The Fractured Team: Facilitating Resolution Between Two Warring Departments

Lumen Digital is a 180-person product company that builds workflow automation software. For eight months, the Engineering and Product teams have been in open conflict. The origin point: a product manager publicly blamed an engineering lead for a major release failure in a company-wide Slack channel. What followed was a cascade of retaliatory behavior - engineers padding estimates to protect themselves, product managers going directly to engineers and bypassing leads, competing narratives at the leadership level, and two senior engineers resigning and citing 'organizational dysfunction' in exit interviews. The CEO has now mandated resolution. Both department heads say they want to improve collaboration but privately believe the other side needs to change. You are the internal OD consultant. You have been given access to both teams, management support, and 6 weeks.

Key Stakeholders

Nadia Forsythe

VP of Product

Omar Khalid

VP of Engineering

The CEO

Chief Executive Officer

Learning Objectives

• Apply conflict assessment frameworks to distinguish interpersonal, structural, and systemic conflict
• Design a phased conflict resolution process for interdepartmental dysfunction
• Use facilitation techniques to create psychological safety in adversarial group settings
• Navigate power dynamics between competing department heads
• Distinguish between symptom-level and root-cause-level interventions
• Develop agreements and accountability structures that sustain conflict resolution over time