Advent International LabsAn attempt to introduce more structure, what it exposed about the limits of top-down mandates, and how it changed how I operate

1. The Context

This story comes from the same role and period as the Unified Search piece. Advent International Labs, 2021–2022, leading a cross-functional product team building digital tools for the firm’s Deal Teams.

The Labs team ran six-week cycles with significant autonomy between planning sessions. That autonomy was largely what made the team effective. It also made any attempt to introduce structured process feel like an intrusion.

2. The Initiative

During this period, the product leadership became uncomfortable with the team’s free-form approach to planning. The request was reasonable: they wanted predictability. To track velocity and understand burn-down, you need a common language for estimating effort before work begins.

I worked with another PM on the team to introduce RICE scoring as a framework. RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) is a standard prioritisation model used to size and rank product work. The effort component would use T-shirt sizing: a simple relative scale for estimating work size without committing to specific day counts at the point of planning.

We were asked to roll this out during a full-team planning day in Portugal.

3. The Planning Day

I went into that session with the wrong assumption: that a top-down mandate and a general sense of openness meant the room was ready for the change. They did not.

The engineering leadership pushed back, arguing it threatened the team’s autonomy. In the session, the approach was challenged with demands for exact day estimates for each T-shirt size. The entire point of relative sizing is that you do not map it to exact days. It is a guide for approximation that evolves over time as a team builds a shared calibration. That insistence ground the session to a halt.

Because we had not done the groundwork to secure buy-in from the engineering side beforehand, the people who were most resistant to the change were able to stop it in the room.

The leadership that had originally mandated the predictability work saw the room turning against the proposal. Rather than forcing it through, they pulled it. There was criticism of the product team in the aftermath. I spent time with my counterpart working through how to process that kind of feedback: treat criticism as an input, test it against your own verification, and decide how much weight it deserves.

4. What Went Wrong

The immediate cause was straightforward: we had walked into a room where the people who needed to accept the change had not agreed to it. But the deeper issue was structural. We had treated a top-down mandate as a substitute for ground-level alignment. The two are different things.

Leadership thinking: A mandate gives you permission to attempt buy-in. It does not give you buy-in. When the room turns, only solid groundwork holds an initiative in place.

The people who needed to be on side had not been consulted before they were asked to change how they worked. The planning day became their first opportunity to raise concerns, and they took it. The public setting made retreat almost impossible for everyone involved.

5. What I Learned

The professional lesson was clear: a top-down mandate only holds if the people who can derail it have been brought along first. We should have gone to the engineering leads individually before the offsite, understood their concerns, and either addressed them or adjusted the approach before putting it in front of the whole team.

I carried this directly into my next role at Shawbrook Bank. When I wanted to propose changes to the organisational architecture, I deliberately started from the ground up. I spent weeks pre-socialising proposals individually with people across the organisation before presenting to leadership. The result was that I went into the senior conversation with confidence that the internal team was aligned.

Ultimately, it was not the right moment for a change that broad. The discussion was constructive, the team remained aligned, and I shifted fully to the delivery work that followed. The experience sharpened my judgment about the organisational readiness needed for transformation at that scale.

Leadership thinking: Advent showed what happens when a top-down mandate runs ahead of ground-level buy-in. Shawbrook showed the limits of bottom-up consensus without executive readiness. The formula changes with every context, but the quality of the outcome was very different. At Advent, the initiative broke down in the room. At Shawbrook, the decision was clear and contained.