I work in academia (a university research lab) as a senior developer/architect. I was rehired by the head of a lab to finish a personal research project that I had previously worked on and single-handedly built to 45% completion.

The project was an update to an established product with real adoption and an existing user community. There were ASAP timelines to meet, but in community meetings, I was demonstrating monthly progress while asking for additional resources to accelerate the project even further.

I was basically "given" a team to manage, consisting of a business analyst (BA), a scrum master, a soft-spoken senior developer, a QA tester, and eventually an intern/junior developer.

Over the course of a year, I onboarded the team, brought the senior developer up to mastery of the 100k+ line codebase, brought the BA into stakeholder meetings, and mentored the self-taught intern into becoming a solid junior developer.

Then, once Version 1 was released, I stopped being invited to stakeholder meetings by the BA. This was fine; I figured I was delegating that communication channel to someone capable of handling it.

Then the BA started building specifications and wireframes for application revisions. Her tone in meetings changed, and she became quite insistent that her wireframes be implemented as written, without developer input.

I caught her lying several times about requirements supposedly coming from stakeholders when they had never been discussed with them. She was managing the creation of tickets, writing them herself, and assigning them to developers. She pushed back against changes suggested by developers due to technical constraints in the existing codebase.

When minor deviations occurred, the QA tester treated her specs and wireframes as the word of God and buried me in bug tickets for every difference—even when selecting a different action icon would make the UI more consistent with other parts of the application.

Eventually, I gave up and started looking for a new job.

By chance, there was a yearly one-on-one meeting with the head of the department, and I was selected. I unloaded and told him about my active job search and my willingness to accept the first offer I received, even at a lower salary.

I was removed from the team and assigned as the personal development resource for the primary stakeholder. He had some specific customizations he needed for his deployment. I had freedom once again and was able to turn his modifications into significant refactoring and other improvements to the launched product.

After a while, the BA went on maternity leave, and someone who actually understood Agile took over in her place. In addition, the head of the department was let go in a round of layoffs.

The community wanted my improvements added back into the main product, so I started merging my fork and interacting with my old team again. Under the temporary team manager, things ended up being great.

Then the BA came back from leave and started getting up to speed on things.

For the moment, I am still interacting with the team, but the old patterns of ignoring developer feedback are returning. We have been stalled on the development of two major features because, after 12 meetings, she still can't understand the technical changes to the architecture.

The group is pretty much run according to her approval of changes and her writing of specs. The developers explain things to her, and she just keeps pulling threads on a sweater, asking questions that dig deep into the internals of the codebase and architecture.

She is trying to clearly document what existed, what incremental fixes were applied, and asking for opinions on how it can be fixed. (Who the f*** are these documents for?)

Honestly, with the 12 hours spent in those meetings over the last few weeks, I could have fixed the behavior according to how the primary stakeholder wants the feature to work. But she ignores this and insists that she doesn't have enough information to write the spec for the work.

So we wait.

Yesterday was the final straw.

I entered a ticket on the Jira board myself to track the work involved in merging new functionality from my fork into the community version. When it got to QA, the tester said he didn't have enough details in the ticket to verify it.

I disagreed with his testing scope because an edge case he mentioned involved testing unrelated functionality in another area of the codebase that depends on my new functionality to load, but whose actions, once loaded, are otherwise unrelated to the new functionality.

After two meetings—a total of 1.25 hours spent talking in circles without accepting my definition of the new functionality or the scope of how to test it—the BA chimed in that she would add a specification/wireframe to define what the new functionality is and how it should behave.

ON ALREADY BUILT CODE/A FEATURE THAT HAD ALREADY BEEN APPROVED BY THE MAJOR STAKEHOLDER.

I almost dropped an f-bomb in my response to her, but luckily, the team's outgoing manager (who "gets" Agile) chimed in and mediated the situation.

I've talked to the new head of the department, who says she's trying to change the existing unhealthy culture that existed before and was tolerated by the previous head.

I believe the team I was "given" already had this unhealthy culture, based on top-down, waterfall-style authority with SCRUM-like meetings and terminology thrown around. However, I think the BA was positioning herself between the stakeholders and the team to act as a controlling gatekeeper.

The stakeholders and the new department head recognize my significant abilities and promise that things will get better. But I'm really done fighting the corrosive culture that sees developers as just a meat-based version of Claude Code, along with the BA/QA alliance that seems to keep it alive.

What do you think I should do?

Edit: typos and add line breaks

We're in the middle of a big feature request for this client and now one of our founders want us to squeeze getting an inference provider while we're at it. Make sense strategically since it's a requirement for one of the deals we're trying to close. But the timing is so off since our team is also in charge of that evaluation. Now we're somewhat stuck with what to prioritize because now it's like the deadline for everything is yesterday, but we still have to keep our cool. Ever dealt with something like this?

In my last company when I was a DM, I eventually was not able to make an impact from Product Managers absorbing the responsibilities. It led to a frustrating experience.

In my new company , I’ve joined as a PM, where I’m absorbing those responsibilities.

What on earth is the point of this role , and why are companies hiring them?

so our team’s been doing retros on a shared google doc which is honestly kinda depressing lol. nobody engages, people just type “communication” and “too many meetings” and we move on
i want to switch to an actual whiteboard tool. we’re 7 people, fully remote, mostly for retros and sprint planning. i’ve heard about miro from a couple people at other companies, apparently it has a ton of retro templates already plus voting and a timer built in. figjam came up too but our team doesn’t really use figma so idk if it makes sense for us. someone else mentioned mural but i don’t know anyone who actually uses it