From Chaos to Clarity: Unifying Teams

Introduction

When I wrote the last post, the word that echoed in my head was chaos. Smart people were pushing hard in different directions, and the migration felt like a crowded intersection with all green lights. We were moving, but not together. This is how the noise turned into a shared rhythm.

The Messy Middle

Two major streams powered the effort: one team rebuilding an MVP existing feature screen in React Native, the others laying foundations and adding tons of stuffs — Design System, Cursor AI rules, CI/CD, Detox Testing, Adding Greenfield features, integrating SDKs for a brownfield app, etc. Around them orbited more groups: web developers, design system, backend, automation QA, and a few mobile engineers from native teams. Work multiplied; alignment didn’t. Secrets were handled differently on iOS and Android. Decisions lingered. Engineers were busy, yet unsure if busy meant progress. Everyone cared. No one owned the whole picture.

Listening Before Leading

I started with conversations, not plans. One by one, I met the leaders and asked two questions: what brought you here, and what would make this worth it? Some wanted testing to be the bedrock. Others prized developer experience. A few were laser-focused on shipping. Naming those motivations changed how decisions sounded—less abstract, more human. It gave us a shared vocabulary for trade-offs.

Then I went to the people most affected: the native platform heads — one of them my direct manager. With so many external voices, it was easy for the core teams to feel like passengers. I made sure they weren’t. When they co-owned the plan, adoption followed naturally.

I mapped stakeholders — who was involved, what they planned next, what are their concerns, what drove their choices. Patterns emerged. This map becomes the guiding star on what is important to us.

Slow Down to Speed Up

I wrote a simple roadmap. No 50-page strategy, just phases, guardrails, and clear description. It lowered the temperature immediately. People didn’t need perfect answers — they needed to see where we were going and how we’d course-correct.

External consultants were our leverage. We didn’t hand them the steering wheel; we asked them to sit in the passenger seat and help read the map and get the guidance. Our engineers capability grew. Dependency didn’t.

Build the Channels, Then the Message

We fixed the basics: Slack channels with purpose, Slack and Email groups for easier communication and meetings, GitHub teams for visibility and ownership. On the iOS side, that work revealed structure gaps we could mirror from Android. Communication stopped feeling like a firehose and started behaving like a system.

Then came the big moment: the first online meeting with all engineers. Nearly a hundred engineers joined. I’d never spoken to a group that large. I recognize a few names. To keep it human, I planted a few questions with engineers ahead of time. The Q&A flowed. Years of working with large groups did their quiet work — I stayed calm, kept it clear, and we made the plan feel real for everyone.

Documentation as a Product

I built a new Confluence home from scratch — structure first, content second.

I found champions and gave them ownership. We treated documentation like a product: actively maintained, reviewed, and refactored. AI tools made it faster to draft and evolve. No more of answering the same question twice. People asked, we pointed to the documentation.

Cadence Creates Trust

Every week, leaders received a short update. Every other week, the broader team did too. Wins, decisions, risks, next steps — short and honest. When we had something genuinely useful, we invited the right people to the table. Predictability reduced anxiety. Transparency built trust.

The Support Loop

Some engineers were stuck and some were simply exhausted. We rotated consultants to pair with them. When issues were solved, we turned fixes into share-backs: short posts, quick demos, doc updates. The loop turned blockers into learning and learning into momentum.

Closing

Hard work still matters. But creating systems, setting up clear & inclusive roadmaps, documentation, support loops — buy us the time to think and the space to lead. Clarity wasn’t a single decision; it was a set of habits practiced every week.

Next up: Scaling the Platform: The Architectural Decisions That Saved Us