Leadership as an enabling team

We aren't leveraging this enough

ℹ️This post assumes that you are familiar with Team Topologies.

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You’re an engineering manager of a tribe with three teams. Two stream-aligned teams and one platform team.

At some point, you start noticing critical areas of improvement.

The platform team is under a huge pressure to deliver features because they are blocking stream-aligned teams. Stream-aligned teams lack the proper structured processes, and are making the whole problem even worse.

We wanted to achieve a fast flow of change, but we are seeing that all teams are constantly collaborating to ship the features.

You see the product having some delays, we identify a lack of quality on the shipped product. We understand that it can mean a:

• Not well-defined architecture.

• Lack of testing and other QA practices.

• Missing ownership due to shared responsibilities between teams, making it hard to own a deliverable end to end.

Your team members share that the testing process takes a lot, and it is a bottleneck. The platform is supporting all the stream-aligned teams needs, and they are unable to handle any more work.

At the same time, you’re under pressure to deliver features. You have a budget available, and your manager gave the OK to spend the money with flexible talent, like external consultants or freelances, if you consider it necessary.

You have to take action.

Seeing a problem and do nothing isn’t good for your job security. It’s better to spend money you have available, and try to do something, and fail, than do nothing and still fail, isn’t it?

So, what do you do? How is your culture? What is the acceptable decision?