Do Promotions Solve Coordination Problems, or Just Move Them?
The Friday announcement promoted the strongest designer on the team to a product-operations title. The intent was to fix a coordination gap that had been slowing the roadmap for two months. By Monday, the question was whether the company had actually solved the gap or simply handed its most reliable person the mess.
Most coordination problems are not solved by a title change. They are moved to whoever has proven they can absorb chaos without complaining.
The Designer Who Was Too Good to Keep Designing
Her name was Ama. She had shipped the last three releases on time, not because the process worked but because she personally chased every dependency, every stakeholder, every late asset. The founders saw this and concluded she was the operations person. The promotion made it official.
What nobody asked was why the coordination gap existed in the first place. The roadmap had three owners. Design reviews were scheduled for Thursdays but the people needed in the room were in customer calls. The file naming convention had changed twice in six weeks. No one owned the machine. Ama was the one who kept patching the machine by hand.
Promoting the person who patches a broken process does not fix the process. It formalizes the patch as the job.
This is the moment where the decision could have gone either way. The company could have treated Ama's promotion as a signal that the coordination function was underserved and rebuilt it properly. Instead it treated her as a reward magnet, a way to keep her happy while the underlying dysfunction stayed untouched.
The McKinsey Lesson That Took Forty Years to Be Seen
There is a documented case of an organization that chose the opposite path, and the mechanism mirrors this one closely. In the early 1970s, McKinsey & Company faced a coordination problem of its own. The firm had grown to a size where project teams across offices were duplicating work and missing each other's findings. A young consultant named John Larson was exceptionally good at stitching these teams together, tracking what each office was doing, and making sure the right people talked to each other.
McKinsey's leadership could have promoted Larson into a coordination role. Instead, in the mid-1970s, they asked him to build something structural: a directory of the firm's expertise, a knowledge index that would let any consultant find who in the firm had already worked on a given problem. Larson's system, documented in the firm's own history and in later accounts of how McKinsey built its knowledge practice, became the foundation of what the firm called its "knowledge management" capability. It did not depend on any one person's willingness to chase people around. It made coordination a property of the system, not a burden on the most reliable individual.
The decision was not obviously right at the time. Building the directory took Larson out of client work for months, which in a partnership model carries real cost. There was no guarantee that a catalog of expertise would change behavior. McKinsey was betting that a structural fix would outlast any individual's heroics. The firm's later results suggest the bet paid off, but at the moment of the decision, the outcome was genuinely in doubt.
What Ama's Monday Morning Asked
By Monday, the new title had changed nothing. Ama was still chasing the same three owners, still attending the Thursday review that never had everyone in the room, still enforcing a file convention nobody had agreed to follow. She was just doing it with a fancier signature block.
The structural fix would have looked different. It would have meant naming a single owner for the roadmap, so no one could assume someone else was tracking it. It would have meant moving design reviews to a slot that did not collide with customer calls, or recording them so the absent stakeholder could comment asynchronously. It would have meant choosing one file convention and refusing to change it for a quarter, accepting that the current one is imperfect but better than a moving target.
None of those changes requires a senior title. They require the willingness to make decisions that remove the need for a hero.
The Bridge Back
McKinsey's story and Ama's share the same mechanism: a coordination gap is a system problem, and promoting the person who works around the system does not repair the system. The lesson for this Monday morning is to ask, before the title takes effect, what structural change the promotion is meant to fund. If the answer is nothing, the company has not solved the gap.
It has just told its most reliable person to keep being reliable, forever, at a job that will keep growing. Ama was still chasing the same three owners. The only difference was a signature block.
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