Gloria was a senior developer at IniMirage, a company that builds custom visualizations for its clients. Over the years, IniMirage had grown to more than 100 people, but was still in the startup phase. That’s why Gloria tried to make her teams the size of two pizzas. Thomas, the product manager, on the other hand, felt that the company was ready for big shifts and could scale teams: more people could move products faster. And Thomas was her manager, so he was “giving direction”.
Gloria’s older dog spent the night at the emergency vet, and society isn’t up to “sick leave” yet, so she was suffering from a sleep-deprived headache when Thomas tried to start a Slack huddle. He had a habit of hitting the “Huddle” button whenever the mood was set, without rhyme or reason.
She put on the headphones and accepted the call. “It’s Gloria. Can you hear me?” She checked her microphone and checked again. She waited a minute before hanging up and getting back to work.
About five minutes later, Thomas called again.”Hey, did you call me 10 minutes ago?”
– No, you called me. Gloria cupped her face in her palm and took a deep, calming breath. “I didn’t hear you.”
Thomas said, “Huh, okay. So, is the demo ready for today?”
Thomas loved making schedules. He usually used Excel. There was just one problem: He rarely shared them and rarely read them after he made them. Gloria had nothing on her calendar. “What demo?”
“Oh, Dylan said he was ready for a demo. So I set it up with Jack.”
Jack was the CEO. Dylan was one of Gloria’s peers. Gloria checked Github and said, “Well, Dylan didn’t push anything for… month. I haven’t heard anything from him. Did he show you this demo?”
Gloria heard a crunch. Thomas was munching on chips. She heard him typing. After a minute, she said, “Thomas?”
“Oh, sorry, I was distracted.”
Clear. “Okay, I think we should cancel this meeting. I’ve seen this before, and with a bad demo, we could lose buy in.”
Thomas said, “No, no, it will be all right.”
Gloria said, “Okay, well, let me know how that demo goes.” She ended the call and went back to work, thinking it would be Thomas’ funeral. A few minutes before the meeting, her inbox rang. Now she is invited to the demo.
She joined the meeting, only to find out that Dylan was sick and couldn’t make it. She spent time giving project updates on her work, rather than demos, which is what the CEO actually wanted. The meeting ended and everyone was happy – everyone except Gloria.
Gloria wrote an email to the CEO, expressing her concerns. Thomas was inattentive, uncommunicative and left her alone to manage the team. She felt she was doing more product management work than Thomas. Jack replied that he appreciated her concern, but that Thomas was getting better.
Julia, one of the other product managers, dropped by Gloria’s desk a few weeks later. “You know Dylan?”
Gloria said, “Well, I know he hasn’t pushed any code in literally a year and he keeps getting sick. I think I’ve pushed more code to his project than he has, and I’m not on it.”
Julia laughed. – Well, he got fired, but not because of that.
Thomas asked for more demos. Which meant he dragged Dylan into multiple meetings with the CEO. Jack was a “face time” person and required everyone to turn on their webcams during meetings. It didn’t take many meetings to discover that Dylan was a completely different person each time. There was more Dylan.
“But even without that, HR was going to fire him for not showing up for work,” Julia said.
“But… if there were more people… why not someone appear?” Gloria realized she had asked the wrong question. “How did Thomas never realize that?”
And if he was more people, how could he never do any work? Dylan was the team for two pizzas by himself.
After the debacle with Dylan, Thomas suddenly quit his job and went to work for a competitor. The new product manager, Penny, came on board, she was organized, communicative and attentive. Gloria never heard from Dylan again, and Penny kept a smaller team.
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