we start to appreciate some of the problems are bigger, are systemic, and go and get a qualification as a scrum master, and come back all excited that we can help our whole team now.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Steve gave a wry chuckle.

“Then we learn a little more and see that the circle of problems is even wider, and maybe we take another couple of courses, and next thing you know we’re fledgling org coaches, all about people and interactions over process and tools. Until it’s time for our bosses to get their bonuses and suddenly it’s all about process and tools and hitting the numbers come hell or high water.”

“Ugh, yeah, that definitely happens.”

“And maybe it gets worse. We learn about organizational culture and psychology and situational awareness and market forces and economics and we’re getting all fancy, maybe even do a bit of executive coaching. It’s a whole other ballpark of problems the further up the org we get, right?”

“You said it.”

“This is why I’m done. Everyone’s so wrapped up in today’s problems, this month’s problems, this quarter’s problems, hitting forecasts, they never lift their gaze and look back at what else happened right alongside solving all those problems and making a mint doing it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever heard the economist’s term ‘negative externalities? The bad things that happen because of your work, but that don’t affect your bottom line?”

“Yeah, well, sure. Not really my area, but I’ve heard of it.”

“Well, there’s the catch. That enormous project? It was implementing the social engagement algorithm, the so called “Honey Pot” project. Look at the timing. It was the main reason that social media turned into the palace of echo chambers. My guys did it first. My guys were the reason the election went the way it did. My guys pretty much caused the country to split right down the middle.” I had to take a moment, something was caught in my throat. “That’s the catch.”

After Steve left, I went back inside. The washing up got done. I put the trash out for the next day. I brought in the mail, and threw most of it away. Put the laundry into the dryer. I fired up my PC, and went right on playing Minecraft. I couldn’t cause too much harm doing that now. Could I?