The retro that saved the account.
In short: When a relationship is going sideways, get everyone in one room, let every side speak first, and share your own view last.
Someone on the client’s executive team kept overruling the team every week. The project was about to end... badly.
This was on a long-running retainer. A senior executive on the client side suddenly started showing up to the weekly meeting, looking at decisions the two teams had already worked through together, and overturning them. No context, no discussion. Just “let’s try a different way.”
The agency team was frustrated. So was the client’s own product team, who felt like they couldn’t stand behind anything they’d agreed to. The relationship was heading toward an ending nobody really wanted.
They thought about just firing the client, but I wanted to cut past the frustration and ask some valuable questions.
Do they like the work they’re doing? Yes. Do they like the team they work with? Yes. Does the executive seem like a bad guy? No. Suddenly, this all seemed salvageable.
So instead, the founder ran a full retro with everyone in the room: the executive, the client’s product team, and the agency’s design team. Not a true retro, actually — the project was still under way. Call it a reset.
The most important thing was the order. They let every side speak first and put all the cards on the table. Only after everyone else had said their piece did the founder share their own view.
It changed the temperature of the room. People on the client side who’d been quietly frustrated for weeks—and going behind their own executive’s back—finally said so. And it turned out the executive didn’t have a problem with the work. They just didn’t understand how the decisions were being made, because they weren’t around for any of it.
As soon as that executive got a walk through the process, they were apologetic and even impressed.
The fix was almost boring. The executive joined the team’s channels and came to a couple of working sessions a month. They stopped arriving cold, and the feedback was instantly more constructive.
The project got extended instead of ending.
When projects are mid-flight, it can seem like nothing can change the course. But sometimes, you need to slam your foot on the brakes and wrestle a stray project back on track.