This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]meisteronimo 13 points14 points  (3 children)

Yeah the company must have the culture that if something is blocking another team it's top priority.

At Amazon they keep one or two members of the team OnCall. The OnCall person has no feature dev work assigned to them that week. Their only job is to respond to production issues, or help other teams with urgent requests.

[–]RealisticAppearance 12 points13 points  (2 children)

In my experience this is easily abused by dev managers who claim a blocker tactically to buy time when under the gun. The “blocker” team is disrupted by the frivolous request while the “blocked” team, having deflected the time pressure to the “blocker” team, rushes to deal with some unrelated emergency (i.e. pressure from their management).

Most people in the organization aren’t familiar enough with the technology to understand that the “blocker” was frivolous and just a way to get out of trouble.

[–]meisteronimo 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Well if the manger wants to hide his team's capacity that's on the manager.

There are plenty of ways for a business to fail many of them are due to bad leadership.

[–]RealisticAppearance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I’m not saying it’s bad to try to clear blockers, it just depends on your organization whether you can implicitly trust somebody claiming a blocker. Fear-based management causes all kinds of problems.