My first meeting at Converse was a 50-person standup. The scrum lead had every engineer type their status into an application. She would present it. Then they would read it off the screen, one by one, as the rest of us watched. Twenty software engineers. Six QA. Status after status after status, read aloud, to an audience that could have just read it themselves. That was my introduction to the team I was inheriting.
I came in hot.
I had just helped double e-commerce revenue at Life is Good. Before that, I spent five years at a digital agency where my whole job was to fly in, diagnose what was broken, and fix it. I had a playbook and receipts to back it up.
What I didn't have was patience.
The loudest voices at Converse were overwhelmingly negative. Product and engineering had a broken relationship. The previous leadership had churned. There was a contracting partner that almost nobody wanted to work with. Every conversation I was having confirmed the narrative ... this team was struggling, the dysfunction was obvious, and I was here to fix it.
