One of the recurring challenges that teams face is getting headcount to support their initiatives. A similar problem is the idea that a team can&rsquo

How to get more headcount.

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2024-11-17 10:30:05

One of the recurring challenges that teams face is getting headcount to support their initiatives. A similar problem is the idea that a team can’t get a favored project into their roadmap. In both cases, teams often create a story about how clueless executives don’t understand why their work is important.

I understand why dumb executives are such an appealing explanation to problems: it fits perfectly into the Karpman drama triangle by making executives the villian and the team the victim, but I generally find that these sorts of misalignments are the result of basic communication challenges rather than something more exciting.

When there’s significant misalignment between a team and an executive, my experience is that it often manifests in discussion about a particular project, but it’s often rooted in a much broader topic rather than whatever is currently being discussed. Because the disagreement is about the larger topic, there’s no way to resolve it while discussing the narrow project at hand, and teams struggle to make progress because they’re arguing on the wrong layer of context.

e.g. Here are metrics on: how many user-impacting incidents we’ve had over time, how we’ve increased end-to-end coverage over time, and developer survey feedback on incidents from the last three quarterly internal surveys.

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