Aug 14, 2026

When the org chart gets in the way of shipping

A production-critical project needed to ship in a week. The team that could deliver it didn't belong to one team.

• #engineering-leadership
• #execution
• #team-design

Sometimes the most useful thing about managing multiple teams is having a view across all of them.

Not because you should be involved in everything. Quite the opposite.

But occasionally a project appears that doesn’t fit neatly into the organization you designed.

We had one of those.

One week

A high-priority project needed to reach production in about a week.

There wasn’t a single team that owned all the work required to get it done.

Waiting for one team to absorb everything would have meant either missing the deadline or pushing out other commitments.

So I looked across the teams and temporarily pulled together the people who could make the project happen.

Different teams. Different areas of expertise. One temporary objective.

And we shipped it.

This isn’t an argument against teams

Clear team ownership is one of the things that makes a larger engineering organization workable.

The problem comes when ownership boundaries become more important than the outcome.

A team structure is an operating system for an organization. It isn’t the organization itself.

Temporary teams are useful

The important word for me was temporary.

I didn’t want to create another permanent cross-functional team.

We had a specific problem, a short deadline, and people with the right context already spread across the organization.

So we created a temporary group around the outcome, got the work done, and returned people to their normal teams.

If every urgent project creates a new permanent team, the organization slowly loses its structure.

If teams can never be temporarily rearranged, the structure becomes a constraint.

The lesson

As an engineering leader, having a bird’s-eye view was less about knowing every detail and more about knowing where the capability was.

When something unusual came up, I could ask:

Who already knows enough to solve this?

Not:

Which team owns this?

Sometimes those are the same question. Sometimes they aren’t — and that one-week project only worked because I already knew, roughly, which five or six people across the org could actually move on it without a week of ramp-up first. That’s the part of the job that doesn’t show up on an org chart at all.