Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision
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An engineering manager recounts a situation where leadership added a new CX-focused team to their tribe without prior consultation. The post details how the new team was misaligned with the existing operating model, understaffed, and set up to fail. Rather than waiting for the new team's unified dashboard, the EM chose to build simpler per-team internal dashboards using Spring Boot templates, deliberately ignoring the funded team's work to meet the quarter's OKR of reducing ticket resolution time. The approach succeeded in hours vs. days, but created leadership friction. The CX tribe team was eventually disbanded after 5 months. Key lessons include the cost of organizational misalignment, the value of pragmatic duplication over coordination overhead, and the Team Topologies principle of not forcing platform adoption.
Table of contents
The team was created oddThe business challengeThe CX tribe team approachDiagnosisDirectionExecutionWhat could we have done differently?My decision of burning moneyThe end of the CX tribe teamWhere the CX tribe team came from?The misalignment goals and duplication of effortWhen you have 5 high priorities and you have to choose your battlesThe later never cameThe dashboardSort: