Six management failures we shipped alongside perfectly valid infrastructure changes.
At 11:42 on Monday, the billing-export pull request had four approvals, one frustrated staff engineer, and no merge. Nothing in the diff was controversial. It changed a retry timeout from 30 seconds to 45. The problem was that our repository rules required a platform lead to approve anything touching infra/, and both platform leads were in a quarterly planning meeting.
We wrote that rule six months earlier. We then spent three hours discovering what it had actually done to the team.
We Made Leads The Default Merge Queue
What we did
