Your Team's Boundaries Are Terrible. Here Are 6 Ways to Fix Them.

A Guide for Engineering Managers Tired of Firefighting

Introduction: The Reality Check of Boundaries

Boundaries are like deodorant.

Those who need them most are often unaware of their absence.

Engineering teams that embrace endless "collaboration" without limits aren't cooperative; they're chaotic. Think of boundaries as cell membranes: without them, what you have isn't a living organism, just a messy puddle of confusion.

I write from experience- the painful, facepalming kind.

As a manager responsible for a crucial engineering team serving multiple dependent teams, our daily operations often resembled diffusing ticking bombs more than building software. Without clear boundaries, frustrations grew faster than technical debt.

Consider this article your warning sign. My mistakes don't need to be yours.

Boundaries: The Antidote to Interruptions

Ever been interrupted mid-thought and felt your productivity evaporate instantly? Interruptions aren't just nuisances; they’re serial killers of deep work. Teams without clear boundaries become open season targets for well intentioned interruption hunters- colleagues whose urgent problems always eclipse your carefully planned tasks.

Without boundaries, you end up serving someone else's priorities at the expense of your own. This inevitably spirals into burnout, resentment, and mediocrity.

The irony? Trying to collaborate more ends up making teams want to collaborate less.

Engineering excellence demands sustained concentration. Boundaries protect this sacred space, making focused, high-quality work possible.

A Personal Cautionary Tale- How I screwed this up

What better way to illustrate this than my own misadventure?

Not that long ago, my team made the noble, but tragically misguided, decision to allow a client team to contribute directly to our core codebase. Sounds generous, right? So is leaving your front door unlocked. Until someone rearranges your furniture while you're out.

We gradually discovered a fundamental misalignment. The client team valued immediate fixes to unblock their workflows, treating code like disposable cutlery. We saw each line as fine silverware we’d have to polish indefinitely. Conflict erupted faster than "Hello World" prints to a console.

Despite setting up contribution guidelines, friction remained. Guidelines are about as effective introduced after the fact as a fire extinguisher purchased during a blaze. The resulting project was late, bloated, and remains a costly beast to maintain.

The lesson?

Set clear collaboration rules upfront. Trying to clarify expectations mid-crisis is like installing brakes mid-collision. Painfully ineffective.

Team APIs: The Boundaries You Never Knew You Needed

Boundaries need explicit clarity. Meet Team APIs-the underrated superheroes of inter-team interactions. Like a restaurant menu for engineering teams, Team APIs tell everyone exactly what’s on offer, how to order it, and when to expect delivery.

A proper Team API defines essential interactions:

• How should requests be submitted?

• What constitutes "urgent" (hint: it’s not everything)?

• Who’s your point of contact when something inevitably goes sideways?

Explicitly documented expectations replace confusion with coordination. After all, clarity is cheaper than confusion.

If you are not sure where to start, here’s some inspiration on how to create your team’s API.

Contribution Guidelines: Not Just Bureaucracy

Rules aren’t meant to irritate. They’re meant to preserve sanity.

Contribution guidelines might seem bureaucratic until you realize they protect against chaos disguised as generosity. These standards- detailing coding practices, testing, and reviews- prevent the kind of frustration that quickly turns collaboration into combat.

Effective contribution guidelines cover specifics such as:

• Coding Standards: Clearly specify code formatting rules, naming conventions, and language-specific best practices. Avoid vague statements like "write good code”. Instead, offer explicit examples and anti-examples.

• Testing Requirements: Outline expectations for unit tests, integration tests, and acceptance criteria. Define clearly what constitutes sufficient test coverage and required test types to ensure new code meets the quality threshold.

• Code Review Processes: Document how pull requests should be structured and reviewed. Clarify timelines for reviews, the criteria reviewers should focus on, and how disagreements should be resolved. Make it clear that code reviews are not personal attacks but constructive dialogues aiming at better software.

