A coaching friend of mine came to me the other day asking for coaching advice about a team she was coaching. I’ll try to get the story right…
She was coaching a fairly new Scrum team. They were refining a story and decided to implement it in the front-end. Even though the “proper” solution was a backend one. It seems they’d done this before so there was a precedent.
The primary reason for this technical decision was speed. It would take them 5x longer to do a backend implementation and they felt the need to get this feature done quickly. They would then defer any technical debt clean-up to a future sprint.
The Product Owner weighed in on the side of the team but really didn’t have a strong opinion either way. They simply wanted the feature delivered as soon as possible.
The Scrum Master, as they were new, also sided with the team. So, the leanage was unanimous.
One of the functional managers in the organization, realizing that the team was making a mistake and implementing a hack or work-around, stepped in and tried to influence the team to make a better call, the right call, by implementing it in the backend.
The coach asked me about defending the team from the manager and how I might go about it…
