Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?

You need to find the real needs of the real users and customers. You need these in priority order. Perfect answers are not required, just good enough answers. Now get your team focusing on getting things done in priority order. When your 3 months are up you can then say "we didn't get everything, but we think it is good enough".

If you cannot get someone else to tell you priority, then start asking questions until you can come up with an answer. Sometimes you have to make a decision and hope you are close enough. Sometimes you will find other people (marketing, sales, your boss) who will help. An incomplete team that recognizes that things might not be perfect but they can influence one where the imperfections are is better then going alone, but go alone if you must.

Note that customers and users are not always the same! If it is a customer need you can fake it as it won't be used, so make this look good, but make it obviously useless to users. If it is a user need it needs to work right, but it doesn't need to look as good since the customer has already bought it. Of course for release two you have feedback on what needs to be fixed.

But it's not built yet? IANAL, but make sure they're doing this correctly. There's a fine line between selling and outright lying aka fraud especially if the "new version" doesn't exist.

Serious question, are there any adults around that can help your team?

if they are your people then there are all sorts of opportunities to reorganize what gets done first, and who is working on what, and how it all fits together.

you can take a unfocussed seemingly infinite amount of work and turn it into 'if we can just get this seed part done, then the rest can hang off that. jane and timmy, since you are both working adjacent to that piece, and I trust you both to sit down and make it happen - please do that'

thats the best part of the job

1. A small course correction can work wonders early on, but if you wait until the ship is seconds from the iceberg there’s nothing anyone can do. Or use the cancer analogy: early detection can be the difference between life and death.

2. Yes, sometimes deadlines are padded and you’re silently expected to miss a little. Sometimes they are not and you’re not. How do you know which one applies to you and your project?

3. Having private conversations is fine but private conversations can be denied and privately made decisions do not become the broadly understood plan of record, leading to confusion and ambiguity, which are risk multipliers.

4. A positive attitude is good and hiding real problems, evading responsibility, and playing corporate games might work in the short term. However if that becomes what you are known for, it will limit your career long term.

The Good:

- I came in with a blank slate. They had no source control, no CI/CD, and two "database developers" using an ancient platform with only passing knowledge of any modern language - C#. I was able to implement best practices and teach them how to code in C#.

- The developers were eager to learn and were smart.

The Bad

- The company moved the entire project to AWS but to get anything provisioned I had to go through both my manager, the net ops people, a bunch of hired consultants, and an outsourced cloud management company. I never did get access to anything outside of some EC2 instances.

- None of the people involved knew anything about AWS besides how to translate an on prem network to AWS and then wondered why it costed more.

- I had a budget to hire, but only contractors. All of the best developers wanted a full time job with benefits. I never got the cream of the crop.

- When the company was acquired, they decided that they didn't "want to be a software company" and wanted to outsource everything. They did however want me to lead two more projects to completion. I stayed long enough to finish phase 1, but it wasn't the best implemented thing in the world. It was architecturally sound, but didn't leverage anything AWS provided.

- Everyone above me was jockeying for position at the newly merged company and didn't make development a priority.

My solution:

- I left for a job that pays slightly more where from day one I was given AWS admin access (yes I had the qualifications and experience). I'm now "just" a Senior Software Engineer but I am nowhere near as hamstrung when it comes to getting things done.