Recently in business: Two teams. One team highly specialized in frontend the other team highly specialized in backend. The management wants vertical cutting of features and end-user stories that can be formulated by pure economics guys.
Both teams are currently in a critical phase. Backend has to completely rewrite a PHP mess and provide a REST API from scratch. Frontend team has to completely write a new frontend with AJAX technology - also from scratch.
Especially the backend team is hard to drive for a pure economics PO. That’s known and everybody knows that it’s not ideal. But in the current phase of the project you need a highly capable and experienced backend team to do a lot of rewrite of old stuff.
The proposed solution of both teams is: Let’s finish backend things in the old team setup. Then mix the teams so that you get two teams that can work equally well in frontend and backend.
But what happened?
Big “surprise” meeting. All important management people and both teams were there. The POs responsible left after 10 minutes and the teams where told that they have to find a solution for the problem that pure economics POs cannot lead the teams within one hour. Otherwise - BIG THREAT - the teams get mixed up by the management.
The biggest issue is not that obviously there was communication problem - the solution was already negotiated.
The real problem is:
If you threat your engineers:
They will be distracted, frustrated and finally leave your company.
If you ever have a problem with your teams and your setup: Talk to your team, talk to the people in your company. Rise awareness. And listen. You hired clever people - right? They will find a solution easily. Threatening is something for really bad managers and leaders. In the case I described the leaders (POs) even left the discussion early on. That’s a no - go.