On my resume, it says I ran an intervention. I’ll admit, it’s a dramatic term, but damn was it necessary. Certain details aren’t important – I’m not gonna be world-buildin’ here – so I’ll leave out personalities, politics, and a lot of context to jump to the point in the story where I called it: the last Retrospective.
Well, fine. A little context: The team was fractured, which isn’t a fair characterization because… they never fully formed. It was always one team who’d been together for a while, led by “Alice”, and the newer few who joined from a broken up team, led by “Bob”. This was a move by engineering management to create full-stack teams, and this one was building a new product, requiring a new API.
You can see where this is going: Alice & Bob didn’t agree on the API design. Like, really didn’t agree. Things got stagnant. So stagnant, that as their Agile Coach at one Retrospective I, gently, had it. I pointed to Alice & Bob and requested their presence for 45 minutes as the 3 of us over the next day at the local hotel lobby down the block for an intervention.
I had never used that term, let alone run one, but I knew I’d figure it out by then, much better than on the spot, and it went like this…
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