I was merged onto a team because we decided to put more wood behind fewer arrows. So I was the Outsider but with seniority and pull (people loved my project and thought we did great, we just couldn’t sell it.)
One of the first big problems I solved was almost by accident. We had a backend and a frontend team and we kept missing deadlines because they would work separately on features and the two wouldn’t mate up so we’d have to do another couple iterations to make everything work and “work” belonged in air quotes because things were hammered to fit.
The biggest of the problems encountered here was data dependencies in the inputs resulting in loops in the APIs where you couldn’t get one piece of data without another, and vice versa. So we started drawing data dependency diagrams during the planning meetings as an experiment, instead of diagramming the data structures, and the problem went away basically overnight.
One of the first big problems I solved was almost by accident. We had a backend and a frontend team and we kept missing deadlines because they would work separately on features and the two wouldn’t mate up so we’d have to do another couple iterations to make everything work and “work” belonged in air quotes because things were hammered to fit.
The biggest of the problems encountered here was data dependencies in the inputs resulting in loops in the APIs where you couldn’t get one piece of data without another, and vice versa. So we started drawing data dependency diagrams during the planning meetings as an experiment, instead of diagramming the data structures, and the problem went away basically overnight.