The team wasn’t failing. But Everyone Thought They Were!

If your stakeholders are telling you the tech team isn’t delivering, it’s very easy to accept that as fact. But don’t assume they’re right.

Be open to it, for sure, but investigate it and form your own view. Because sometimes, the team isn’t the problem.

The Situation

I stepped into a leadership role where the narrative was already set.

“The development team are poor at delivery”.

That view was strongest from account managers, the people closest to customers. And the expectation was clear… Fix the team, make get them delivering.

But when I looked more closely, something didn’t add up. The team was capable. The quality was good. And when the tech team committed to something, they were broadly delivering it when they said they would.

It wasn’t perfect. There was room for greater efficiency, but it wasn’t failing in a way that would result in a reputation of non-delivery.

So what was going on?

What I Found

The issue wasn’t delivery, it was demand.

Requests were coming in from multiple account managers, each representing their own customers. Individually, nothing looked unreasonable. Collectively, it was impossible, because every account manager (and there were, maybe, 8 of them) had promised more than their fair share of the available supply (capacity) to their customers.

So we made it visible. Every request went onto a physical record card. We grouped them by customer, in columns, laid out across a very large table. We quite literally put all of our cards on the table!

Then we looked at capacity. Not precisely, because we didn’t have throughput metrics to work with, but realistically based on roughly what we observed had been delivered prior year.

And we placed a piece of string across the table, across the columns, to indicate where we thought capacity would run out.

The Moment Everything Became Clear

The string sat only part way down the table. Not even half way.

What we could see is that collectively, the account managers had promised multiple times the capacity of the teams to customers without checking in with tech or each other first. They were each selling our capacity in isolation of one another.

The outcome was obvious and visible. The tech team was being judged for delivery success against the portion of the demand that was never committed by tech and would likely never even start.

One account manager pushed back, saying

“I’ve promised my customer all of this.”

So we turned the string 90 degrees and showed him. Yes, you can have all of that. As long as you agree with the other account managers that none of their customers will get anything that year. This effectively surfaced where one of the communication interfaces had broken down. The account managers were not talking amongst themselves to make sensible and achievable commitments to their customers.

The Truth

That’s when it clicked, for everyone in the room. Tech wasn’t failing to deliver. Others had made promises on their behalf, without their agreement, and they were being judged against those commitments.

The team wasn’t underperforming. Their capacity had been sold multiple times over, with no shared visibility, no coordination, and no real prioritisation. But we also accepted that we could probably do more to make the capacity visible so the account managers knew what they had available to sell.

What looked like poor delivery was actually overcommitment and unmanaged demand

What Changed

Once the reality was visible, everything shifted. We didn’t just defend the team, who were feeling pretty bruised by the unfair judgement, we also fixed the system.

We made demand visible across all customers, and introduced collective prioritisation.

We helped account managers reset expectations. We also continued improving delivery, because we acknowledged that some improvement within the team was still on the

table.

Within a couple of months, perception of the team turned around, stakeholders were aligned to the reality of what could be delivered. We gave them the tools and information they needed to be able to sell a sensible commitment.

The Insight

If stakeholders are telling you the tech team is failing to deliver, don’t ignore that feedback, but don’t blindly accept it as the truth either. Because sometimes the team is delivering exactly what it can, but it’s just been asked to deliver far more than their capacity allows.

Don’t ignore that feedback, but don’t blindly accept it as the truth either

Practical Takeaway

Before you start fixing performance, ask:

• Is all of the demand visible?

• Is it prioritised correctly?

• Do we know what our capacity is?

• Do the supply and demand match up?

If the answer to any of those questions is “no”, you don’t necessarily have a delivery problem, you have a supply versus demand problem, and you risk falling short in the eyes of your customers and stakeholders.

So what now?

If you answered “no” to any of those questions, write down all of your demand, gather people around you to prioritise it, work out how much you can deliver, and if the supply and demand don’t match up, have a conversation about demand reduction or supply increase (either through hiring or efficiencies). If you need any help with any of that, drop me an email at matt@stepthinking.com, or a DM on LinkedIn.