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This week: the joy of team rivalry

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #52 – The joy of team rivalry.

I’m a team leader on a project chartered with rethinking how rss/blog newsreaders work. It’s a good team (Team A), I love the problem space and things are good. My problem is that there is another team (Team B) that is trying to solve similar problems, but from a different direction. No one has said outright “you are competing with each other” but it’s pretty clear the designs each team has are on mutually exclusive paths.

How do I balance the conflicts of interest? Ho do I treat team B when I talk to them? Is it appropriate not to share all of our plans? What do I tell the members of my team when they encounter people from team B?

– Signed, The joy of rivalry