• Documentation Expectations: Explain precisely what documentation is required, where it should be stored, and how detailed it must be. Good documentation prevents future archaeological excavations through ancient and confusing codebases.

• Commit and Merge Strategies: Specify the preferred branching strategies (e.g., feature branches, mainline development) and merge practices (e.g., squash merging, rebasing). Provide rationale for these decisions to avoid endless debates.

The hard truth- establishing these guidelines post-conflict is as effective as wearing sunscreen after the sunburn. They only help if established beforehand, aligning expectations before things heat up.

Advanced Boundary Tactics (Because Basics Aren’t Always Enough)

Sometimes basic measures aren't enough. It's time to deploy advanced boundary tactics.

• Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Agreements (SLAs) clearly define performance expectations and response times. They serve as contracts that specify exactly what dependent teams can expect, minimizing ambiguity and the inevitable finger-pointing when things go awry. With SLOs and SLAs, expectations become predictable rather than negotiable.

• Ownership Documentation explicitly assigns responsibility, ensuring everyone knows precisely who owns each service, system, or module. Ambiguity around ownership leads to endless "hot potato" games, where teams dodge accountability. Properly documented ownership promotes accountability, streamlines communication, and reduces inter-team friction dramatically.

• Request-for-Comment (RFC) Processes provide structured forums for proposing changes across team boundaries. Instead of surprise alterations, RFCs encourage transparency, thoughtful discussions, and collective buy-in. This process ensures stakeholders have opportunities to provide input, reducing misunderstandings and improving overall alignment.

• Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) document crucial technical choices, providing clear, historical context behind decisions. ADRs prevent future engineers from questioning or unintentionally reversing past decisions, thereby preserving coherence and minimizing rework. They serve as institutional memory, helping teams learn from past insights instead of repeating old mistakes.

The Engineering Manager: Bouncer and Mediator

So, I can just establish the rules and guidelines and we’re good to go?

Not quite.

As engineering managers we juggle dual responsibilities that seem contradictory: facilitating open communication and zealously protecting team boundaries. We act like nightclub bouncers, selectively allowing productive exchanges and firmly escorting disruptive distractions out the door.

Our job is to constantly evaluate interactions, ensuring discussions remain focused and respectful. We need to preemptively resolve potential conflicts, mediating disputes swiftly to maintain productive collaboration without compromising team autonomy.

We must also fiercely defend our team’s time, shielding engineers from endless requests and distractions. By setting clear communication protocols and actively managing stakeholder expectations, managers ensure their team remains focused, productive, and motivated.

Collaboration, Not Capitulation

Boundaries aren’t barriers to collaboration. They’re foundational prerequisites.

Real collaboration thrives within clearly defined interactions and rules. Healthy collaboration is like a firm handshake: strong enough to convey intent clearly, yet gentle enough not to injure.

Teams should regularly revisit and adjust their boundaries through structured interactions, such as cross-team retrospectives and shared goal-setting sessions. Cross-team knowledge sharing should be intentional, structured, and reciprocal, not forced or chaotic.

Effective boundaries ensure that collaboration remains intentional and productive. Far from creating silos, boundaries empower teams to cooperate constructively, maintaining autonomy while engaging meaningfully.

Conclusion: The Subtle Art of Boundary Maintenance

Boundaries aren't about limiting freedom- they're about avoiding unnecessary pain.

Like seat belts, they seem restrictive until you crash. Good fences don't merely make good neighbors. They make sanity possible.

Take it from me, clarity today prevents chaos tomorrow. Ignore boundaries at your peril, unless you enjoy firefighting, finger-pointing, and midnight crisis calls.

But if you're like most of us- engineers who prefer sleep over drama- define your rules early and guard them ruthlessly.

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Are your team’s boundaries clear, or is chaos quietly brewing? What small step could you take right now to clarify expectations?

Share your stories- painful, humorous, or enlightening. Let's set better boundaries together.