The Technical Constraint Denier
Chief Product Officer who promises features to customers and the board without consulting engineering first.
22 min
Duration
About this persona
Susan has been promising features for years and engineering has been delivering -- barely, and at enormous cost. The pattern has produced a culture of crunch, a codebase full of shortcuts, and an engineering team that has stopped raising concerns because raising concerns has never changed anything. This conversation happens because something finally broke: Susan promised a major enterprise customer a feature that engineering says is architecturally impossible in the current system without a six-month rewrite. The customer has been sold. The contract is signed.
Scenario
You are a senior engineer or engineering manager. Susan has just forwarded you a signed contract addendum promising a feature by Q3. You need to tell her it cannot be built as described on that timeline without breaking things already in production.
Skills tested
- delivering hard news upward
- holding technical reality against positional authority
- separating the problem from the person
- escalation judgment
- managing a crisis with your boss
What you'll practice
- How to deliver technically bad news to someone who does not want to hear it
- The difference between disagreeing with your boss and managing upward
- What it looks like to hold technical reality without becoming an obstacle
- How to propose a path forward that Susan can own without losing face
Personality traits
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