365 Days of Stories – Day 16: Restructuring Teams & Aligning Priorities in a Crisis

Continuing from Day 15, where the CEO put payments on hold due to delays in high-priority projects, and I made the tough call to let go of 9 out of 11 managers—the real challenge now was execution.

🔹 Internal restructuring was the easy part. The real battle was delivering results.

Step 1: Identifying the Core Problems

We had two separate teams:

✔ Development Team – Senior experts focused on new projects.

✔ Support Team – Junior engineers handling production issues, often lacking system knowledge.

🚧 The Issues:

💡 Production support was weak, causing customer frustration.

💡 Support teams depended on developers, but developers weren’t accountable for production.

💡 BU leaders had their own priorities—some focused on CEO-driven initiatives, others on production stability, and others on their business unit projects.

With 130+ engineers spread across 10-12 teams, misalignment was inevitable.

Step 2: Merging Development & Support Teams

To fix this, I took a bold step:

✅ Merged Development & Support into one unit under a single Tech Lead per team.

✅ Now, the right expertise was allocated where needed—whether for fixing production issues or delivering new features.

✅ This improved accountability and skill alignment, reducing dependency on developers for urgent fixes.

🚀 Result: Production stability improved, but new development timelines were impacted.

Step 3: The Bigger Challenge – Customer Priorities & Billing Issues

The customer contract followed "named resource billing", meaning:

✔ Each engineer was assigned to a specific workstream and billed accordingly.

✔ BU leaders had invoice approval authority and focused only on their projects.

✔ Support engineers were billed monthly, but development engineers were billed per project.

🚧 The problem?

💡 If a development engineer helped in support, their work wasn’t billable.

💡 If a support engineer assisted in development, the invoice could be rejected.

💡 BU leaders rejected billing if engineers worked outside their assigned scope, creating constant conflicts.

Now, the real challenge was aligning leaders, billing structure, and priorities to make this model work.

💡 Have you ever faced a situation where resource allocation and priorities conflicted with customer expectations? How did you navigate it? Would love to hear your experiences! 👇

#365DaysOfStories #Day16 #Leadership #ProjectTurnaround #CrisisManagement #BusinessTransformation #StartupJourney #ElevateIdea