A team finished work on a component that passed all its tests. The next project was already waiting for them.
The component let one set of core functions run in many different user contexts. The user story was the same everywhere and the component behaved the same everywhere, while each user experienced it in their own context. To do that, the component treated the user’s context as an abstraction. A presentation layer still had to connect that abstraction to the user’s daily work.
It made sense to reassign the team that built it. Other work was pressing, and the customer-facing team had the capability to build the presentation layer. On paper, the transfer worked. In practice, the customer-facing team had no explicit assignment to build the presentation layer and no time budgeted for it.
The infrastructure team knew the reason the presentation layer mattered and expected the customer-facing team to build it. The customer-facing team did not receive the message. They used the component directly in their implementations. Because the customer only received the abstraction, the “fit” to their work was blurry, at best.
The customer-facing team wanted the customer to succeed, and they could see the experience should have been better. End users were confused by the abstraction, and the component got poor reviews.
This is a work design problem.
What “it works” tells you
A working component is a good reason to move a team to the next work.
“It works” doesn’t describe these three important facts: what the work was for, what still had to be built around it, and what it was explicitly not meant to do.
Because this information wasn’t transferred with the work, the fate of the component and how users would experience it was decided.
Ask three questions before the move
Leaders. Before you move a team on to other work, have the team take the time to answer these.
What is the work you’re handing off for? Write the purpose in terms of the people who will use it, in plain words the next team can read cold.
What remains to be done? Name the work still needed around it, who is assigned to it, and where the time for it comes from. The presentation layer would have appeared here.
What is the work not meant to do? Name the edge of it. The component was not meant to be the thing a user met.
Contributors. If you are the one being moved, write the answers anyway and put them where the next team will find them as they start.
Design the archive for the question you’ll be asked years from now.
The reassignment is the moment the reasoning gets decided, whether or not anyone intentionally decides it.
If you want to see which of your work depends on reasoning that lives only in people’s heads, the diagnostic takes 10 minutes: https://amykennedyleadership.com/choose-your-diagnostic/