Her output is the best on the team. Two people have asked not to be paired with her. This is the conversation that gets postponed for a year.
S
Sasha
Staff Engineer, your team
They open the call. Listen before you speak.
You are
A product manager who has just taken over a team of nine.
The situation
Sasha Bright is the strongest individual contributor on the team and the reason two of the last four retro sessions ended early. She interrupts, dismisses ideas sharply in front of the group, and rewrote a colleague's work over a weekend without telling him. Two people have asked, separately, not to be paired with her. You have been in the role six weeks.
What you want out of it
Make the impact of the behaviour concrete and undeniable, without attacking her character or losing her — and agree what changes.
What you already know
— Retro on the 14th: she cut across Marcus twice and called an idea 'obviously wrong' in front of nine people.
— The weekend rewrite of Marcus's service happened without a word to him.
— Two people have asked not to be paired with her. Neither wants to be named, but both agreed you could describe what happened.
— Her delivery is genuinely exceptional and she knows it.
4 things they won't volunteer, 2 of them buried.
How hard should they play?
Sharper, and harder to impress.
Coach mode
Call language
47 languages. The counterpart, the pressure and the scoring are the same in all of them.