Whenever I encounter issues like this: > This routinely caused the team’s focus to change to whatever was the problem of the week (or to solve for whomever was

Whenever I encounter issues like this: > This routinely caused the team’s focus to change to whatever was the problem of the week (or to solve for whomever was yelling loudest). My mind immediately goes to a lack of leadership and strategy. Why do we have pirates going around from team to team yelling, inventing new feature requests? A lot of what I can read here sounds like someone (goopthink) finally took ownership and seized authority from a leadership team that had rotated out twice and had mostly given up. > we had cycled through two previous heads of product and one head of engineering > In fact, I volunteered for the role because no one wanted to take on a project > The problem is that you need a conflict resolution and effort coordination mechanism > Figuring out the impact and likelihood was something that a product management org would normally devote the bulk of its time towards. Not having that information was one of the failures of process we were dealing with > adjusting the stack rank continued to be a deeply political process even after it was created > “you’re a team of 40 people… surely you can do more than one thing at a time?” > There was no way to scale those conversations. These 1:1s also allowed us to get ahead of influential senior managers who could have been saboteurs if they didn’t buy in. This whole thing screams that there is no acting leadership in the sense of building a team focused on one goal. Allowing many managers to go around and create new business lines, not holding them accountable to drive outcomes but rather just be busy with some new idea. The issue your engineers have is identical to the one going on outside of engineering: no unified mission, nobody willing to say "no" to "some new idea that could totally make us some money and we should just try it and see". It is as if the executive allowed a rabble of random managers to do whatever they wanted like gladiators in a combat arena. It's like CV driven development: "hey let's use kafka and http2 for our internal CRUD app" but instead it is like "hey let's start a new division of the business that has an entirely different workflow but exists in the same industry vertical". The leadership team is absent from every point of this story and things could only improve when they got out of the way or were engineered out with pre-messaging in 1:1s. Good that OP could improve all of this (which in itself is a huge accomplishment, something like 60% of change management efforts fail) but honestly until that L-team is rotated out entirely the problem isn"t solved, those pirates will go back on their habits that created a dysfunctional org full of "yeah but I have a cool idea" leaders. These leaders tend to want all of the decisions and none of the details, making everyone live in their mess. OP dove head-first into the details and this is why they could fix things.