"The disaster Natanzon inherited stemmed from a nine-month effort to migrate a healthcare portal from monolithic architecture to microservices, using a commercial identity provider. The release crashed immediately, locking all users out. The original engineering lead has left, trust evaporated, and Natanzon stepped into the wreckage, facing a critical question: how to deliver the migration's promised value while restoring system stability and team credibility."
"Her first lesson emphasized the need to balance forward progress with damage control. With users, the team needed to demonstrate that the portal would be available when they needed it. Reliability trumped innovation. With business partners, they had to prove they could balance architectural improvement with concrete business value rather than pursuing technical perfection in isolation. Natanzon's strategic decision was no more "big bang" releases: large releases delay business value that moves companies forward."
"Instead, she advocated for incremental delivery with increased transparency, communicating openly and clearly about the engineering work to rebuild stakeholder confidence, which leads to her second lesson: owning the spotlight. In a sharp change from the team's previous behaviour, Natanzon championed proactively communicating progress, setbacks, and realistic timelines to stakeholders, as transparency about challenges builds trust more effectively than defensive posturing."
A catastrophic identity migration locked all users out of a healthcare portal immediately after a nine-month migration to microservices using a commercial identity provider. The original engineering lead left and trust collapsed, prompting new leadership to prioritize restoring availability and credibility. The recovery emphasized balancing forward progress with damage control, favoring reliability over innovation and rejecting "big bang" releases in favor of incremental delivery. Increased transparency and proactive communication with users and business partners aimed to rebuild stakeholder confidence. Team dynamics and perception management were treated as equally important to technical remediation in achieving sustainable recovery.
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