Ever feel like your software development team is the rope in a corporate tug of war? On one side, customer projects are pulling for urgent enhancements and changes with fixed deadlines. On the other side, product management wants to push new revenue-generating concepts into the roadmap. And somewhere in the mix, you’ve got legal requirements, bug fixes, and a whole list of “must-haves” from various departments—all competing for the same developer hours.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many software companies struggle to balance multiple priorities. The result? Missed deadlines, internal and external frustration, last-minute scrambles, and half-baked requirements. In this post, we’ll explore why everyone’s fighting for development time—and the things you are in your approach to stop the chaos.

In 2022 I set out to build a new ServiceNow development Team for my department. This is the story of how I found 6 developers, a business analyst and two product owners in 7 months. In case you are wondering why two product owners, one product owner left after four months.

The principles behind the search

I learned a lot from executing the hiring process repeatedly. These are the principles I used throughout the hiring process.

Take the stress out of it. There is a good chance you’ll make a hiring mistake. You spend about 3-5 hours with a candidate before offering them a job. That is not enough time to learn everything there is to know about a person and how they work. Would you get engaged with someone after taking for 5 hours? That is basically how this process works. Do everything you can to have a solid process. But don’t expect the process to deliver perfect results.

Author: Joel Martinez

The great tug of war: why everyone’s fighting over development time (and how to fix it)

The recruiting process I used to build Team SNAP

The principles behind the search