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I wasn’t receiving complaints from the people on the team. I could just see it in the their eyes. There was exhaustion and not the good kind of exhaustion from doing complicated and hard work. It was the exhaustion you see when individuals on a team have to do too much interpersonal yak shaving. Writing software, the core job of a software engineer, had become too taxing and it was taking a toll.
It was incredibly hard for a simple feature to get out the door because we found ourselves in an all too common collaboration overload situation. Our wish to create continuity meant that the managers in the tech organization had to maintain expertise over 5-6 different priorities across 5-6 different tracks and at any given time would have to switch contexts to help one of their engineers out or discuss an ongoing project or upcoming release. For individual contributors and product managers, it manifested differently with questions of who was responsible for what. It didn’t lead to finger pointing, but ownership was sufficiently muddy that it became hard to move as quickly as we’d like. Even worse, personal and team success became elusive because a matrix, by its very nature, diffuses responsibility across the collective.
Via David Hain
