🚀 365 Days of Stories: Day 27 - Restructuring for Success: Building the Right Team

When I took control of the account, I knew I had to understand the team and the challenges before making any major moves. I spent the next few days interacting with everyone—literally each and every one of the 30 team members working on the project.

I asked a few standard questions to gauge where we stood:

❓ Questions to Understand the Team:

🤔 What’s your role in the project?

🖥️ Explain the module you are responsible for, including a code walkthrough.

🛠️ What’s the problem you see in this project? Why are we stuck in this state for so long?

The goal was simple—understand:

🧠 How well each person knew their system and their work.

🧐 Their perspective on the project’s challenges.

Based on these conversations, I categorized people into three main buckets:

📊 People Categorization:

✅ People who were good and could move the project forward.

🚫 People who were good but would act as a deterrent to progress.

❌ People who lacked the right skills and weren’t contributing effectively.

In just 2-3 days of one-on-one discussions, I was clear about the changes that had to happen. The project needed a restructured team, and here’s what that meant:

🛠️ Team Restructuring Plan:

👥 Bring in trusted team members from previous projects who could contribute significantly.

❌ Let go of people who weren’t adding value—whether they were good or bad.

📈 Elevate capable people from the existing team to leadership roles.

I quickly made these changes over the next 1-2 days, and by the end, the team understood that I had full authority to make decisions. It was clear: it was do or die. Either we pull this project off in the next 2 months, or people would be out of a job. As a small startup, we couldn’t afford dead weight.

The team was now aligned—everyone was committed to giving 200% to make this work.

⚙️ Aligning with the Customer - No Sugarcoating

With the internal team sorted, I started joining every customer meeting—technical and management meetings alike. My purpose was simple: understand the customer’s perspective on where we were stuck and what could be done to move things forward.

I made it clear to everyone—no sugarcoating in crisis. I had to be blunt, even in front of the customer. During one of the calls, I told them, “We need to start fresh and explain the requirements properly again. We are not clear on the requirements so far.”

The customer responded, “How can you say in the UAT phase that you're not clear on the requirements?”

I responded plainly, “That’s the truth. Either we fix it now, or we can play the blame game. The choice is ours.”

The customer quickly recognized that I was a new leader, here to fix things and save the ship from sinking. I had full access to the top leadership on their side, and we were clear: no blame game. We both needed to do everything to make this project live.

Stay tuned for Day 28, where we dive into how we handled the complex integrations and moved the project forward.