Role: Senior Engineering Manager · Company: CarTrawler
Where we were
Deployments at CarTrawler had become slow and fragile after years of accumulated debt. They needed manual steps, they rolled back often, and they took multiple hours. A backlog of infrastructure improvements had built up with no owner, because every squad was rightly focused on product delivery.
Why a separate team
Nobody was going to fix this in the margins of product work. It needed people who were not allowed to do anything else.
The risk was how that would look. Pulling senior engineers off product work reads as taking resource away from the roadmap, and organisational support would evaporate the moment the ROI looked unclear.
The deal
I put together a small senior team, the Blitz Team, with a fixed mandate: deployment reliability and the infrastructure backlog, no product work. Three months. Success metrics agreed upfront with the people who would otherwise be asking where the engineers went.
The team worked in short cycles and shipped improvements continuously rather than holding them for a big release. Every week they reported progress publicly to the whole org.
What happened
Deployment time dropped from several hours to about an hour. The infrastructure backlog was cleared inside the three months. The weekly updates did more than report progress: they built enough trust that the same model, a fixed-mandate team with a deadline and a public scoreboard, was used again for later targeted improvement efforts.