How to make everyone quit - part 1

Alex had a problem.

Half of the teams in engineering just missed their committed Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for the second quarter in a row. These were firm commitments made to the business and a bunch of people were very pissed. As the “leader” in charge of engineering, Alex needed to fix this pronto. His neck was on the line.

As the captain of one of the teams that had no problems shipping their OKRs, I had a VIP seat at this sh*t show. People on my team (and the other two "high-performing" teams) were very happy and productive. These teams not only had zero problems shipping our committed KRs. We also had plenty of bandwidth for aspirational OKRs and internal improvements as well.

People on the “problematic” teams instead were often unhappy and grumbling. Every time we had a dependency on "one of those teams" it was a struggle: “We are too swamped, we don’t have time for this!” was the standard answer to our request. My team often ended up doing some of their work so we could get unblocked and ship our OKRs.

After another quarter of missed OKRs, Alex decided that he had enough. He was gonna fix this mess! One day Alex announced every team would have to follow a new (incredibly complicated) process to track work with a one-day granularity. Alex was also hiring 5 project managers (one every two teams) to enforce the process and “make sure every team was accountable”.

Suddenly, the time my team and I spent updating tickets and stories skyrocketed. It went from a few minutes per day during our standup to almost 30 minutes per day. Not only that but the amount of meetings to "go over status" or "align on estimates" with the project managers exploded. My team and I were spending more and more time revising work estimates and less and less time doing the actual work. Talking to my peers, it seemed like all other teams in engineering were experiencing the same.

One month into this "new order", the unavoidable happened.

I sat down for my weekly 1:1 with my team TL and he told me he was quitting. He told me that he “didn't sign up for this draconian tracking sh*t" and he couldn’t take it anymore. He didn't see the point of the new "accountability process". Our team was already shipping our OKRs! Why did Alex ask us to do all this bureaucratic overhead?

The more weeks passed by, the more people started quitting en-masse, especially from the high-performing teams. This, of course, resulted in even less productivity for engineering as a whole and even fewer OKRs being delivered.

Less than two quarters after Alex “shook things up” engineering had lost 13 people (16% of the staff!) and we weren’t any better at shipping our OKRs.

What do you think Alex did wrong? What would you have done instead? Reply to let me know!

Curious about how the story ends? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post!

-Ale