Collision Audit · Northwind Labs · June 1–12, 2026
The brief Post-reorg, teams felt busy but not moving — and three roadmaps kept slipping with no clear reason.
Three times in twelve days, Northwind's teams committed, decided, or built without knowing what another was doing.
They take three forms — a decision no one owns, a commitment the delivering team never agreed to, and the same work built more than once. Each one is one team's words set against another's. Two are already being fixed by the owning executives as of this pre-read.
Every finding below is two teams describing the same thing from different sides — in their own approved words, verified against the source and attributed to teams, never individuals. No estimates, no scores. Just where the work collides, and what to do about it.
Open a decision docket with a named owner — Priya — and a Thursday deadline.
It touches the most teams of anything we found — see F1 below.
Where it's colliding
Every collision drawn across the slice — which teams, over what.
An SSO decision has sat unowned for two weeks, holding two teams.
It ping-ponged between two leaders, each believing the other had it — so neither did. Platform and Infra both describe holding real work for 'the SSO call.'
“we've been holding the auth refactor for the SSO call — two weeks now”
“we built a billing workaround, but it's a workaround until SSO lands”
Fair catch. I own it — decided by Thursday.
Sales committed Acme to a July SLA that Platform scoped for September.
The proposal that moved the expansion forward includes a service level the delivering team descoped in May. Neither team knew the other's date — so it surfaces at the customer kickoff, not before.
“the July SLA is what got us to proposal stage”
“SLA tooling isn't in scope before the September hardening — that was decided in May”
Confirmed — we're renegotiating to a phased SLA Thursday. This would have hit us at the kickoff.
Two pods built the same service — 'event delivery' and 'outbound reliability' are one thing.
It surfaced in March planning, three months after the December reorg merged the pods. Neither lead knew the other was building it.
“we shipped outbound reliability in Q1 — retries, backoff, the works”
“event delivery was my whole quarter; I didn't know Platform had one too”
The plan
What to do, in order.
Every collision above with a concrete next move and a named owner — sequenced so the one touching the most teams goes first.
- 1This weekF1 · Platform, Infra
Open a decision docket with a named owner — Priya — and a Thursday deadline.
- 2This weekF2 · Sales, Platform
Renata (Sales) and Marcus (Platform) align on a phased SLA this week, before the contract round-trips.
- 3This quarterF3 · Platform, Integrations
Consolidate to one service; Marcus picks the survivor by Friday.
This is a worked example. Yours takes two weeks.
Findings like these, drawn from your company, every quote verified against its source — or you decide there's nothing worth acting on, and you pay nothing.
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