Don’t Win the Argument. Build the Thing You’re Arguing About.

A field note from engineering leadership: a Slack thread that almost turned into a standoff — and the one move that turned it into a plan instead.

It started with a simple ask.

Our on-call schedule was buckling. Eighteen engineers, twenty-seven services that all depended on each other, and one shared rotation trying to hold it all together. I posted a proposal in Slack: split the rotation in two, pair people up, spread the load. Low-risk. A stepping stone. Nothing dramatic.

Our org-level engineering leader replied with a different question entirely:

“Why don’t the squads just own separate services?”

They’d asked this a year earlier. Back then, we’d said no — every squad should be able to touch every service, no silos. Now the system had grown messier, and they weren’t going to let the question drop this time.

Then one of my senior engineers said, in a channel with all our tech leads watching:

“Service level ownership is not possible right now. It’s really hard to have that in this domain.”

Six messages in, and the thread had gone sideways.

I’ve seen this exact moment play out a dozen times in different rooms, with different words. It usually ends one of two ways: the team’s answer just sits there as a wall…