> 4. The VPs and senior managers in the engineering org then negotiate which team will own the work. > These [tiger] teams are given a loose mandate - like “st

> 4. The VPs and senior managers in the engineering org then negotiate which team will own the work. > These [tiger] teams are given a loose mandate - like “stop the database from falling over every few days” - and allowed to do basically whatever it takes to get it done. > The actual way around this problem is *illegible backchannels*. The post seems to be based on organizations where teams aren't organized, and responsibilities aren't assigned to teams, in such a way as to allow teams to independently deliver value with minimal handoffs. If you need to pull engineers from multiple teams to fix a problem with the database that the teams all share, that suggests that the teams' applications aren't restricted to communicating with each other over their external interfaces. If determining which team should work on a project requires negotiating among VPs and senior managers, that suggests that the teams' responsibilities aren't clean, clear, and tied to the business's value streams. I think a more fundamental way to address the problem of team A being blocked by team B is to organize the teams so as to minimize cross-team dependencies. I don't think the solution of illegible backchannels addresses the root cause of the problems observed by the author.